Sad to hear Fort Worth’s Mayfest is off this weekend thanks to swine flu. Attendees enjoy arts, entertainment and crafts. It also hit many of us with allergy and asthma attacks with all the hay (it almost always rained before or during Mayfest).

• How not to be hated in Facebook
• 10 people to unfollow in Twitter
• 10 techniques for an effective ‘call to action’
• Is PR really in the relationship business?
• 10 reasons to be grateful for difficulty
• Letter from a Proofreader with Edits
• The difference between male and female leaders: I always find these types of conversations fascinating.

And for fun because we’re allowed…

• John Williams is the man! A Star Wars-themed four-part a cappella musical tribute. Performed by Corey Vidal and Moosebutter. Closed-captioned,too!
• Swinefighter: Swine flu fighting game. Need a break from all the swine flu bad news? Here you go.
• 17 cool magnet tricks
• Spreadtweet: “So, you work at a big corporate, huh? And you’re not allowed to use Twitter… Wouldn’t it be awesome if there were a Twitter tool that looked just like Excel?”

• Stay out of the Recession with Email Marketing
• A New Game! What happens when self-published books skip the editing process. [Link: Lori Cates]
• 70 Million Definitions of “Blog” and Counting: I love an intelligent discussion and this is one.
• Friday Word Fun: Why do we drive on a parkway and …
• Where to Find Quality Web Templates and Blog Themes

And for fun because we’re allowed:

• 89 useless facts [Link: Ritu B Pant]
• 10 real-life superheroes
• Caller complaints: Fight back against telemarketers
• RadioTime: Listen to radio… local, international, and internet. Site relaunched with a new design. Disclaimer: I’m one of the guilty parties behind the site changes. The content, of course. Free service. The only thing that costs anything is RedButton, which is TiVO for radio. You can try it for 14 days.

Remember to join the birthday celebration! Lots of prizes and easy to enter.

• Five Words You Can Cut: Blogged about this in the past… cut modifiers such as “really, very, much” is a good start. I use “just,” but more to add “conversation” to writing. If it’s an article or something formal, I omit it. [Link: John]
• 35 Essential Elements for a Newsworthy Release: 35 is a bit much. Useful info.
• Landing Page Tutorials and Case Studies. One resource should do the trick for your landing pages wanna knows.
• Polish Your Writing to Professionalism: Three tips to self-editing. My number one tip is to use an editor… but that’s not always possible, so these three will do.
• 5 Business Decisions You Will Be Proud Of: “Does doing all of these things guarantee anything? The answer: YES.”

And the fun stuff because you’re allowed.

• ABC book in 3D. For a moment, I wished I had this book when my kids were younger. But then I realized… they’d tear it up. This one looks too fabulous to ruin.
• Jewish Bread Toilet Seat Cover: In honor of Passover, which starts this weekend.
• 10 annoyingly brilliant office interiors: No depressing gray found here.
• The 10 Most Underrated Consoles

Don’t you hate it when you revisit content that you wrote a day or over a week ago and you find problems? If I had the luxury, I’d sit on most things for more than a day.

For short turn-around assignments, I write the first draft quickly and smooth it. Then I sit on it for at least an hour, if possible before doing the final read through. Every bit helps.

The nice thing about sitting on something is that more ideas come to me while doing something else. For game reviews, I often have a short turnaround time. Sometimes, I have to take a break from playing the game and writing the review because something else comes up.

Many times, a creative comment or idea pops up while I’m away from the computer and the game. So I use my smartphone to capture the thoughts before they get away.

However, I don’t apply the “sit on it” rule for blogging unless it’s a post for later.

So don’t feel guilty about taking a break. You’re still working by letting your brain rest or brainstorm during the rest period. That’s enough break for me, back to writing.

I love editing… other people’s work. You know how many of us don’t like to look at pictures with ourselves in them? That’s how I feel about editing my work. After all the research and rewriting of sentences, I can’t see my writing with fresh eyes anymore. Occasionally, I’ll read an article I wrote months later and see a few easy fixes. Even if I had read the article the day after I wrote it — I wouldn’t have caught those fixes.

