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Showing posts from August, 2008

August 2008: Monthly Post Recap

Professional Long Sentences: Some Guidelines Writer’s Block: Don’t Know Your Today’s Topic? Why I Love Woopra, the Revolutionary Web Analytics Tool! Google Dance and Future of Keyword Research Drug Addiction, Treatment, and Rehabilitation A Note on Realism by Robert Louis Stevenson Point of View Thoughts in Fiction Grammar of Parallel Constructions The Valley of Spiders by H G Wells Learn From Others' Mistakes: What Non-Best-Selling Writers Can Teach You EntreCard Myth: How to Choose the Correct Blog to Advertise? Commenting on Blogs: Are You Making Your Mark or Marring It? Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving An Interview With Problogger, Darren Rowse CuteWriting Usage Help, Policy, and Disclaimer Purchase Professional WordPress Themes: Revolution Themes [Sponsored] The Art of Sentence Diagramming The Purloined Letter from Edgar Allan Poe Passive Voice in Creative Writing Writers' Health: Health Problems, Ergonomics, and Health Tips How to Write Concise Sen

Professional Long Sentences: Some Guidelines

Though I always maintained in my posts how effective concise sentences can be , there are times when you need to make professional-looking long sentences . Here, we will see some guidelines to combine short sentences (primer style of writing) to form longer ones, using more diverse forms of grammar. Primer Style of Writing Joe is the name of Harry’s brother. He is a doctor. He saved fifteen lives. His wife’s name is Sarah. Sarah is an entrepreneur. She lives in Pennsylvania. They have two sons. They are both three years old. They are twins. This is an example of primer style of writing , which involves a greater use of simple sentences. Simple sentences are those which have a subject and predicate and nothing else as in the above passage. A writer’s style should be unique and diverse in terms of using language . Simple sentences are good, but they should be limited. Also, a short sentence should be defined not by the length of the sentence, but by the efficiency of space .

Writer's Block: Don't Know Your Today's Topic?

Writer’s Block Are there not days when you sit thinking and thinking to find an idea for an article and discarding anything that comes your way as crap? Have you been sometimes afraid that the editor that is reading your work may comment to his friends in the office, laughing, “This guy writes crap, pure crap!”? Have you actually dreamed your friend and editor reading your work with clearly strained face, occasionally shaking his head? It’s all due to your fear of your own writing. 90 per cent of the new writers are convinced that their writing is not up to the mark. You have a hero, a best selling writer, and you yearn to write like him. You feel inherently that you can never be actually like him . This is the cause of anxiety. Though you may not be as talented as your favorite best selling author, you may well be more talented than several hundreds of published, selling writers . Many new writers don’t understand this fact and unnecessarily strain themselves with unwanted thoug

Why I Love Woopra? A Review of the Revolutionary Web Analytics Tool!

Woopra is a new entrant to the sprawling array of web analytics tools, led at the front by Google Analytics . Several innovative analytics tools are already there, such as Crazy Egg, with their click heat map overlay , Sitemeter, Feedjit, and Statcounter with live analytics , etc. But I couldn’t find one better-equipped than Woopra. Here we will see Woopra's features through various screenshots. Please click on the screenshot to enlarge. To learn more about web & digital data analytics, visit ZoomOwl . Woopra is currently in its Beta stage , and provides free site traffic analytics . Right now, the sites allowed should not have more than ten thousand visits daily . The program doesn’t simply count any visit above that limit. Also, signing up on Woopra may well take a long time to wait, since they are clogged with new sign ups. I recently got approved by them for Beta testing. Woopra is loaded with features, not found in normal analytics tools. Unlike other analytics t

Google Dance and Future of Keyword Research

Keywords until some time back have been lifeblood of an Internet startup. What most of the entrepreneurs would do as the first step was researching keywords. They would dig up the best keywords to represent their websites in either the PPC campaigns like Adwords or normal search results. Keyword research used to be the first and most important step, with such tools as WordTracker , Overture, etc. Would You Really Use WordTracker for Your Keyword Research? ‘Best Technical Writing Fields’ is a keyword for which I optimized one of the pages within CuteWriting recently at WordTracker’s recommendation. WordTracker said this keyword received above hundred searches daily . I optimized my page for that keyword and got it as the first result on Google. Even now, my page on Constant Content is ranking second after Los Angeles Times page for this particular keyword due to the optimization I did. What about those hundred visitors? In three months, not a single person visited that page throug

Drug Addiction, Treatment, and Rehabilitation

Is your friend, the closest, addicted to drugs? What do you feel when you see the needle of the syringe full of Amphetamine going into his forearm? Injecting drugs holds more harm than oral means of taking it. Not only the person will be addicted, but also there will be a higher chance for the contraction of malignant viruses and bacteria through injection. I needn’t go much into the negative effects of taking drugs; everyone knows it. Drug addiction is a terrible pathological condition, which cannot be cured without help from a proper drug rehab program . Addiction treatment is a step that has to start early on. It is a complex process involving individual care, counseling, detoxification, and aftercare. It should also involve comfortable setting for the patients to bring them back to the normal conditions. Drug rehabilitation and treatment is inevitable for addicts. One cannot remain silent and continue to take drugs without going for treatment. Addiction is different from the n

