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By Kevin J. Duncan

It’s almost too easy.

By using sensory words to evoke sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell; smart and attractive writers just like you are able to make their words burst to life in their readers’ minds.

In this post, you’ll learn:

  • The science behind sensory details (e.g. why sensory words are so persuasive);
  • The definition of sensory words (plus examples);
  • How answering five simple questions will help you write descriptive words that pack your content with sensory language;
  • 500+ sensory words you can incorporate into your own writing (right now).

Let’s dive in.

The Colossal Power of Sensory Details

Remember the final scene in Field of Dreams when Ray Kinsella has a catch with his dad?

You can smell the grass on the field.

You can hear the sound of the baseball hitting their gloves.

And you can feel Ray’s years of guilt melting away as he closes his eyes, smiles, and tosses the ball back to his dad.

(Be honest. You’re crying right now, aren’t you?)

Field of Dreams made you feel like you were in Ray’s shoes, on his field, playing catch with dad.

The scene creates such a vivid experience for many viewers that whenever they think of playing catch, this scene will come up alongside their own childhood memories.

Here’s why:

When you paint a strong scene in your audience’s mind, you make it easier for them to pull it back up from their memory. You’ve essentially bookmarked it for them so they can easily find it when something — a sight, a smell, a sound — reminds them of it.

That’s the power of content that incorporates sensory details.

And this power isn’t limited to cinema classics capable of making grown men cry. For centuries, literary giants have been packing their prose with powerful words that evoke the senses:

“Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial”
— William Shakespeare (circa 1599)

In addition to The Bard, authors like Maya Angelou, Edgar Allan Poe, and Charles Dickens excel at sensory language. So do literally every famous poet you learned about in school.

And that begs the obvious question…

Why are Sensory Details so Effective?

Short answer:

Our brains handle sensory words differently than ordinary words.

a 2011 study published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, experts found that our brains process “tangible” (i.e. sensory) words faster than other words.

And in a study published for Brain and Language in 2012, psychologists found that a certain part of our brain is “activated” when we read sensory words.

In other words:

It’s Science!

So, we know why sensory details are powerful. And we know writers have been tapping into their power for a long, long time.

Now let’s define them and go over a few examples:

What are Sensory Words?

Sensory words are descriptive words — using imagery, they describe how we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell the world around us.

Let’s break each one down:

Read the Whole Article

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by Jeff Goins

The point of marketing is not to convince people to buy your stuff. It’s to help you find the people who need your work. Don’t create something for everyone. Create something for someone.

I once saw a conversation between Michael Hyatt and an upset fan.

The fan started complaining about how Michael didn’t really care about people and all he cared about was money. He started to attack how my friend had conducted himself on his blog and podcast. The fan ranted and protested, and as I watched this go down on Twitter, I wondered what Michael might be thinking or feeling. I know what I would’ve been feeling at that point: a strong need to defend myself. However, when I saw Michael’s response I was blown away.

He said quite simply, “I’m not for everyone.”

Did you know that your work is not for everyone?

That is actually the point of it. Most of us get into creative work, whether that’s starting a business or painting a picture or trying to write a book, not because we want to make something for everyone but because we want to make something for someone.

We want to create something that has never been created before. We want to write something that has never been written, not like this, ever. But at some point along the journey, we lose our way. We start to think about who might not like it. And as we consider those who don’t like it, we start to hedge and play it safe. We remove any of the strong language that could potentially lead to people disapproving of it. They might unsubscribe or ask for a refund, we think, so we do whatever we can to avoid any kind of criticism.

Not for Everyone Book cover by David Leddick

But here’s the problem: the kind of work that doesn’t deserve criticism doesn’t deserve praise. Read that again and let it sink in.

The kind of work that doesn’t deserve criticism doesn’t deserve praise.

If you don’t do something worth criticizing, then you aren’t doing something worth appreciating. So as we venture forth to make our things and share them with the world, we have to consider a few questions before we begin.

Who am I not trying to reach?

Before we think about who this work is for, I wonder if it would be a better strategy to consider who this is absolutely not for.

Who is going to disapprove of this?

Who is going to hate it?

