Category Archives for Articles
5 Ways Professional Writers Can Care for Their Hands
Have you noticed how often we use our hands every day?
Think about it and you’ll realize that our hands are active every time we do house chores, carry items, and take care of kids or pets. In addition, our hands are also busy when we’re eating, drinking, playing games, using phones and tablets, and even while driving cars and motorbikes.
But for you as a professional writer, it doesn’t stop there.
Because you write for a living, your hands are also key business tools, since you use them to write longhand, type on the computer, and hold the mouse while writing for hours on a daily basis.
However, if care is not taken, doing all these day in and day out can lead to varying degrees of pain and discomfort, not only in your hands and wrists but also in other parts of your body. Added to that, it can also increase your risk of developing a condition known as repetitive strain injury (RSI).
RSI is the gradual damage to muscles, tendons, and nerves as a result of repetitive motions like typing, using a computer mouse, working on an assembly line, and other similar activities. Symptoms of RSI include pain, tenderness, swelling, stiffness, tingling, and numbness, and they can affect not just your hands and arms but also other parts of your body.
You can reduce the risk of developing all these and achieve your goals as a professional writer when you take care of your hands and keep them in optimal condition.
Ready to learn how?
Then keep reading to uncover five effective ways to take good care of your hands as a professional writer, increasing your productivity at the same time.
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How Weather Affects Your Writing and How To Control It
It doesn’t require a degree in meteorology to realize that weather affects many of our activities as well as our mood. Writing, as a hobby and certainly as an integral part of our professional routine, couldn’t be an exception.
On the surface, the influence of weather in our writing seems to be a matter of mood, and a fairly simple one: Good weather, good writing mood; foul weather, foul writing mood, right?
Well, no. It’s not that simple.
The complexity of the way weather affects our writing lies in the fact that there is a lot of subjectivity involved. Some of us like snow and winter; others prefer heat and summer. Indeed, most of us have varied responses to weather, our preferences depending on various factors, including how we feel on a given day, which complicates matters further.
Even then, we can actually leverage weather we don’t particularly like to produce texts of certain kinds, as I will show you in this post.
We would need a steampunk weather machine to … control the weather, but until one is available, we can opt for the next best thing: controlling how weather affects our writing.
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10 Ways To Write Blog Posts That Increase Readers’ Time on Page
A massive number of social shares and page views sounds great, but it doesn’t necessarily mean your content is engaging.
Have you checked on the user’s average time on the page? And the bounce rate? What about your heatmap’s data? Check, and I am here waiting for your feedback …
Well, is everything impressive? Probably not. Because if it were, you wouldn’t be reading this sentence. Clicks are a frail metric to measure the success of your content. It’s easier to get clicks than make readers spend more time reading your content.
We write to educate people, entertain them, and convince them to buy what we offer from our businesses. If readers don’t stay longer on your site, the chances of them seeing your newsletter signup form, clicking on your affiliate link, or buying your product are as slim as a needle’s eye.
As a result, your content won’t achieve a good return on investment, ROI.
In this post I will be sharing with you 10 tips that will help you create engaging content that your readers will love reading.
So let’s delve in.
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How Compartmentalizing Can Help You Focus on Writing
Setting aside time out of your busy schedule to focus on writing can be difficult. Many of us are juggling full-time commitments, family life, school, and personal relationships. As a result, it can be challenging to find time to sit down, turn off all of your devices, and separate yourself from the rest of the world to write. However, as I’ve discovered, learning how to compartmentalize can help.
Simply put, compartmentalizing is to “separate into isolated compartments or categories.” Compartmentalizing means to keep the various areas and activities of your life separate from each other.
It is important to note that compartmentalization is a learned skill. You must practice it consciously. If you are someone many others rely on, it will take extra focus for you to master this skill, because you will have to learn to not be available at all times.
The good news, however, is that practicing this skill will also help to create boundaries you may have not been successful in creating before. These boundaries will not only allow you to take time to write or to spend time doing other activities for yourself, but they will also help to create a healthier balance between the many areas you are managing in your daily life.
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