But I make an effort to self-edit using similar steps covered in Editing Made Easy. The article focuses on manuscripts, but most of the tips work well for articles. But when I edit my work, it feels like I’m doing it with one eye as the rest of me cringes reading my own work.

Two don’t-miss steps when self-editing:

* Sit on the article for at least one night (writing the article in the morning and editing at night doesn’t count — must sleep at least once and naps don’t count either).

* Read it aloud in my head. I don’t know if it’s a deaf thing or not, but I hear words in my head almost as if they’re being said out loud. My head does a better job than my voice anyway. When I reach a spot that sounds bad, then I say it out loud.

I do have moments when I stop self-deprecating and look an article with fresh eyes (when it’s published). Occasionally, I’ll respond thinking “Whoa. I wrote that?” (in a positive way). It’s easy to forget why you stay in business as a writer when writing something every day and on a regular basis. Your own words sound monotonic (did I use that correctly?) and unimpressive, but then you are surprised when reading an article you wrote over a month ago and seeing that there’s a reason why people hire you, and you feel better about being a writer.

I’m also lucky to have a family willing to be a second pair of eyes.

Digital Web is looking for an editorial assistant. Here’s the description:

As our editorial assistant, you’ll help maintain our schedule, keep tabs on authors, and assist us as we prepare each article for publication — performing many of the mundane, yet essential, behind-the-scenes tasks at one of the web standards community’s most important and widely-read magazines. You will be part of an all-volunteer team and must have a flexible schedule and a sense of humor. You must also be reliable, an excellent communicator, and obsessed with getting the details right. You’ll also need AIM or ichat, as well as Skype. Knowledge of Textile and Basecamp is a plus — or just learn it on the job.

I was a volunteer at Digital Web Magazine for over a year and it was a great experience because you get the opportunity to work with some of the most talented people in the web design industry and one of the premier magazines in web design. I also help behind-the-scenes on occasion. Basecamp is a breeze to use and Textile is simple text markup.

How many times have you written an email only to find an error as soon as you hit Send? When writing an email to a friend or family, most of us rarely do a second read to check our work because we take a relaxed approach with such emails. An article to a magazine, a book chapter, or a short story, however, requires formal editing.

“But isn’t that the editor’s job?”

The authors say, “Yes and no.” They explain the editor’s purpose is to polish the work and not rewrite your work. The writer looks good in the editor’s eyes when turning in an “almost finished product.” Not only do you make the editor’s work easier when rechecking your product, but also it earns you a better reputation.

Writers aren’t the only ones who benefit from Write It Right. The College Board’s National Commission on Writing conducted a study that concluded a third of employees in America’s blue-chip companies wrote poorly and businesses were spending up to $3.1 billion per year on remedial training (2004). Newspapers like the New York Times published the statistics from the report to show the gravity of the situation in the U.S.

The five chapters in the book make up the five steps for self-editing. Each chapter ends with “Questions for Self-Reflection” to help readers determine what areas need working on, so they focus on those while self-editing. The first chapter ends with a grammar quiz, which is the book’s paradox. It has two errors. One question misses a word that appears in the answer and another has a typo.

While following the five step process feels lengthy, the authors include advice on what to do when in a hurry. Writers can judge how much to review their work and adjust the process as needed.

The basic advice consists mostly of common sense, the things we learned in school or through experience. However, the book shows how to find your weak areas and work with them. The authors do an impressive job covering all the bases in this small book by tackling the editing process, giving a handful of grammar tips, and providing checklists. It takes less than an hour to read straight through without completing the suggested activities.

This little guide has a good chance of coming in handy rather than sitting on a bookshelf never to see the light of day. The easy-to-scan format, checklist templates, short list of rules, and examples increase the probability of the reader using it.

Biblio:
The National Commission on Writing (2004) Writing: A Ticket to Work… Or a Ticket Out [Internet] New York, College Board. Available from: <http://www.writingcommission.org/prod_downloads/writingcom/writing-ticket-to-work.pdf> Accessed 14 June 2005

Title: Write It Right
Author: Dawn Josephson and Laura Hidden
Publisher: Cameo Publications
ISBN: 0974496626
Date: September 2005
Format: Paperback
Pages: 144
Cover Price: USD: $17.95 Amazon: $12.21