I recently ran into a strange problem. I was asked to present an academic paper at a conference, and while writing fell automatically into the habit of referencing all my quotes and other citations with traditional parenthetical citations. When I went to produce the shorter copy that I would read from at the conference, I wanted to remove all those parenthetical citations — they were just clutter and I Knew I’d stumble over them while I read.

Here’s the thing: normally, I could just use the “wildcard” to search for anything inside of parentheses, like this: (*). The problem is, when you enable wildcards in Word’s search, you also enable a bunch of operators, and parentheses are among them — Word uses parentheses to group together different parts fo the search query, the same way you use them in math, e.g. 12*4+3 vs. 12*(4+3). So a search for (*) simply returned everything.

Here’s how I solved the problem:

1. With wildcards disabled, I did a “find and replace”, replacing all left-parentheses “(“ with an ampersand “&”.
2. Then I replaced all the right-parentheses  ”)” with a dollar sign “$”.
3. With the parentheses all turned into something unique (if I’d used dollar signs or ampersands in the paper, I’d have replaced the parentheses with carets or percent signs or any other punctuation or symbol I hadn’t used) I could enable “Use Wildcards” and search for the phrase “&*$” (without quotes).
4. Because there might well be other statements in parentheses, I used “Find next” and “Replace” rather than “Replace all” to go through the paper and delete only the citations.
5. Finally, I restored the parentheses by running the above find-and-replace operations backwards, turning dollar signs and ampersands back into their respective parentheses.

And that’s it. It wasn’t particularly intuitive, unless you’re deeply familiar with how wildcards work in Word, but once I grasped that the parentheses were the problem, it was a simple matter to replace them and blast them out of my paper.

And the presentation went well, though of course I found plenty of other things to stumble over, like words and my tongue…

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For most people, “becoming a writer” means first and foremost getting published. And really, getting published for pay. That first sale is a watershed moment for the fledgling writer, a moment of validation that you have something to say that other people want to hear.

These days, getting published is less and less of a challenge – but getting that first paycheck can be harder than ever. The Internet has opened up a huge range of opportunities for people to publish their work free or for insultingly low rates – blogging, article sites, search engine optimization, and so on. While these can be great ways to start building a reputation for yourself and even earn a couple of dollars here and there, they simply are not the basis of a strong writing career, and the low barrier to entry makes it hard to feel like you’ve made much of an accomplishment.

National markets – whether websites, magazines, or book publishers – with editors, production staff, and marketing departments are what we’re usually looking for in terms of publication, and they tend to pay something at least within the ballpark of a decent amount – something we can feel positive about. Unfortunately, these markets are highly competitive at the best of times, and getting more so as an increasing number of publishers fail or scale back in response to tough economic times – not just the recession, but increasing postage costs and paper costs have hurt publishers at  the same time that audiences have increasingly turned to free entertainments on the Internet.

All that said, there is still a large market for professional writing. Every magazine on the newsstand, every book in the bookstore, and almost every A– and B-list website on the Internet needs high-quality professional content and is produced by someone willing to pay good authors to produce it. And the good news is, once you get past the first couple of sales, you can start to relax – first of all, you’ll feel more comfortable about your own marketability, and second, you’ll have a growing body of “clips” (samples) to impress future editors with.

Start at the top

The process of getting into print has several purposes for the budding writer. One is to give that sense of validation, and the hunger for this often drives writers to make un-smart decisions early on, like publishing for free or low pay for too long under the guise of “paying dues”.

A more important function of early publication is to see where you stand in the writing field – how good are you really? This is a lot more important than validation, at least as far as your career is concerned, as the less time you waste publishing beneath your level, the sooner you can earn the freedom to follow your muse wherever it leads you.

So my advice is this: send your first pitches or submissions to the highest-level outlets you can find. That is, if you’re writing about politics, pitch Harper’s or Atlantic Monthly or The Nation; if you’re writing about sports, pitch Sports Illustrated; if you write short stories, pitch The Paris Review. You will probably get rejected – which isn’t such a bad thing in and of itself, as failure usually teaches us pretty important lessons. If/When you are turned down, turn to the next highest-status outlet in your niche, then the next-highest, and so on down the “totem pole” until you get a piece accepted.

The idea is to start at the highest possible level. If you don’t have any clips yet, refer editors to your blog, or ask some respected bloggers in your niche if they could use a guest post by you (most will accept, since most don’t pay anything and have little to lose) and use those posts as clips. If you’re submitting finished manuscripts, don’t worry about the lack of clips – have a great cover letter and a great opening, so your material can speak for itself.

