Ever heard the term ‘Freewriting’? I did it for many years before I learned what it was called. I don’t know where the term originated, but I’ve found it in a number of books and learned that English classes in many schools use it for daily writing practice.

Freewriting is a great way to get a piece of writing or a speech or in fact any communication started. Sometimes I use it to break out of a mind-lock that prevents progress, sometimes it’s just a good way to get warmed up. Freewriting for me is often a mind dump that takes me to places I’m not expecting.

The essence of Freewriting is to choose a time period, say 5, 10, or 15 minutes, and just start writing. You can start with a focus, but allow your writing to wander wherever your thoughts go. If you can’t think of anything to write, just write “I can’t think of anything to write” or anything else over and over again until your mind goes somewhere else. The point is to start and to keep writing until your time us up. Some people set an alarm and keep going until it goes off.

In a focused freewrite, start with a topic and dump everything you know or that comes to mind. Getting off topic is OK just as long as you keep going.

There are no real ‘rules’ for freewriting, but there are some guidelines:

1. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, or anything else. Turn off your internal editor and just write whatever comes to mind.

2. Don’t stop, keep going for the whole time you’ve chosen.

3. Don’t worry about what you’re writing, write anything whether you’re going in a specific direction or not

4. Don’t look at this as a draft or any sort of predecessor to a piece of writing. Consider this a throw away. It doesn’t mean you can’t use it or part of it, but don’t expect to. If you get something you can use, that’s great, but that’s not the objective.

5. If your mind goes blank, just start writing something, anything “blank … blank … blank” or “I can’t think of anything” or “the quick brown fox … ” or ANYTHING

Is it valuable? I can’t speak for you, but I know it’s useful to me. Linked to a technique like Mind Mapping, freewriting is a great way to just let the flow come out. Not only does it loosen me up and get me moving, but sometimes it uncovers the most amazing things.

Often, I’ll do my initial information dump into a mind map. Add additional information from reading and other research, and keep adding material until I feel I’ve got a pretty good handle on the subject. Before I start a draft or convert this information into an outline, I’ll use a freewriting exercise to see what I come up with.

To freewrite the project, I start with the core idea in mind and just start writing about it. I usually do this into a text editor and not a word processor because I find editors more responsive. Once I’m done with the freewrite, I’ll let it sit for a while then come back and reread it. You’d be amazed at some of the insights that come out in the process.

Much of my best writing started as a freewrite. Sometimes, my freewrite becomes my project after I’ve edited out the stuff which doesn’t fit. Take this blog post for example, would you believe that it originated in a 10 minute freewrite session. I had already worked on the idea, mind mapped it in my journal, and reread some of the books and web sites that talk about it. A couple of days later, I sat down and just starting dumping my thoughts into the text editor. I HAD to stop because a 5 year old climbed up on my lap and said “Papa … you said you’d come and build with me!” You don’t refuse that kind of invitation. So I saved what I’d written and left. Several hours later I came back, reread it, and found I was close to what I wanted to say. I added some new thoughts, dropped some that did hit the mark, cleaned it up, added references, and now it’s ready to post.

What more could I ask for?

To see a sample Freewrite, check out

http://www.techiwriter.com/wordpress/a-freewriting-sample/

I hope my old English teacher will forgive me!

If you want to learn more about how to do it, there are several books that mention Freewriting. There’s not much in any of them about it, but these are pretty basic references.

Peter Elbow Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process (1981)

Julia Cameron The Artist’s Way (1992)

Natalie Goldberg Writing Down the Bones (1986)

If you don’t want to bother buying a book just to get a few pages on Freewriting, then take a look at these web sites. Each page has good information about how to do it. There’s not much there, but there doesn’t need to be.

Freewriting: A way around Writer’s Block

Getting Started: Freewriting

How to Freewrite

Categories: Skills
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A recent release on PRWeb titled “Help! I’m Stuck With Business Writing Tasks And I Can’t Spell Dieabotticle!” speaks about a booklet called “Leave It To The Prose” recently released with hints for people who need to write for their business.

I haven’t seen the booklet, but I’d bet that it overlaps with much of what I’m saying here. The author, Chris Amorosino whose web site is at http://www.amorosinowriting.com is quoted as saying “Words are a business’s clothes. Don’t go out to your prospects naked …”, a sentiment I can agree with.

The point here that strikes home more than any other isn’t about writing, but it’s about the reality of working in a business today. With the economy struggling and people being laid off left-and-right, we all need to be as flexible as we can be. If you’re asked to write something, can you do it? If you’ve got a technical background, can you write a user’s guide or a web page that will help make your company successful.

Can you ‘Make Your Ideas Clear’?