In fact, in the “growth hacker” marketing community, thinking about who will absolutely hate this is one way to stir up buzz about the product.

If this thing is not worth hating at least by someone, is it even worth creating?

What will it not do?

Read the Whole Article

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by Joel Friedlander

Let’s face it: writing is mostly a solitary business. The picture we have of the writer alone in her room, deep in the writing process, is pretty accurate. Writing takes dedicated hours over a long period of time.

This means that many people who write for a living work at home. I’ve been self-employed for quite a long time, and sometimes I had a space to work that I rented, but mostly I’ve been lucky enough to have room in my home to set up an office.

This scheme is not without risks, however.

Early in my working at home days, it seemed almost impossible to get anything done. Eventually, I gave up and took an office in the city.

But when I began book publishing in earnest in the 1990s, I took an extra bedroom in your home and converted into an office.

Over the years since I’ve worked from home both as a contract worker doing book design and production, as well as an entrepreneur, starting businesses and gathering a team online.

In the course of the thirty-plus years I’ve been doing this, I’ve learned lots of lessons about navigating work at home successfully.

Here are my top tips for authors and publishers who work at home:

13 Tips for the Work-at-Home Author

  1. Get dressed for work—It may seem like fun to spend the day in your pajamas, you’ll be much more productive by dressing for work to trigger yourself to take your home work seriously.
  2. Establish a routine—Routine is part of life when you work in any context, and routines can be used as powerful reinforcements in building successful habits.
  3. Treat your business like a business—Your mindset will communicate itself to others whether you intend it to or not. Act like you’re transacting serious business and people will take you at your word.
  4. Choose a dedicated work space—An absolute necessity for home workers. Having a space that’s optimized for your type of work, where everything you need is readily accessible will help make you so much more productive. Put some time (and some resources) into making your home office an inviting and efficient place to work.
    • Declutter—Keeping order, not surprisingly, helps with focus and concentration
    • Create a pleasing ambiance—Having your own space gives you an opportunity to create an environment that you’ll be happy to work in.
    • Less noise, more light—If you can find a spot that has either quiet or great natural light, take it. If it has both, guard your space jealously.
    • Get a good chair—When you consider your desk chair is your most-used piece of equipment, you’ll realize why it’s a good idea to invest in one that gives you great support. During the dot-com bust, we picked up several pricey Aeron chairs, and they really make a difference especially on those late night launches.
  5. Try to leave the house each day—Getting some air and a chance to walk around for a few minutes will keep your energy up for the long haul.
  6. Restrict your social media use—If this is a problem for you, try logging out of all your accounts during your work day, and/or turning off notifications on all your devices. On iOS devices, the “Do Not Disturb” setting is quite handy.

Read the Rest of the Article on The Book Designer

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by Mark Nichol for Daily Writing Tips

1. Prepare
Absorb information about writing, but don’t overwhelm yourself. I’ve been known to read a writing handbook or editing manual cover to cover, but I recommend reading one chapter or section at a time and absorbing information from online resources in similarly small doses as well. Our website is a good starting point, as it features thousands of posts about specific grammar, syntax, and style topics as well as vocabulary-building posts and more comprehensive posts about writing, editing, and language.

2. Practice
Work on your writing every day. Commit to a daily writing exercise, even if you have only five minutes to spare. If you write for a living, or writing constitutes a significant proportion of your daily tasks at work, still set aside time to practice other forms of composition. Style or subject matter can vary day to day, or you can decide to, for example, respond in writing to something you experienced with any of your five senses (including anything you watched or read by way of a form of media). Alternatively, find a list of writing prompts online, and use the next one on the list each day, or choose one randomly. (Encourage family members or friends—or even coworkers—to join you in producing their own responses.)

3. Engage with Others
Participating in a group learning activity is a great motivator. When you have paid for a class and/or scheduled time for attend classes or workshop sessions, you’re more likely to persevere, and completing assignments and projects will help you establish and/or maintain your writing discipline. If you’re intimidated by a group setting, consider finding a writing partner with whom you can exchange drafts and/or discuss concepts and practice skills, then graduate, on your own or with your partner, to a course or workshop. Alternatively, seek out online courses or groups.