This takes time, and may well engender a bit of disappointment (though if you keep telling yourself you’re querying top markets you aren’t likely to get into, the sting of rejection might be more manageable). But far too often people who start with the no-pay, easy markets stay there for way too long, uncertain of themselves and unwilling to move out of their safe zone – even when their writing merits much wider attention (and more pay).

Next Time: Building on the first sale to create a platform for yourself.

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So, you want to be a writer.

It can be daunting to know how to get started as a writer. A lot of us feel we can write, know we can write – or better yet, know we can’t not write. We love the unfolding of stories beneath our pens, the spray of words across a computer screen, the sound of imagery narrated in our heads. We are story-tellers, truth-seekers, teachers, and sharers of life’s joys and sorrows, beauties and uglinesses.

But there’s a huge gap between scribbling our thoughts in a journal or writing a couple of essays in a college class and actually being a writer. I know I’ll be contradicted by… well, by everyone on the Internet trying to make a buck selling you their Super-Amazing Get-Rich-Quick-Writing-from-Home System for only $97 or $297 or $497, but while writing may come easily to you (and it doesn’t especially matter if it doesn’t), actually being a writer is hard, hard work. Not the hardest ever, but hard enough.

I don’t say this to discourage you, or to test your mettle, or anything like that. I want you to be a writer. Or I want you to at least have given it a shot, to have at least tried it on – better that you try and fail than to not become a writer out of fear, laziness, or simple lack of knowledge. But if you’re going to become a writer, I’d like you to be prepared for the long haul, and all those scammy “anyone can write” programs and products do a piss-poor job of preparing would-be writers for the job of actually writing.

So this series, which I intend to be 4 posts long (but that’s subject to change if I feel like it), will look at what it takes to get into writing as a professional pursuit. The goal is to take you from getting started to the point where you’re just getting your feet under you and “standing up” in the writing world. I hope you won’t quit your job and hole up with this blog and a stack of legal pads – writing is a dangerous career and all writers have to make sure they have a steady, reliable income, whether at a “day job”, through an established network of publishers and editors, or via a constant stream of freelance commercial work.

Building Up Your Chops

The first step you need to take if you’re going to become a writer is to build up the basic skills you’ll need to write well. If you dream of becoming a writer, you might already feel you write pretty well – get over yourself. While you may have a way with words, there is no writer who can’t do with a little improvement (read in most cases: “a lot of improvement”) .

Learning to write well is more than just learning command of grammar, structure, and narration – though those are all important. On top of that, you need to learn the jargon of your new industry – what a “dek”, “lede”, and “nut graf” are; the difference between a novella and a novelette; the ins and outs of direct submissions vs. using an agent; how to write a query letter or proposal; how to identify an appropriate market for your work; and so on.

That’s not to say you  shouldn’t be writing while you’re learning. By all means, write! But make sure you’re working on the other stuff too. Taking writing classes and workshops, reading books about writing, and blogging are all ways to build up your basic writing chops – get into them!

Take classes

If you have the time and money, you might consider pursuing a college degree in creative writing or journalism. While the jury’s out on whether these programs are a fast-track to fame and riches – or even to publication – the skills you learn will certainly help you in whatever path you decide to pursue as a writer.

However, a college degree is by no means essential – plenty of writers, even most writers, don’t have a degree in writing, and many don’t have any degrees at all.

But the classroom experience can be quite useful – you’ll get some feedback (at least from your instructor; students are supposed to give feedback but somewhat notoriously most do not, or give useless feedback) and you’ll have ample opportunity to push your skills into unknown territory.

Your local community college probably has dozens of writing classes you can take for usually rock-bottom process. Semester-long for-credit courses at the community college I teach at run about $130.

Community colleges, and many universities as well, also offer shorter not-for-credit courses through their adult extension programs. These courses might meet only once or twice a week for 6 weeks or every other Wednesday for two months or whatever. Because they are intended for adults they often offer courses in the evenings and on weekends to accommodate working schedules.

Other options include the Learning Annex if they have it in your city, local writing conferences (which often offer workshops as part of the program), or short programs offered nationally with 2–4 weeks residency.

Books

These are some of my favorite books on writing, the ones I’ve found most useful over the years.

