Category Archives for Articles
The Why and How of Putting Yourself in Your Readers’ Shoes
If you’re a writer, you have them—journals and Word documents filled with writing that most likely no one will ever read. It’s a joy in itself to write for the sole purpose of expressing yourself or to practice, and in many cases, you’re probably glad that particular work will never see the light of day.
However, sharing your thoughts, ideas, and creative turns of phrase with readers is the real goal of writing, and most of the time, you’re writing for an audience. Writing is the process of transferring what’s inside your mind to the minds of your readers, and it’s easy for much of it to get lost in translation.
Whether you’re having a hard time picturing who your readers are, or you struggle to write clearly for people who don’t have your knowledge, putting yourself in your readers’ shoes can help you make sure that your readers are connected, engaged, and picking up what you’re putting down.
How To Avoid Burning Out on the Subject You Love
Once upon a time, there was a girl who loved space. Rockets and robots, planets and pulsars, constellations and comets. When she was eight years old, she knew she was going to work for NASA one day, and she did. And it was awesome.
Then, somewhere along the line, it stopped being so awesome. Sure, it was cool, but it wasn’t fun anymore. The magic of the cosmos got sucked out with the daily grind—it’s hard to see the stars over the piles of email in an inbox.
“When you grow up, your heart dies,” indeed.
What I Learned About Writing From Reading James Joyce
There are few writers who are touted by pretentious readers more than James Joyce. Maybe David Foster Wallace? Or William Shakespeare?
But when I first came across Joyce in my high school senior year English class while reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I had no idea that reading this guy’s work was considered pretentious. I didn’t even know who he was, what else he had written, or why anyone studied him at all.
Heck, the very first line of that book is “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo ….”
How could pretentious people get behind a guy who writes the word “moocow” or about a “baby tuckoo” (whatever that is)?
Isn’t that essentially gibberish?
How to Handle a Small Team Like a Newsroom
Scroll through your favorite social media feed, and you may see a post or two telling you how you can “adult,” and while we wait for that unfortunate verb to go out of fashion, the concept behind those articles is useful for many of us. Because who doesn’t need a little help scrubbing those hard-to-reach places when it comes to personal development?
But what happens when it’s not just ourselves that we have to coax into our full potential, but a group of strangers?
When other people’s work is suddenly your responsibility—whether you’re the team lead on a collaborative project, or you’ve collected a federation of steady freelancers, or you’ve finally hired that help you’ve been wishing for since the day you started your business—congrats, you’ve been knighted into the managers’ club.