A Note on Realism by Robert Louis Stevenson

A Note on Realism by Robert Louis Stevenson I am a great fan of Robert Louis Stevenson and his works. I had published earlier, from his Essays in the Art of Writing, an article, On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature , which is a great addition to the blog, and which should be read along with my article on writing style. Here is another article from the same book that describes realism in his view. Please read and comment. A Note on Realism by Robert Louis Stevenson Style is the invariable mark of any master; and for the student who does not aspire so high as to be numbered with the giants, it is still the one quality in which he may improve himself at will. Passion, wisdom, creative force, the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the hour of birth, and can be neither learned nor simulated. But the just and dexterous use of what qualities we have, the proportion of one part to another and to the whole, the elision of the useless, the accentuation of the impo

Point of View (POV) in Creative Writing: Some Thoughts

I see that many new writers tend to write in first person POV (Point of View) and several professionals use third person POV, either omniscient or limited. Never have I gone through a work of fiction told in second person POV, which I think is the best way to connect with your readers . Here are some thoughts on POV. First Person POV First Person POV can be either the normal type (in which the protagonist narrates the story), those narrated by someone close to the protagonist , or those narrated by ‘we’ . FP POV normal holds a highly limited and easier narration method (though there are very few writers who pull it off successfully). Though it is easy to write in this way, making it successful is up to the personality of the narrator . If it’s distinct and enjoyable to masses , the story will be successful, otherwise, no. The writer gets to concentrate on one of the characters, and sees other characters through his eyes. Hence, the character development work is reduced . Howev

Grammar of Parallel Constructions

Well, it seems we touched the topic of grammar some considerable time back. So, for today’s post, I have come up with grammar post on parallelism , which you will find interesting. Several authors seem to make mistakes on parallel constructions (in which conjunctions like both…and , as well as , either…or , etc., are employed). We will see how to write such sentences correctly. Parallel construction or parallelism is used to combine two or more ideas or attributes in a single sentence using such conjunctions as mentioned above. Example: Joe helped me prepare the report as well as the tea. Kim is both a great student and an athlete. Robert goes by the name of Bob in the city and Baron in the village. In all three sentences, two different attributes are connected in parallel to the subject using three conjunctions ( as well as , both and , and and ). All the attributes in the parallel form are to be of the same grammatical type, and they should have similar construction and

The Valley of Spiders by H G Wells

Here is a short story by H G Well, 'The Valley of Spiders'. We should dedicate this story to China, at the successful completion of the Beijing Olympics . The Valley of Spiders by H G Wells Towards mid-day the three pursuers came abruptly round a bend in the torrent bed upon the sight of a very broad and spacious valley. The difficult and winding trench of pebbles along which they had tracked the fugitives for so long, expanded to a broad slope, and with a common impulse the three men left the trail, and rode to a little eminence set with olive-dun trees, and there halted, the two others, as became them, a little behind the man with the silver-studded bridle. For a space they scanned the great expanse below them with eager eyes. It spread remoter and remoter, with only a few clusters of sere thorn bushes here and there, and the dim suggestions of some now waterless ravine, to break its desolation of yellow grass. Its purple distances melted at last into the bluish slope

Learn From Others' Mistakes: What Non-Best-Selling Writers Can Teach You

Even fiction enthusiasts may not have heard of David Armstrong . He wrote five or six novels, which were not selling big. Later, he wrote perhaps his best work, How Not to Write a Novel I happened to read this book some time back. There is nothing great to speak about this book or any of his novels. I also happened to read one of his novels, Small Vices (out of print), but didn’t finish it. How Not to Write a Novel is a book that lifts your misconceptions on the glamour of getting published . It tells you, for each Stephen King , there are hundreds of thousands of David Armstrongs . Writing is not a lucrative business to most. One touching line from this book that sticks on my mind is: “My son told me that he had seen a guy walking with my book. But I don’t quite believe that; he is an intelligent son.” [I don’t remember the right words]. Later, I read Small Vices , one of his fiction works I happened to find in the British Library. This novel deals with a detective’s effort a

EntreCard Myth: How to Choose the Correct Blog to Advertise?

EntreCard is a popular advertisement platform. Its specialty is that you can get free advertisement on 125x125 buttons on popular blogs , thereby free traffic. Thousands of bloggers have already adopted EntreCard for free advertisement. Here, I will not introduce EntreCard; it will be a wastage of time here, but I will bust a myth on EntreCard and give you some guidelines as to purchasing better ads on EntreCard. Have you ever actually looked at how much of your traffic is coming from your EntreCard ads? How many of you purchase advertisements from actually popular blogs other than those shown as popular on EntreCard? People, when they look for blogs to advertise in EntreCard, they go to the search feature, and look for the most popular blogs in a particular niche. If you check out the blogs listed there, you will see that most of the top blogs take thousands of Entre credits for a day’s advertisement. These credits you spend to advertise on a particular blog is your hard earned m