• William Zinsser, On Writing Well: This book is my go-to book for writerly style. With clear, likeable language, Zinsser spells out how to craft solid, readable, and stylish prose. This book is a joy to read, and I find myself “dipping in” quite regularly when I need a dose of inspiration.
• Stephen King: On Writing: Easily one of the best books ever about the process of writing. You don’t have to be a fan of King (I’m not) to recognize that the man knows how to write in ways that reach deep into the hearts and souls of readers. Here he gives advice both on how to reach your audience and how to structure your life as a writer – all wrapped up in an inspiring and at times heartbreaking auto-biography of King’s own writing journey.
• Robert Bly: Secrets of a Freelance Writer: Although intended for aspiring freelance writers – and particularly for commercial writers – Bly offers plenty of advice about managing your career as a writer, as well as very strong tips on crafting persuasive language.
• Michelle Ruberg: Handbook of Magazine Article Writing: This is on my list because this is closest to the kind of writing I do, and the direction my own career is heading in. Covers the nuts and bolts of coming up with ideas, pitching stories, and working with editors, as well as the steps to research and write a compelling article (most of which would apply to any non-fiction writing).
• Philip Martin: The New Writer’s Handbook (2007): A collection of articles all offering practical advice on everything from tracking your writing goals to brainstorming ideas to building your author’s website. There are articles about every possible kind of writing in here, which means plenty for everyone.

You’ll notice the absence of Elements of Style. I own it, of course, but I find that I almost never open it – and have never just sat down with it and soaked it all in. Your mileage may vary, of course – Stephen King swears by it, and will lay a curse on any writer so full of pride as to not own a copy (I just squeak in under the wire on that one!), so it’s probably worth your while to at least have a copy. I just can’t promise you’ll learn much from it.

Blogging

I’ve been pretty vocal about why writers should blog, but in this context, the important thing is that blogging a) gives you a regular outlet to practice writing, b) puts work (potentially) in front of an audience and therefore invites feedback, and c) helps build your “platform”, that collection of marketable qualities that make up your salability as a writer. (I’ll talk more about platform later in this series.)

The Passion Test

One of the side-benefits of investing time and energy into improving your writing is that it functions as a kind of self-test of your passion for writing. This is important because, contrary to our idealistic desires, a lot of writing is a deadly slog through idea-less wastelands. If you’re going to do commercial or journalistic writing, you’ll find yourself writing about topics you could not care less about – and it had better be scintillating prose. If you’re going to write novels or non-fiction books, there will come a day when you absolutely do not care one whit about what happens next.

What’s more, while you might have plenty of ideas right now, you’ll use them up – and without passion, it can be damned hard to come up with new ones. Even worse, you’ll find that the ideas you do have simply don’t interest you any more.

Then there’s all the dull-work. Oh, yeah, it’s not all martinis and nymphomaniac fans in the writing world. There’s a lot of bookkeeping, doing taxes, filing, networking, filling out obscure paperwork (non-disclosure agreements, publication contacts, image licenses, etc.), legal mumbo-jumbo, and so on – all the stuff that you probably thought you were escaping by becoming a “creative person”. Oh, no no no – in fact, given a writer’s income and lack of institutional support, you are probably going  o be doing more business stuff than any business person you know. And if you don’t have a real passion for the writing, for the whole kit-and-kaboodle of the writing life beyond the simple act of putting word to paper, you won’t make it.

Next time: Breaking into the writing world.

I’m going to write this post in 20 minutes.

Being able to write fast is a crucial skill for writers of every stripe, especially freelancers who work to order, often under tight deadlines, as well as journalists trying to get a scoop. Bloggers, too, can benefit from writing fast, so they can move on to the writing that pays the bills, advances their careers, or satisfies their muse.

The key to writing fast is turning off your internal editor, that little voice in your head that tells you when a sentence or choice of words sucks. You have to fight that painful urge to go back and correct what you’ve just written, to fix the typos, or to pick just the right word, every single time. 

This boils down to a matter of trust — trust in yourself. You have to know that when you’re done madly drafting your piece, you’ll go back and fix things up. The important part is getting something to work with on the screen or on paper. Your writerly instinct is as much an editorial instinct as anything else — by separating the act of getting thoughts out of your head and shaping them into a finished, publishable piece, you can save a lot of time as your brain stays “locked in” on one task or the other, instead of split between both.

Here are my tips for writing quickly:

1. Have a plan.

An outline is a good start, but for shorter pieces (and even longer pieces if you just aren’t the kind of writer who outlines) just having a good idea of what you want to say before you start writing is going to shave plenty of time off your writing. A good capture strategy is key, too — get ideas down as they occur to you, flesh them out whenever you have a minute or two, and be ready to go when you sit down to write.

