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What Color is Your Language?
After writing my “Ode to the Thesaurus,” I started to think about how I could write a multitude of such Odes and have a great time. The problem is that I’d probably lose my readership. This left me at a bit of a loss for blog topics. Recently, I bought a second pack of colored…
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Provocative Words
Welcome to my “Ode to the Thesaurus.” One of my favorite Facebook pages is The Writer’s Circle. I always seem to glom onto their lists of Other Words For <fill in the blank>. I’ve several of them clipped into my Blog Ideas notebook in Evernote. One I’ve been looking at a lot lately is for…
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The Joys of Business Ownership
(Or, how I went from worker bee to entrepreneur.) The joy of being a business owner is that you can do what you want when you want, right? Not so much. People keep telling me that I need to work ON my business, not IN it. Translation: do things to grow your business, let other…
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The Point of My Service Business
I recently heard someone say that if a business only provides a service, it doesn’t have any lasting impact. That one hit me hard. While not a secret, I don’t say this often: I’m terrified of ending up like Eleanor Rigby. I don’t expect to be in the history books (unless as a possible author…
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Editing Company or Editor?
I keep thinking about writing a blog on self-publishing, then I get a different idea. Today, my self-publishing research became sidetracked by the Book Editing Services page on the BookBaby website. BookBaby seems to be the Full-Service Self-Publishing company of choice these days. I’m sure there are others, but my searches, random readings, and the…
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Editing for Self-Publishing Authors
With plenty of variations on the theme, I see four general categories of authors who self-publish. They just want to publish something for their close friends and family. They have a story to tell, a message to share, that they hope will go beyond just their social media connections. Their book is a marketing piece…
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What Type of Editing do You Do?
This question used to drive me nuts. Most folks know that my “formal” training in putting words together is fairly minimal, so for a long time I didn’t know that there were different types of editors, let alone what they were called. Editing was just the process of making written text better – I didn’t…
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1 Step Clear Communication
As a ghost blogger, I frequently write about the 7 this and 5 that. Everyone, even people who don’t like numbers, seems to love numbers in blog headlines. The number tells the reader how much they will learn in that post. Well, I am not part of the “everyone.” Mostly because, as a ghost blogger,…
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Words That Don’t Work: Nonplus
I believe that a person with a basic understanding of the language ought to be able to understand content published for the general population – even if they encounter a word they haven’t seen before. Obviously, text books, scientific articles, philosophical debates, and the such are likely to contain words that will send the reader…
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The Hazards of PowerPoint
This blog originally started as a guest blog for my friend Elizabeth Bachman; lately, however, I’ve been wanting to refer to the content, so I thought I’d spin it for myself. While I’d rather write a presentation than give one, I sit through them with some regularity. And I’ve sat through some really BAD presentations.…