An eagle-eyed reader, Justine, spotted a bunch of typos in my archive of articles about writing web content — oldies but goodies on this web site:
Quality Web Content

Justine says she can be “fussy and pedantic”, and got A+ in Professional and Technical Writing. Lucky for me. She spotted, among other things:

• A repeat that looked like a stutter: “a a logo…”
• Missing spaces after a full stop: “the font.Suddenly,…”
• Redundant word: “the tutorials thinking planning to…”

That’s the risk when you write, edit, proofread and publish your own work.

As all bloggers do, pretty much.

So thanks, Justine! The beauty of blogs is that fixing typos is done in seconds. It’s as easy as fixing spelling mistakes in chalk graffiti, thank heavens.

I rember (sorry, remember) the bad old days when to “cut and paste” over errors literally involved a pair of scissors and a glue stick.

And now for all the other things Justine noticed, especially broken links…

How alarming! My blogging rate has slowed down from lively to sluggish. This must change.

Sure, I had excuses. In the last couple of weeks I’ve launched a book which involved a certain amount of effort and publicity (Scarlet Heels: 26 Stories About Sex) and I’ve rehearsed and performed in a dance show (Crows Feet: How to be a Domestic Goddess).

But everyone has excuses when their work slacks off. I’m wondering how to ensure this deadly silence doesn’t happen again — unless on purpose, as when we’re on holiday.

My only strategy is to have a stash of draft blog posts, especially of tips. (In theory, we publish two tips per week.) This strategy fell to bits when we ran out of tips-jpegs. But that is just one more excuse. What right-minded writer has only one strategy to overcome writers blog block?

All I can say to myself and you is Sorry, sorry, sorry!

I enjoy blogging but if you break the habit, suddenly there goes one more week… one more week… one more week.

As my granddaughter observed about breathing, “Once you start, you have to keep going.” Quite right, Elsie.

I will pull up my socks. I will do better.

Image: Fabric cupcakes by Jennifer Holdaway. Compensation prize.
Elsie poem: You want to breathe

When I find myself lost for words or even ideas… it’s time to sign off for the year. Blogging is fun, satisfying, interesting. Personal satisfaction is the main reason why people blog, according to a study whose name and web site elude me. I find that easy to believe.

But come mid-December, the joy has gone.

The sun is shining — and sun has been the missing factor in Wellington this December.

The children are still in school, meaning the shops will be kind of accessible. My gift list is short but important.

My home is in chaos, too, with the lovely painters working in the bathroom. No shower, no dishwasher. Odd job man coming any minute to fix Leak No. 18.

My heart is broken because my kitten died of FIP. I’m getting over that, but I’m a vicar’s daughter so I need every excuse I can drum up before I stop work.

Surely that’s enough excuses?

Blogging? Tips? I’m signing off for a short end-of-year break.

Headlines always matter, whether in a printed article, a document on your shared hard-drive, a blog entry or any other web content whatsoever.

Others will re-use your headline, whether you like it or not:

• on another web site
• in a newspaper
• on Twitter
• in your archives or document management system
• in Google

Need I go on?

So think twice about every headline. Sure, it seems to make sense right under your nose, when you’re writing it. But does it make sense alone? Is it quotable?

Today is the second birthday of Contented Enterprises Limited. Alice and I have already established our corporate tradition: we have coffee and cake, we give ourselves major armfuls of flowers from Moore Wilson, I accidentally (?) take home more than my share, and Alice is nice about it.

This year at the ripe old age of two, we have plenty to celebrate. In our first year we’ve had over 1,000 customers in 19 different countries, and the feedback from our courses has been brilliant. The vast majority of our customers seem to be really nice people, we don’t know why. Thank you, you’ve made our work easy! These are typical of the reports that flow into our inbox:

• “I’ve been raving about the course.”
• “Contented was fabulous.”
• “You certainly walk the talk!”
• “Specific, to-the-point, relevant.”
• “Very practical.”
• “A real eye opener.”
• “It was fun to do.”
• “ I used it straight away.”
• “Your service is exceptional.”
• “I absolutely loved it!”
• “Most absorbing.”

And that was Version 1.0, a very simple, no-frills HTML-based set of courses (platform: Moodle).

Last week we sneaked our new Diploma in Web Content out to a few trial users. Phew, they loved it. (And spotted a few bugs just in time.) So now, on our birthday, we are whispering the good news to you. It’s ready! And it’s great.

The Diploma is more substantial and even more fun than our earlier courses. It includes 2 new courses: Writing for Search Engines and Strategic Blogging. Editing in Action is now a complete course. It’s still web-based and self-paced. It takes about 10 hours to complete. Prices are irresistibly low, especially when you decide to enrol a decent-sized group. And managers can track the progress of staff.

Enough talk. Check out the brand new Diploma… and be among the first to graduate.

A writing revolution has been happening over recent years. It’s not on show, and it’s not happening in the classrooms. On holiday recently I saw it again, under my very nose.