2. Have a formula.

I write a ton of blog posts, between Lifehack and The Writer’s Technology Companion and a bunch of other sites I contribute to as a guest. I also write a lot of articles for mainstream and trade outlets. For each of them, I’ve developed a kind of formula — not a fixed, immutable template, but a general set of rules I follow. Like the numbered, sub-headed list (this article, for example) — having this pattern in my head means I don’t have to think about how to move from one point to the next when I’m actually writing.

3. Don’t stop for ignorance.

Write what you know. And BS what you don’t know — at least in your draft. I do this all the time when I’m writing up pieces based on interviews with sources — instead of scrubbing back and forth through my recording of the interview, referring back to my notes, or (god forbid) writing a transcript, I just make up quotes that seem kind of like what they said, and that fit the point I’m making. Then I go back and replace my made-up quotes with actual quotes from my intereview. 

If you don’t know a fact or date or name, just insert XXX or [EXPERT’S NAME] or [SECTION ON FISHING] wherever you’re stuck or need further research, and come back to it later. I like to highlight those sections in yellow to make them easier to find.

 4. Kill distractions. 

This is self-explanatory — if you’re going to write fast, you can’t stop to do anything else. Find a quiet place, put on your most glowering face (to scare off those who would dare interrupt you), and get to work,  Put on a little music if it drowns out other noises or helps you stay focused, but otherwise make sure there’s nothing going on that might catch your attention. You need it all for your writing.

5. Set a timer. 

I have a timer running on my PC right now, set to 20 minutes. That keeps me on my toes — writing this is a race with the timer. It also keeps me motivated — I know the timer will go off if I stop, so I need to just keep going. A lot of writers claim to write best when they’re up against a deadline — setting a timer creates your own deadline, not a day or two from now but in 20 minutes or so. GO GO GO!

6. Use tools you know.

While I’m the last person in the world who would suggest you never look at new tools, when time is of the essence, use the tools you know well and are comfortable using. Don’t waste time trying to figure out how to make italics or boldface text, or how to double-indent or single-space a quotation, when you’re trying to write fast. Just fire up your Trusty Old Friend (for me, it’s the simplicity of Google Docs) and write. Save the experimentation for when you have a little leisure time to work

Well, there you go — I’ve got over 5 minutes left on the stopwatch (as of the beginning of this sentence) and what I think is a pretty nice article. I’ll go back, fix up the formatting, correct any typos or poor grammar, make sure I expressed myself clearly, and cut and paste this into my site. The end. 

(Word count: 883; Total time: 16:05 mins)

Taken as a whole, Twitter can seem like one gigantic mass of everyday tedium (“Eating cheese again, yum!”), TMI (“I’m having sex. Right. Now!), and occasionally useful snippets of information (“THere was just a giant earthquake in China!”). But just as bloggers have taken to tagging their posts to make work on a particular topic easily found (look at the bottom of each post on this site, for example — you have to be on the post page to see them, not on the front page of thesite), Twitterers have developed a system of tagging for tweets to help make it easier to find tweets on a specific subject.

Because space is limited and there’s no built-in space to add tags, Tweeters mark their tags with hashtags (#) to differentiate them from the body of the tweet, like this: #twitter. Searching for #twitter (with the hashtag) at search.twitter.com will bring up all the tweets from across the Twitter system that people have marked as being about Twitter.

This makes Twitter a unique and quite useful research tool. You can find out what people are saying about a subject, and who you should be listening to if you’re interested in a particular topic. Most tech events agree on a Twitter tag so that attendees can pool their impressions of various panels, discussions, and the event in general. You can also see what’s hot by looking at the “trending” topics on the Twitter Search homepage, or for a more thorough look at today’s how topics on Twitter check out TweetStats.

To improve the findability of your own tweets, and to reach out to the community of writers who might be interested in what you have to say on Twitter, use tags wherever possible, For questions and comments about writing, use #writing; for tweets about editing, use #editing. The more you use hashtags to tag your tweets, the more useful the service as awhole will be — and by agreeing to use standards like #writing and #editing we can all contribute to the great community of writers on the Internet.

Open courseware can be a great way to learn new skills and information from some of the best colleges and universities in the US for free—all you need to do is search for the courses you want and commit to improving yourself with some of the best resources currently available.

What is Open Courseware?

The term open courseware refers to the free and open availability of college courses from major universities around the United States. Started in 2002 at MIT, the aim of the open courseware initiative is to bring a body of high-quality collegiate material and make it available, for use and/or adaptation, to the general public.

How Does Open Courseware Work?

Open courseware is provided free-of-charge from major universities like MIT, Tufts, and Yale, to name a few. These prestigious institutions offer access to materials used by students and created by college professors, including notes, video lectures, reading lists, exams, and much more.