Categories: General Thoughts
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Finding a useful application isn’t always easy. I downloaded an application for blogging that’s impressed me, but I’m just getting started, so it will take some time to find out if it really works for me.

MarsEdit is a Mac-only application specifically for blogging. I’m using it to support a group of Wordpress blogs. I don’t know if I’ll keep using it, but if I find I like it in the next 30 days, I’ll find the $29.95 for it somewhere.

So far, I’m seeing a lot of good in it. Once I started it, activated XML-RPC on all of the blogs, MarsEdit downloaded everything I’d written and presented it to me to work with. I’ve written my first couple of entries using MarsEdit and I’m impressed. It’s be exceptionally easy to work with.

I’m sure I’ll run into some problems over time, but so far it certainly looks like something I’ll want to use.

Categories: Tools
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If you actually like to write and like to write large pieces like books, reports, or anything involved, then the application I’ve been playing with might just be the thing for you. I’ve just taken it out for a 30-day trial, I haven’t bought it yet, but I’m very impressed with what I’m seeing.

I’ve always found that most application have too many features. Word, for example, is bloated with stuff I’ll never use or understand. I like it and for final preparation it’s hard to beat, but for drafting or research, I find it very difficult to use. I ran across Scrivener (http://www.literatureandlatte.com/) by accident in something I was reading and decided to take a look. Unfortunately, it’s MAC only, but it has so many neat features that I’m enjoying playing with it. Since I work on Mac, Windows, AND Linux … I’ve always got an environment I can run something in.

I ran through the tutorial tonight and was impressed with the quality of the application. Everywhere I looked, care and effort seems to have gone into how everything works. Outlining integrated with note taking integrated with research and more makes this a dynamite application for a writer. AT LEAST I THINK SO. I’ll be working with it during the 30-day trial and report back on it here. If I like it enough, you can bet I’ll fork up the $39.95 it takes to buy it. I do so much writing that this will be a godsend.

Categories: Tools
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Sometimes, you just need some help to get things done. I’ve added a ‘Services’ page to lay out some of the things I can help you with if you need it.

If you’d like some help with a writing project, I offer a free phone consultation where we’ll review what you need and come up with a plan for how I can best help you. Send me your contact information below including a phone number and I’ll get in touch within the next several business days.

Categories: Uncategorized
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If you’re interested in writing, then the place to go for both the good and the bad is the web. There is so much of both ends of the spectrum and everything in between that it’s an amazing place to study. Now the study of the web has been launched as a formal area of study by a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton. In November 2006 they launched the Web Science Research Initiative to study the web and how it works.

Scientific American Oct 2008

The article in October’s Scientific American ( “Web Science Emerges”, Scientific American, October 2008, pp76-81) is an interesting overview of this new science, the insights already gained and some of the interesting questions up for study in the future. So what does this have to do with writing? A lot actually.

If you’re going to communicate something, you need to understand the medium and how it’s used. That goes for any medium. Most importantly, you need to understand the people who use it and how best to communicate with them. I expect that this new science will help us put the whole phenomenon of the web into a better perspective so we can use it better.

Web Science is a multi-disciplinary activity involving many areas of science. Insights from Biology, Brain Science, Population Dynamics, Ecology, Sociology, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Socio-Cultural Systems, and in fact nearly every area of knowledge will be important. If we start to understand the evolution of the web in all its complexity and how messages are best structured and delivered, it will have a major impact on how we communicate. Blogging, Audio-Blogging, Video-Blogging, Social Networking, and many other innovations on the web have introduced new ways to communicate. If we understand them better, we can use them better.

For example, I believe that poor writing style & grammar will hurt a communication, even on blogs. Many people disagree with me, believing in turn that writing without prior thought makes it somehow more real and more believable. But who is right? Maybe we’re all partly right and what truly matters is the specific audience or the topic or the intention or some other factor or combination of factors. It will be many years before we can get answers to questions like this, but as we start to learn, we’ll do better on ‘Getting Out Point Across’.

Categories: Web & Internet Communications
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Short written communications are so common, that many people treat them as unimportant. They’re anything but. They are often one of the things people use to assess your abilities. How trusted you are depends on what they see in your writing. Writing which is clumsy, disorganized, or loaded with misspellings will lead to the impression that you are the same.

Because I’ve been writing for many years and have been an editor on magazines and newsletters, I’ve been asked to put together short courses for clients to help their people write better. My style is informal and tries to be informative. I focus on getting a series of ideas understood. Most people like that. Some people consider me to be too informal or too personal, but I’m going to suggest throughout this series of blog entries that more writing should be that way. Overly formal or impersonal writing is harder to understand and puts up unnecessary barriers between you and your readers.