Virtually every young guest at the Heilala Holiday Village was writing daily in a blog. They’d brought a netbook in their luggage, or used the iMacs in the dining room. And they were not just tossing careless words at the screen and hitting Send. They spent time and care over what they wrote. They exhibited precisely the behaviour that English teachers dream of.

They structured their prose. They edited it. They massaged it. They proofread. Above all, they wrote for an audience.

Older people watched the young travellers and waited for the iMacs to come free. And waited. And waited.

I was amazed and impressed. Even as one older guest was ranting on about the Poor Literacy Standards of Young People Today, there they were, under our noses, polishing their prose for a real audience. Writing and writing and writing.

Years ago, when my kids travelled through wild and dangerous lands, I hoped for a postcard every few months. They didn’t write much: maybe because they had to say the same thing over and over again. Today’s lucky parents can open Firefox, join the crowd and sweat over their children’s hair-raising adventure of the day, told to the whole wide world in a blog.

Why this revolution? Why do people work so much harder at a blog than a school assignment? It’s the audience: real, known and unknown, they’re out there and they respond. Sure beats writing for a teacher, and ultimately, no matter how ingenious the teacher, school writing is done for a grade. Then there’s the reward of seeing your writing look good on the screen: a printout cannot compete for glamour.

Clive Thompson calls this “the new literacy”. In Wired magazine he tells us Andrea Lunsford at Stanford has been studying young people’s writing for five years and come to some fascinating conclusions.

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The Stanford Study of Writing

Denise Wakeman talking about How to Drive Quality Traffic to your Blog has excellent tips for business bloggers. And free. She practises what she preaches about sharing expertise with readers.

Here are 2 statistic tips:

On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. [...]

Posts that use numbers consistently bring in 3 to 8 times more traffic. [...] So something like: seven steps to blah blah blah. 30 days to whatever. 10 tips for blah blah blah. Things like that.

Fancy that! Thanks Denise.

“In my day, we didn’t have all these fancy computer things. Printing was much simpler then.”

Blah blah blah. Yeah right.

Today we can write, publish and distribute with one click. What could be simpler than that? Blog technology plus RSS do all the hard dirty work that was once done by machines and trained professionals.

If I needed reminding, this book did it: Specimen Book and Catalogue 1923 from the American Type Founders Company. The preface begins:

The printing of 1923 is greatly superior to that of 1900. It has better style, more attractiveness and greater power and dignity. It is more highly appreciated by the clients of the printers, and better prices are paid for it. Better printing has created a better demand for printing. The printers are more prosperous. This great improvement has not come to pass without direction. There has been, in fact, very deliberate direction.

After this plodding prose I want to shout, “But what about the content!?”

But back to the point. The book is fascinating and indeed beautifully produced. (It’s also rather grubby.) About 600 pages about fonts follow:

Types
The choicest selection of Publicity Types for the Commercial Printer and the General Advertiser
as well as
the newest and best designs in Job faces, Italics, Texts, Scripts, Shaded Faces, Gothics, Typewriter Faces, Body Types Accessories, etc.

Next come 200 pages about decorative material (think glorified WingDings) and then another 200 about the magnificent, weighty and delicate paraphernalia of printing, from swivel hooks to printing presses.

As for me, I’ll just click Publish and hey presto. I’m published.

OK, finally, two years after thinking about it, we’re on Twitter.

Find us on twitter.com/AliceandRachel

Twittering or tweeting is mini-blogging, as they say, and in terms of length, tweets are the extreme opposite of the living-memoir kind of blog. One compresses, one expands.

We expect to find out how to use Twitter by using Twitter. It will sure teach us to be succinct. Which is an essential skill for all web content writers. So it’s all good.

Harvey McQueen is a dear friend, a former teacher and influencer of education policy, and a lifelong writer. His life is brutally confined and constrained now, as a result of a degenerative muscle disease.

Very recently, in February, Harvey discovered blogging. Straight away he saw its potential to expand his wheelchair world. He was born to blog, and Stoatspring has galloped ahead as he writes poems, reminisces and thinks aloud on the screen. (Thinks visibly?)

This blog is settling into a pattern similar to an old time movie session. Cartoons, newsreels & brief clips followed by interval and then the main feature.

Stoatspring shows the power of blogging. When old age hits you like a mallet on the head… when the real world and real time shrivel in front of your nose… when real books take far too long to be published — along comes the blog.

At this very moment thousands, possibly millions of older people are musing, I’d like to write a book. A book about my life. Or my ideas. I’d like to write poems. Or something. For the grandchildren, perhaps, or for my friends. No, let’s be honest —for me, dammit!

The funny thing is, most of these people do have time to write: not years perhaps. But they do have time in the week, the day, the hour.

What they never had before is a tool that becomes a living book with three clicks. A book that self-publishes to the entire world the moment they click Publish. A way to talk to all the friends and family who feel like listening, at a time they choose.

Bravo dear Harvey. I may have indirectly bullied you into blogging, thank goodness. And as for the rest of you… stop moaning about wanting to write a book, and do it online. Apart from anything else, personal blogging is the biggest fun.