Many posted exams have answer keys to help users check to make sure they have retained the information, and there are discussion forums available in certain content areas. Open courseware does not require any sort of registration and is completely self-paced. Although there is no access to faculty, feedback is shared and used by the universities.

What About Grades and Personal Feedback?

Open courseware seeks to educate people in a non-traditional way that hearkens back to the days before college degrees were the be-all, end-all to qualifying individuals. Since no degrees, grades, or certifications are awarded; it is up to the individual to dedicate themselves to learning the information.

Of course, when it comes to courses like writing, it is essential for people to put these new skills to practical use right away and seek feedback from alternative sources. Writing communities and forums are great places to seek out feedback for your work and get fast results.

Knowledge is Power

Whether you are able to interact in a traditional manner or not, open courseware seeks to help make educational resources available to anyone who chooses to better themselves through education. The fact that this wealth of knowledge is available for people to pick and choose what they would like to learn helps them to hand-tailor courses suited to their individual needs. This information ultimately can serve to help improve your skills as a writer and your knowledge in general.

This post was contributed by Kelly Kilpatrick, who writes on the subject of best online technology degrees. She invites your feedback at kellykilpatrick24 at gmail dot com

Image by slack12 via Flickr

There comes a time in nearly every big writing project when you just can’t seem to move forward. Maybe you’ve written yourself into a corner and aren’t sure how to get out of it, maybe the end just seems too far away to be reachable, or maybe you burned through your initial enthusiasm and it just isn’t fun any more.

The difference between a writer and a dabbler is what you do at that point. A lot of folks will give up – pack up their manuscript and put it away, telling themselves they’ll pick it up again when their inspiration returns. Unfortunately, it rarely does. The real writers are the ones who push through these hard moments, doing whatever they have to do to overcome or bypass the thorny problems that keep them from reaching the end of their manuscript.

There are many strategies a writer can use to get up and over the hump. Try some of these ideas to help you deal with your own writing challenges and get your project done.

1. Change the scene.

Not in your story but in your life. Most writers are acclimated to particular environments where they feel comfortable – we literally get conditioned to associate where we write with the act of writing, like Pavlov’s dogs (if Pavlov had trained dogs to write books). But the mental processes that make our usual writing places conducive to writing can work against us when frustration strikes. Facing the same problem in the same place every day can put you deep in a rut that’s hard to escape without changing things up.

Something as simple as writing somewhere new can be just the change you need to trigger a breakthrough. Take your laptop to a different room, or outside, or to the library, or to a coffee house. Drive out of town with a notebook and box of pencils and write in the mountains, the desert, or the woods. Head to the beach or a friend’s house or a hotel – whatever it takes to break the association between where you write and what you’re writing – or anxiously not writing.

2. Switch mediums.

Just as changing where you write can help loosen up whatever’s blocking your way, changing your medium can help get the creativity flowing. Writing with a pen or pencil has a different feel — and involves different parts of the brain – than writing on a computer. Even switching to a different keyboard or word processor might throw some switch deep in the recesses of your unconscious mind to get the idea machine powered up again.

3. Skip a bit.

It’s easy to get caught up in the narrative flow of your work, trying to write straight through from beginning to end. But there’s no rule that says you have to write in the same order your finished product will be. In fact, often jumping forward in a piece can help solve difficult problems, since you get a more concrete idea of where you have to get to when you go back to fill in.

For example, I recently saw Neil Gaiman talking about his recent work The Graveyard Book. After years of trying – and failing – to write the book from the beginning, Gaiman finally decided to start in the middle, writing what would become chapter 4 first. Once he did that, he said, he knew how the story got there and where it had to go – the rest of the book just fell into place.

4. Go random.

This is a brainstorming trick that can help you write through a difficult patch. The idea is, when you’re stuck, find something totally random and force yourself to work it into the text. Open a dictionary and pick a word with your eyes closed, spin around in the middle of the room and point – it doesn’t matter how, just find something accidental to inject into your work.

The goal here is to change up the problem you’re working through, thus shifting the mental process away from whatever’s got you stuck. Instead of trying to figure out how your killer got into the locked room, you’re trying to figure out how to work the word “asparagus” into the scene – freeing up your mental “gears” to work on the first problem in the background. You might end up cutting the random bit later, but by then it will have served its purpose – and who knows, you might like that part, too!

5. Take a break.

It’s a strange thing about our brains – much of their best work is done when we’re not paying conscious attention. That’s one reason why so many ideas strike in the shower or while you’re driving – with your mind preoccupied by the matters at hand, the unconscious mind is free to work on the thorny problems that are keeping you up at night.