4. Read
Read for education, enjoyment, and enlightenment. For the most part, with recreational reading, just sit back and enjoy yourself. But consider devoting occasional sessions to analytical reading, in which you highlight particularly effective words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs and think about why they stand out, and apply the techniques to your own writing.

5. Organize
Use organizational techniques such as outlines and diagrams. Brainstorm keywords and essential ideas or plot points. If other forms of creative expression stimulate you, use them: Listen to (or play) music to inspire a certain mood, collect photographs or illustrations of people, places, and things that suggest elements you want to incorporate into an essay or a short story, or draw sketches of characters or settings to help you visualize them.

6. Research and Fact-Check
Whether you’re writing nonfiction or fiction, take care to write authoritatively. If you’re writing a short story or a novel, read about the historical background of the setting to make sure that you are not introducing counterfactual or anachronistic elements. When crafting a newspaper, magazine, or website article, or a blog post, educate yourself on your topic, and double-check quantitative information: proper names; affiliations and relationships; and dates, distances, dollar amounts, and so on.

Read the Whole Article

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by Tracy Stanley

Writing a thesis is a huge accomplishment, and in today’s guest post Tracy Stanley discusses how all the work you put into that project doesn’t have to end once the thesis is submitted to your academic advisors. As always, your writing can be turned into more than one asset; it’s possible to turn that thesis into something you can sell.

I spent four years researching and writing for a Ph.D. on the topic of How Work Environments Contribute to Creative Behaviours and Employee Engagement.

When submitted it was 103,850 words and I knew that no more than six people in the world would read it. As a result, it was unlikely to have an impact on anything. Yes, I’d written shorter academic articles, but these were also designed for a mainly academic audience.

I wanted to share what I’d learned to a different audience, to managers, and to share the main messages in my own voice, not my carefully restrained academic voice.

Starting was hard

The journey took me a couple of years. Like many, I suffered from the Jekyll and Hyde phenomena of thinking:

Who am I to write this book?
to
Of course, I can write a book.

This imposter syndrome plagues many writers and I highly recommend you read, The Successful Author Mindset by Joanna Penn before starting the journey as it will help you to confront your demons.

successful author mindset joanna penn

Next, write a book proposal that you might send to an agent or publisher, (even if you don’t and choose to take the self-publishing route). Think of your proposal as a pitch – so use marketing language to communicate its value in terms of content and your value as the subject matter expert.

The proposal will help you to organize your thinking and to focus on your audience and their pain points.

The book proposal should include:

  1. Problems the book addresses for a specific market;
  2. Value that will be provided to the reader in terms of pain points addressed;
  3. A proposed title;
  4. Evidence that there is a need for the book based on market research. This should come from an analysis of similar books in the marketplace and from talking with people impacted by the problem you are solving; and a
  5. Contents page.

As you did with your Ph.D., write your contents page as soon as you can. This will help to organize your thinking. We know that it will probably change, but it’s a great starting point.

Having written a Ph.D., you are unlikely to suffer from a lack of content. Indeed you may be able to repurpose your research into several books. I could see that I could split my thesis fairly easily into two books around the themes of employee engagement and creativity.

I suggest that you look at your Abstract and Contributions of the Study chapters in your thesis to glean key areas you want to draw on in your book. But do not do a direct copy and paste as you will be copying your academic voice as well.

Lessons learned from the journey

Read the Whole Article

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You dream of being a writer.

Maybe you even feel there is a book within you.

Each New Year, you resolve to do it. To start writing regularly. To start working on a book or a blog.

But what happens?

  • You get too busy.
  • You don’t have the energy.
  • You can’t find the time.
  • Your health or the health of a dear one falters.
  • You doubt whether you have what it takes.

But deep within lies your dream, waiting for you, year after year.

You can’t erase this dream of becoming a writer. Because this dream is the message you are destined to share with the world. 

But how to do it? How to make this dream a reality?

How to start and not give up?

There is only one way to do it. You need to write. Every day.

It is a challenge. However, there is a simple way to overcome this challenge without using willpower or needing a dose of discipline.

You need to establish a tiny habit of writing.

According to behavioral scientist, BJ Fogg, there are two ways to change behavior in the long-term: either change your environment or take baby steps.