Consider customer service, If you’re writing to reply to a question from a customer and you’re not clear, you’re only going to frustrate that customer. If you’re on a help desk and responding to a user request, you could make the situation worse. If you’re trying to get funding for an important project and you’re answering questions from executives in email, you might lose the funding. There are many places where doing a good job on Short Written Communications is important.

I’ve posted the slides from one of my short courses in the Documents folder. The file, ShortWrittenCommunications.pdf, contains all of the slides used for the lecture. There was additional practical coaching which went on during each engagement after the lecture to help each participant become familiar with the techniques involved. Over time, I’ll be expanding on every technique addressed there as I go further into writing and how I think it should be done.

It’s important to recognize that all of the techniques aren’t suggested for EVERY communication. They’re a toolbox you can use as needed to help make your ideas clear.

Categories: Skills
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Some people seem to believe that ‘think before you write’ means that you need to through a long process to write something. Nothing of the sort is necessary. Thinking before you write is about engaging your mind before you start moving your hands. It helps to think out the process, but the whole thing can be done in minutes.

There are some people I’ve met who are good enough to write and think at the same time, but I’m not that good. I need to put my thoughts in order or I start going off on tangents as I write. If I want to COMMUNICATE, then I want to be clear. To be clear, I need to think about WHAT I want to say and HOW I need to say it.

I can do this quickly when I’m writing something short. This morning while replying to an email, I read the original email, spent a few minutes thinking about my response, then wrote it. I re-read it to make sure I said what I’d intended, fixed a few awkward phrasings, and sent it off. My reply was a few lines and everything was done in just a few minutes, that’s all.

Once it gets important to make your point clear, or the point is more involved, or there is more than one point … you need to take more time. This is where my journal comes in.

My Journal

I keep a notebook with me all the time and use it for note taking, thinking, journaling, and more. I’ve been doing that since the 1960s, so I have quite a collection of notes. I started using notebooks for classes at university, but when I left, I kept using them for notes in meetings, notes from books, for thinking and planning, drawing, and even just to do lists. it’s my ‘rough draft’ location for most things.

When I need to really make my ideas clear, I work through aan informal process like this:

1. I pull out my journal and start a mind map with the core idea in the center of the page. If I think it’s going to be a big idea, I’ll put it in the center of a two page spread.
2. I fill in everything I know about the subject, expanding as I need to and linking ideas one to another
3. With my knowledge dumped on the page, I use the map to determine what I still don’t know, what holes need to be filled in, and what questions other people might ask about the subject
4. If there are any questions that appear important or holes that I need to understand, then I’ll do any additional research necessary to fill in the map
5. Repeat steps 3 & 4 if necessary, but usually I don’t need to
6. I’ll convert the map into an outline by the simple expedient of numbering the major points in the order I want to deal with them. I might actually type this outline into my Word Processor to give me a place to start my written draft. If the map is for a presentation, then this will be the outline of the presentation.
7. Now I can draft what I want to say, raising and answering questions or whatever is necessary to get my point across.
8. A critical step: Put the draft away for a period of time. It might be an hour, it might be a day. What I want to do is be able to come back and re-read it with a fresh perspective as if I’m reading it for the first time.
9. Now I’ll edit the draft, correcting problems I found in re-reading it. These might be grammar, spelling, phrasing, or even rewriting a section to eliminate anything that isn’t clear
10. Repeat 7-9 as much as necessary
11. Publish it

Sounds pretty complex right? Well it’s not. For something short that I know well, Steps 1-6 take just a few minutes and everything is in the journal. Steps 7-10 may take only as long as I need to write it. For something really important, I might delay a day between draft and edit to clear my mind and be able to see what I’m writing more clearly. For something like a BLOG post, I might come back to it after getting a cup of tea or coffee.

How much time it takes to write something depends on how important it is to write it, but even something simple should get some thought before you write it.

Categories: The Basics, The process
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I’ve added a comment spam filter to the blog, so I’ve activated comments from anyone. I look forward to getting a conversation started.

Categories: Uncategorized
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For anyone who runs across this blog, this is a new blog. I’m just starting it up, so while it’s getting it’s legs, I’m restricting posting to people who are willing to sign up and log in. This is primarily for me to get some time to get used to new software and to get some history into the bog. I intend to open it up for everyone to comment, but I will be posting some guidelines for what postings will be acceptable. For example:

• I won’t edit comments except to cut out flames or obscenity.
• I will block anyone who tries to use this blog for advertising something not related to the blogs topics
• I won’t allow posts that link to sites that I don’t personally recommend. If anyone puts a link in a post, I’ll visit it first to confirm that I support it

Terry

Categories: General Thoughts
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