The tricks I’ve listed so far all try to shake things up so the unconscious can do its job, but in many cases, just stopping whatever you’re doing and working on something else can be enough. When frustration strikes, get up and take a walk, go for a drive (assuming you have a really, really fuel-efficient vehicle; in fact, why not take the horse-and-buggy instead?), watch a mindless sitcom, write a letter to your grandma, wash the dog, or – why not? – take a shower. Just make sure you have something to write on so you’re ready when inspiration comes a-knockin’.

6. Write crap.

Probably 90% of the writer’s block in the world comes from perfectionism, the insidious need to bring forth polished brilliance with every keystroke or jab of the pen.

Feh!

Look, you’re going to revise. I know it, you know it, William Zinsser knows it. You have to trust yourself enough to recognize crappy writing when you revise – and if you do that, then you can relax a little bit now and put some crappy writing down for your later revising self to catch.

So, if you can’t figure out the right way to say something, say it the wrong way. Give characters out-of-character dialogue. Write purple prose. Use 40 adverbs in every sentence. Just get down the general idea of what should be there and move on. If you feel uncomfortable about besmirching your otherwise perfect (NOT!) manuscript with such foulness, go ahead and highlight it or make the font color red so you know you’ll catch it on your next pass, but whatever you do, don’t stop writing until you figure it out – just write.

Sooner or later you’ll get through the rough patch and the ideas will start flowing again – and you won’t have to waste time rebuilding your momentum.

7. Read.

This is really a variation on “Take a break” above, but reading offers writers something different from other activities – it reminds us of what we wanted to do and be in the first place. Letting yourself be transported away by a favorite author’s words can help you find your own writerly self and return to the task you love. Better yet, read crap – I find there’s nothing quite so inspiring as the thought of how utterly awful some of the stuff that makes it into print, and even onto best-seller lists, is. Nothing like lowering the bar a little bit to give yourself the strength to tackle your own creative problems.

There’s an old saying that if someone asks you how your writing’s going and you haven’t written that day, you can’t answer “badly”. For the writing to go badly, you have to be writing. You can always fix up bad writing; you can’t fix up no writing. In the end, the best way to deal with the problems that threaten to keep you from writing is to just keep on writing, no matter how bad the lines that flow from your pen or across your screen end up being. Because that’s what writers do – we write.

Good luck.

The whole point of a blog is that the author, or blogger, wants to share something. What they’re sharing could be anything, from 401K investment advice to tips on bathing your cat without incurring major injury. There is a dizzying array of topics that people blog about, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that all bloggers have one thing in common: they want the information they’re providing to reach readers. Otherwise, what’s the point of having a blog to begin with?

There are many ways to go about building a blog, but generally your top priority is going to be making what you have to say easily accessible to your readership. If no one’s visiting your site to read your brilliant account of backpacking in Paraguay, then you’re essentially talking to yourself.

That’s why I’m here today — to discuss something that many bloggers seem to take for granted, the RSS feed. Dustin wrote a great post about the basics of RSS here, so I won’t go into the nuts and bolts of syndication. Instead, I’ll take it a step further and talk about the finer points of linking to your RSS feed.

I can tell you from personal experience that if I stumble upon a website with content that I find interesting or useful, you’ve got about thirty seconds for me to locate the link to your feed before I get annoyed and leave. I don’t like having to search the text of your page for the words “subscribe” or “syndication,” and if I’ve gone through all that and still can’t find your feed, you’ve lost me as a reader. The link to your RSS feed needs to be clearly marked for the world to see and subscribe to. If folks can’t find it, no one will subscribe, and you’ll be left staring woefully at your dwindling web stats.

With that scenario in mind, I’d like to introduce you to my friend the RSS icon:

This little guy is pretty much the standard for clearly marking the link to your blog’s feed. Most people know it, and they look for it. When it’s not there readers get confused, then annoyed, then they navigate away from your page. This standard is a good thing, because it creates a common navigation between your site and the rest of the internet — no longer are we left to scroll through blogs in vain looking for a subscribe here link, because we know what to look for. You even have a plethora of options when it comes to stylizing your icon to fit the look and feel of your blog.

Now, let’s talk about placement. You generally want your feed link at the top of your page, usually near the top of your sidebar. Look over to the right corner of this very page – see how easy it is to find the RSS feed for the Writer’s Technology Companion? Dustin has done a good job of placing his feed icon in a location where it’s hard to miss, and goes a step further by putting a second link at the bottom of every post. If someone wants to subscribe to his blog, they don’t need to hunt all over for the link.

