Writer's Resources from Quintessential Quill

https://www.quintessentialquill.com/writer-s-resouces

[Link] The 34 Best Tools for Improving Your Writing Skills

by James Hicks

Words are hard.

Whether you’re a published author or just getting started with blogging, it’s not always easy to string words together in a way that makes sense, sounds good, and makes the reader feel something.

But every marketer should be able to write — and, more importantly, every marketer can write. It’s just a matter of finding the writing environment that works best for you, expanding your vocabulary, asking for feedback (and listening to it), and practicing.

Luckily, there are a slew of great tools you can use to help improve your writing. Check out the list below, and feel free to add the most helpful ones you use in the comment section.

The 34 Best Tools for Improving Your Writing

1) Daily Page

“Writer’s block is a comforting lie we tell ourselves so we can stop writing and go do other, more pleasurable things,” said Beth Dunn, HubSpot’s UX writer and editor. “If your fingers still work, you can write. Sit down at the same time every day and start typing.”

Want to get into the habit of writing every day, but don’t know what to write about? Daily Page emails you a writing prompt every morning, and you have the rest of the day to write your response. Once you’ve written your response to the prompt, you can either share it or keep it private.

2) 750 Words

Another way to practice your writing is to do a “brain dump” exercise using a tool like 750 Words. “Brain dumping” means getting all that stuff in your head down on paper — without having to worry about incomplete ideas, tangents, and private stuff.

It’s not blogging or status updating — it’s just you, writing whatever you want on a totally private account, without ever having to title your content or tag topics or share with your friends.

What it does do is track your word count so you’re sure to write 750 words (about three pages of writing). Plus, it’s gamified, which makes it kind of fun: You get a point for writing anything at all, two points for writing 750 words or more, and more points if you write consistently. And every time you write, it’ll give you some cool statistics on how much time you spent writing, the feelings and themes of your words, and so on.

Read the full article: http://hightrafficwealthprogram.com/reviews/the-34-best-tools-for-improving-your-writing-skills/

Online Writing Resources

What are your favorite online resources for writers, and why do you find them effective, inspiring, etc.?

Frank Edler: I always like to run my work through Hemingwayapp.com very helpful at picking out complicated sentences, over use of adverbs and extra wording in general.

James Bojaciuk: The two resources I use the most are on the extreme opposite ends of the sliding scale between "professionally austere" and "likely designed by a teenage girl."

For the professional in all of us, you owe it to yourself to check out Celtx. It's not the most useful thing for the novelist, but if you find yourself hard at work on anything from a script to a comic book to a audio drama, Celtx is invaluable. Thankfully, it's also free.

For the corner of your soul that's in love with Disney sitcoms, there's Written? Kitten! It's like Write or Die, except rewarding you with fluffy balls of purrs instead of deleting your work. The keen thing about this site, though, is that you can immediately edit it to reward you with whatever you'd like. Dinosaurs, explosions, Arnold Schwarzenegger, you name it.

Gordon Dymowski: For writing drafts, I use LibreOffice Writer. (LibreOffice is a free, open source alternative to Word). I like the fact that Writer is a little old-school, no frills, and allows me to concentrate on drafts before performing a final polish. (I do have Microsoft Office, but I tend to use that for freelance work documents, and LibreOffice helps liberate me creatively.

For motivational reading, the blog Write to Done. It's a little bit more professionally-oriented (meaning that it can sound a bit spammy), but contains some great pieces of advice on moving through difficult pieces, focusing on efforts, etc.

Great podcasts on writing include both Perry Constantine's EXPLODING TYPEWRITER and WRITING EXCUSES. The latter can be a bit too dry, and feels much more lecture-oriented, but it's short enough (20 minutes) that it's more of a diversion. Exploding Typewriter' goes into greater depth and contains more "practical" advice on writing.

Rebekah McAuliffe: It really it depends on what kind of writing you're doing. For nonfiction, I definitely recommend Purdue OWL -- Online Writing Lab. It has everything you need from structure to citation. But for fiction, personally I just go with the flow. The resources I use are mainly research based. For example, when researching ALPHA, I used everything from my university's library to YouTube.

[Link] Getting Started With Microsoft Word Styles for Book Layout

by Joel Friedlander

Okay, so you’re sitting at your keyboard pounding away, working on your latest work in progress. You get to the end of a section, hit [Enter] a couple of times and then type the subhead for the next section of text.

You’re an experienced word processor—hey, you’re a writer, right?—so you grab your mouse, select the text of the subhead and start formatting it. Maybe you want your subheads to be Helvetica Bold, 12 point, all caps. (I’m not recommending that, by the way, just using it as an example.)

You quickly select Helvetica from your font menu, change the size, change the alignment from fully justified—which you’re using for the text—to flush left (left-aligned), which is what you’re using for your subheads. Maybe, if you’re nitpicky, you also add a little space above and below the subhead, either by using the [Enter] key or going into the Paragraph formatting palette and setting values in the “Spacing Before/After” boxes.

The Problem with Formatting

That was a lot of work to format a subhead, don’t you think? We walked through about 6 steps to get the formatting right. And you’ll have to repeat these steps every time you come to a subhead in your manuscript.

Some people realize this is a lot of repetitive work and invent shortcuts like copying the last subhead, which copies all the formatting with it, then pasting it where you want the new subhead, and then deleting the old text and replacing it with the new text. That saves time, doesn’t it?

But the fact is that all these methods are bad choices.

Over the course of a long book, can you really be sure you’ve input exactly the same formatting values every time? Did you remember to add that “Space/After” every time? Maybe you should check, since there’s no other way to be certain.

Wait, didn’t you try a couple of subheads in the Verdana font? Did you remember to go back and change those? What about if someone mentions that your 12-point Helvetica bold subheads would look a lot better in 11 point? What are you going to do then?

Continue reading: http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2013/02/getting-started-with-microsoft-word-styles-for-book-layout/