Most people who want to create a new habit choose a big goal and experience a burst of enthusiasm…which is then eventually followed by failure when momentum stalls and motivation wanes.  I bet you know all about this.

However, with the strategy of tiny habits, you’ll be able to develop a new habit with ease without having to use willpower or discipline to achieve your goal.

Want to make your dream of being a successful writer a reality this year? Join the Budding Writer’s Lab. CLICK HERE to find out more.

The Secret of Tiny Habits

According to behavioral scientist, BJ Fogg, a “tiny habit” is a behavior that…

  • You do at least once a day.
  • It takes you less than 30 seconds to do.
  • It requires little effort.

Let’s take a look at what a tiny writing habit could be. Remember, your habit needs to be ridiculously small and easy to accomplish so that you only need a minimum of _activation energy (_the energy to start a habit). The smaller the habit, the less energy you need to establish it.

Read the Whole Article

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Having written articles and books with Dragon speech recognition software, I can vouch for the following tips written by Michael at Daily Writing Tips. I can also vouch for the astounding accuracy statistics cited. It’s honestly as good (or better) than having a human transcriptionist writing down your every word!

One thing I’d add to Michael’s tips (and to bring the number of tips to 7) is to recommend using a blue yeti microphone. I’ve tried a dozen microphones over the years and the blue yeti is excellent, hands-free, keeps wires off your head, and has a focused but forgiving directional microphone pick-up pattern.

Blue Yeti Microphone

From Daily Writing Tips:

A professional writer might add a thousand words a day to their rough draft. With speech recognition software, some writers can add several thousand. That’s one reason why more writers are choosing to dictate their books. Today the error rate of speech recognition software has improved to within a percentage point of a human being. According to IBM, even a human transcriptionist hears the wrong word 4 or 5 percent of the time. IBM reached 5.5 percent in 2017. Google claims even lower than that – 4.9 percent in 2017.

Speech recognition can be found in Google Docs, Windows 10, your smartphone and in various home devices. Dragon Naturally Speaking is the only commercially-available speech recognition software for consumers, mostly because they bought all their competitors. According to their website, “Dragon is 3x faster than typing and it’s 99% accurate.” For higher accuracy, Dragon can be trained to recognize your own voice and vocabulary.

Tips for writing with speech recognition

  • Dictate in complete phrases or sentences. Recent advances in accuracy have come not so much from speech recognition (“that’s a buh not a duh”) as from language recognition (“after the words ‘eat’ or ‘peel’ the sounds ‘buh nah nuh’ are probably ‘banana’). I can sometimes see my software rewrite a sentence once I’ve completed it, because it now has more of the context and so can recognize more of the words.
  • Pause between phrases, not words. That’s mostly what I just said, but it bears repeating. Separating parts of speech with pauses (“It was… the… best of… times”) can really confuse the software. It likes to sense the sentence structure as you speak. Pausing between phrases is also a good habit for public speaking, or for speaking in general, for that matter. Yes, you need to pause while you think, but you don’t need to keep talking while you do it.
  • Watch the screen. If there are any errors or omissions, you want to make sure they’re not so serious that you can’t remember what you really meant to say. I can handle Dragon spelling “to” instead of “too” or “member” instead of “remembering.” But sometimes the software provides a perfectly spelled word that would make no sense later. In that case, I can usually dictate the correct word again, perhaps preceding it with “or rather” as a newscaster might. Or you may be able to train Dragon (and yourself) that you pronounce “to” as “tu” and “too” as “te-yoo.” Or restate your sentence in different words. Don’t worry about polluting your masterpiece with synonyms – it’s probably faster than hemming and hawing for the perfect word. You can perfect it when you edit it.
  • Keep a consistent tone, speed, and volume. Shouting, whispering or pretending you’re Robin Williams will make the software work harder. It doesn’t appreciate or even recognize histrionics. I did a stint as a professional voice transcriptionist, repeating the speech of another person more clearly so that Dragon could understand it better. We maintained a cheerful tone as we worked, but we weren’t dramatic.
  • Don’t stop for mistakes. Keep a consistent flow, where words come out of your mouth at approximately the same speed they come into your mind. Your mind will appreciate that. Don’t stop to fix typos or punctuation errors. Talk around any blatant mistakes – restate anything that’s unclear but keep dictating. Your first transcription may not be smooth or free of mistakes. But mistakes inspire creativity because they beg you to fix them. So don’t worry about making mistakes when dictating.
  • Don’t try to speak the keyboard. You’re better off just dictating words and not trying to operate your computer with your voice. Yes, Dragon has many editing commands:
    Scratch that, Scratch that <n> times, Go back, Go to top, Stop listening, Search eBay for <text>
    (NOTE TO SELF: DO NOT TRY TO WRITE NOVEL AND SHOP ON EBAY AT THE SAME TIME.)But the main commands I use are Period and New line – I’m supposed to be writing not editing – remember? – and I’ve turned off my internal editor. Dragon’s commands are great for people who can’t use a keyboard – they can say Open Google Chrome or Post to Facebook – but the extra learning curve can sour other people on trying the software.