Many prefab blogging services, such as Blogspot and Blogger, do not clearly mark your feed by default, instead creating a little, nondescript link way down at the bottom of your page that says “Subscribe to: Posts.” This is very difficult for potential subscribers to spot, and unless they’re searching your text for the word “subscribe,” they’re not going to see it.

There are many ways to add a more obvious feed link to your blog, but if you’re not comfortable getting elbow deep in html, I recommend using a feed service like FeedBurner. They’ll let you create a feed for your site with all sorts of nifty features, and then will provide instructions on how to add the code to whatever blog platform you happen to be using. Easy! Feed services also tell you how many people have subscribed to your site, so you’ll be able to see firsthand how the placement of your feed link is affecting your returning readership.

Please be kind and clearly mark your RSS link. You’ll save your blog’s visitors a lot of time in superfluous page scrolling!

Stephanie Stiavetti is a feature writer, copywriter, and all around technical savant. Having spent the last decade ensconced in both the editorial and computer industries, she’s comfortable in either world and often combines the two. Her areas of expertise are food, cooking, nutrition, health/wellness, technology, and the writing lifestyle, though if she had her druthers, she would spend 100% of her time writing about her culinary exploits. Read more about her and her work at Wasabimon.

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We writers are pretty easy to please when it comes to computing requirements. Writing can be achieved with the simplest of media: white screen, black text.

As an avid free and open source software (FOSS) advocate, I’ve spent some time over the last few years writing on the Linux platform. I’ve come to discover that it’s still an immature platform for certain folks, such as hardcore gamers or multimedia professionals. But for those who have their fun (or make their living) by putting words on (e-)paper, Linux offers a perfectly usable platform for doing everything a writer needs to do.

I’d like to introduce some of the most basic writing tools available on the Linux platform. Firstly, note that the availability of these tools may depend on your distribution, or the “kind” of Linux you run. Examples of this include Ubuntu (along with its siblings Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and others), Red Hat’s Fedora, or Novell’s OpenSuSE. The differences between these is far beyond the scope of this (or indeed, most any other single) article. For now, just know that you can pick one, and it will likely have everything you need, but maybe not everything below.

Text Editors

Most writers are accustomed to working in a word processor such as Microsoft Word. But for many types of writing, a program this large is overkill. Text editors are an excellent tool for brainstorming and getting rough drafts out of your head, for two reasons:

1. Firstly, many text editors tend to be pretty spartan interface-wise. There are few buttons, toolbars, or other flashing widgets to interrupt your writing. Plus, tell a Linux guru that you love your text editor, and they will respect you.
2. Secondly, plain text files are about as portable a format as you are likely to find. This includes both across operating systems (e.g. Windows, Mac, Linux, and others) as well as devices (such as smartphones or Internet devices). If you begin your writing process in plain text, there are very few places you won’t be able to work on it.

There are literally too many text editors to count for the Linux platform. You could spend the next few years sifting through all of the arguments for or against two perennial favorites: emacs, and vi/vim. I’m not going to say that there aren’t many powerful features for writers in either of these programs. But I will assert that these are not the Linux text editors on which you want to cut your teeth. The following are much friendlier to the new Linux user:

• Kate: An editor for the KDE desktop, installed by default on most systems. There are many useful plug-ins you can add as well.
• Gedit: Ditto the above, only for the GNOME desktop.
• nano: An editor for the command line or terminal window, with keyboard shortcuts conveniently listed at the bottom of the screen.
• cooledit: I list this not because it is an especially capable editor, but because it is included with the Midnight Commander, an excellent clone of the old DOS Norton Commander two-pane file manager. It’s very convenient to navigate through directories and quickly modify text files from within a single screen.

Again, there are probably hundreds of these types of editors, but the above are a great start if you’re new to Linux.

Word Processors

If you are a writer, you know what a word processor is, and what it can do. I won’t insult you by re-stating it. Just know that most Linux-compatible word processors will do most anything you need them to do, including working with Microsoft Office formats. Popular word processors on Linux include the following:

• OpenOffice: The Writer component of OpenOffice is every bit as capable a word processor as most people will ever need. On a side note, there is no reason that everyone who owns a PC, Mac, or Linux computer should not have this installed. Go to the web site. Download. Install. Right now. Seriously… I’ll wait.

Did you install OpenOffice yet? I wasn’t kidding about that.

