Writing Archives - Craft Your Content

Category Archives for Writing

Your 2023 Guide to Holiday Gifts for Writers

As the 2023 festive season approaches, it's time to deck the halls and delight the wordsmiths in your life with thoughtful gifts that will ignite their creative spark. 

If you're seeking the perfect gift for a budding novelist, a journaling aficionado, or the seasoned wordsmith, this curated guide of holiday gifts for writers is here to kindle inspiration and joy.

This year we’ve included both Buy Direct and Amazon links, after a few requests last year. We know that holiday shopping can get expensive, and bulking together shipping costs and other discounts on Amazon can help some folks make the most of their gift-giving budget.

Unwrap the magic of 2023's top literary and writerly holiday gifts. 

Whether they’re scribbling away in a cozy corner or tapping tirelessly at a keyboard, the writer in your life deserves a special something to transform their creative life into a haven of inspiration! 

Continue reading

70 Gifts for Writers – Craft Your Content’s 2022 Holiday Gift Guide

What do writers want for their holiday gifts?

Whether it is Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, ChrismaKwanzaKkah, Blue Christmas, Bah Humbug!, or something else … we’re coming up on the season of celebrations and gift-giving.

And it can be a struggle to figure out what to give the writers in your life.

Heck, if you are a writer, it can be a struggle trying to figure out what to ask for!

Have no fear, my writing comrades.

I’ve spent months scouring and saving items from some of the coolest and most interesting sites on the internet. 

So whether you are looking for a gift for writers in 2022 or want to send this article to someone so they can find a gift to give you—we’ve got you covered! 

*Prices are accurate at time of publishing

Continue reading

How Not To Write Like an Expert

If you want people to take you seriously, you need to sound like an expert, right? 

The internet is littered with advice on how to write like an authority in your field, but you might want to add a pinch of salt to it all.

It’s not that you shouldn’t sound like you know what you’re talking about. The problem lies in the way many of us think an expert ought to sound. 

To live up to the weight of the word, we make choices we would never make in normal conversation. We douse our readers with information, say everything in the passive tense, or write in a superior, distant tone. ‘Verbification’, oversized paragraphs, and using words that are way too short or way too long are the other main hallmarks of expert writing gone wrong.

None of this helps us convey knowledge or authority; it just builds up walls between us and the people we’re trying to reach. Here’s how to share your expertise – without letting it get in the way of your message.

Continue reading
online writing courses

How To Self-Assess Your Writing and Why It Is Important

I’ve been writing for three decades, having published more than a dozen novels—one of them traditionally (and that was more than enough for me). I’ve also spent more than 10 years studying and teaching literature at a university level, including getting a PhD in English. Still, it took me all this time and more to figure out something both intriguing and essential to know: Nobody can gauge my own writing but myself.

People can have ideas or opinions, and they can even be good ideas or informed opinions. Very often, when a knowledgeable person with writing experience offers you a piece of advice about your writing, it’s actually a rather accurate assessment.

But that doesn’t necessarily make it true; not until the final authority on the matter—the author of the work—decides so. That’s why they call it… author-ity (yeah, stand-up comedy is not for me; got it).

In the end, writing is a fundamentally solitary endeavor. True, there can be other people involved—advisers, supervisors, editors—but the core of the work is made by one person, the author.

That’s you!

As a result, you are the only one entitled to say whether you’re getting better, in which areas of your writing you’re improving, and by how much. So, it’s worth learning how to do it in a way that serves you and does your writing justice. That’s precisely what I’ll be sharing with you in this post, hopefully inspiring you to look at your career with new eyes.

Continue reading
1 2 3 73