• AbiWord: An excellent, lightweight word processor installed on many GNOME-based desktops. This is a great choice for older systems, as OpenOffice has a reputation as something of a memory hog.
• KWord: Likewise, KWord (part of the KOffice suite from the KDE project, and commonly installed on those desktops) runs extremely light compared to OpenOffice. It has traditionally been a bit raw compared to AbiWord or OpenOffice, but I am a big fan of the KOffice Shell, which allows you to have multiple documents of different types (e.g. spreadsheet, text document, etc…) open within one window. Think of this as an Outlook for office documents.
• Ted: If your system is very old, you still have options. The word processor Ted makes AbiWord look like a sumo wrestler. Yet it still saves files to Rich Text Format (RTF), which any self-respecting, modern word processor can also use.

Desktop Publishing

Lastly, the final step for most writing projects is layout/typesetting. This process is largely ruled by proprietary programs such as Adobe’s InDesign (for highly graphical-intensive documents, e.g. marketing materials) or FrameMaker (which excels at technical publications such as software documentation). But the FOSS world has several alternatives, as follows:

• Scribus: This program strives to be a turnkey solution to both of the aforementioned segments. I’ll be introducing Scribus in later installments.
• LyX: This application excels scientific writing with is support for highly-complex equations. LaTeX, the typesetting language around which LyX is built, was once the go-to format for nice printed materials. But other applications have since caught up with support for PDF format and the like.

Finally, to the new or potential Linux user, I should point out one thing. Any of the above applications can likely be downloaded, installed, and used free of charge. In my distribution of choice (Kubuntu), it’s as simple as opening the package manager, selecting a program, and marking it “Request for Install.” It’s called “free software” for a reason.

In the next installment, we’ll examine some tools and tricks for working with plain text in Linux.

I visit a lot of blogs as a part of my day-to-day life, and my number one pet peeve with finding information within the blogosphere is the inability to print efficiently. Anyone who’s tried to print a recipe from a blog post can attest to the fact that in order to get one page of cooking instructions, you also end up with sheet after sheet of paper wasted on the superfluous printing of ads, sidebars, and empty tables. Even if you fish through your print preview to look for the meat of the printing job, you’ll often find that the post itself is splayed across several pages, interspersed with the aforementioned bloggage. This is no good if you’re trying to conserve paper and printer cartridges.

This isn’t just a problem with cooking blogs, either. I read through a vast number of interesting blog posts everyday on an array of subjects, and occasionally I want to print out something to hang on my wall or pass on to someone else. Again, I find myself wading though a ton of blog chaff to get to the wheat of the post.

To sum it up, printing from a blog can be a complete and utter headache.

Thankfully, the developer community is a great source of additional functionality for those of us running WordPress. There are countless plugins available that allow us to customize our little slice of the web in whatever way we see fit. WP-Print, a plugin created by Lester Chan, allows you to add tidy printing functionality to your WordPress blog by automatically adding a link to every post that will lead to a clean, printable version of your content. Here’s an example of what the output looks like:

• Original post
• Printable post created by WP-Print

Installation instructions are located here, but I’ll summarize the steps below.

First, go here to dowload the zip file. Once you’ve decompressed the file, you should have a folder titled ‘wp-print.’ Upload this entire directory to the server where you host your WordPress blog, and put it in the wp-content/plugins folder inside of your blog’s master directory.

Next, go to your WordPress control panel and navigate to the plugin management screen by clicking the ‘plugins’ link in the upper right-hand corner of your control panel, next to ‘settings’ and ‘users.’ Scroll down until you see the WP-Print listing, and click the ‘activate’ link to the right.

After you’ve activated the plugin, you’ll want to edit its preferences. Click the ‘settings’ menu in the upper right corner of the control panel, and you should see a listing of installed plugins under the main control panel navigation bar. To get to WP-Print’s settings, click the link that says ‘print.’ Here you can edit a multitude of setting, such as if you want images or comments to print with the post (I don’t recommend you turn on comment printing, as often your readers will just want the information in your post and not necessarily extraneous information).

That’s all there is to it! WP-Print should automatically insert a link to every post you make, offering your readers a tidy way to print the entry. If you have trouble installing or configuring WP-Print, the support forum can be found here.

Stephanie Stiavetti is a feature writer, copywriter, and all around technical savant. Having spent the last decade ensconced in both the editorial and computer industries, she’s comfortable in either world and often combines the two. Her areas of expertise are food, cooking, nutrition, health/wellness, technology, and the writing lifestyle, though if she had her druthers, she would spend 100% of her time writing about her culinary exploits. Read more about her and her work at Wasabimon.