Read the rest of Michael’s article for some excellent hands-free editing tips.

Over the holidays I moved education-related articles on McGillespie.com to a new website created for that purpose. OutliersAcademy.com is a new full-blown educational website with a tagline of “Inspiring the Next Generation of Outliers.” It’s built for students of any age interested in courses, articles, curriculums, etc. that enable one to thrive in the artificial chaos of today’s world.

The Essence of Education

The essence of education is transformation and learning to live in ways that leverage the power of those transformations. The categories of materials on OutliersAcademy.com are centered around the theme of transformation: Education, Entrepreneurship, History, Creativity, Productivity, Economics, Legal, Alternative News Commentary.

New Focus for McGillespie.com

With OutliersAcademy.com to house educational materials, the focus of McGillespie.com will be shifted to Writing, Technology, Family, Health, Personal Experiences, Politics, and news commentary unrelated to my other sites.

By the way, if you’ve signed up for the McG newsletter for educationally related materials, there’s no need to do anything. I’ll re-tag your email so you’ll have access to the new resource library in OutliersAcademy.com (where I’ll be uploading lots a great new material!)

DivineCouncil.org at the Center

DivineCouncil.org is devoted solely to spiritual matters as I believe the essence of human nature (and the origin of physical reality) is spiritual.

DivineCouncil.org is a fully-featured website with a regularly updated article blog, an infrastructure to distribute theological materials to a large subscriber base, and a private forum that could run a large church.

The private forum on DivineCouncil.org provides extensive resource-sharing capabilities. The forum, alone, could serve a large mega-church with dozens of ministries (in fact, many websites with such a forum devote the entire site to the forum.) However, DivineCouncil.org’s forum is devoted to sharing and distributing theological resources, supporting missionaries, and facilitating conversations searchable by keyword & category.

Private threads are also available on the forum for planning, article critique and collaboration, and for matters not appropriate to the entire forum readership.

In short, DC’s forum is everything Facebook is not.

What They Have in Common

There are three things that all three websites have in common: a course library, a private forum, and a store.

Course Library

Given that all courses, regardless of subject, will be housed on OutliersAcademy.com the categories for McGillespie.com and DivineCouncil.org will inevitably spill over to OutliersAcademy.com when courses become available in their respective areas of focus.

Private Forum

The forum on DivineCouncil.org is expensive and requires considerable administration. For that reason, I’ll be leveraging the forum to support OutliersAcademy.com and McGillespie.com, as well. Please see the bottom of the forum on DivineCouncil.org to discuss articles or courses related to OutliersAcademy.com and McGillespie.com.

Online Store

The “Store” button on the menu of all three websites will take you to the online store for that website.

The store was installed to make it possible to sell digital downloads without having to update expiring links for security. However, there are lots of possibilities I’m looking forward to exploring.

Life Admin & Web Cockpit

I have two large computer screens in my office formed into a kind of life-administering cockpit. Between logos, writing tools, and all sorts of apps and gizmos that make it easier (read possible) to administer life and three fully-blown websites there’s usually something interesting on the screen.

Every once in a while a friend is in my office to discuss something in private, and they see something on the screen that prompts them to ask what I’m working on. While answering their questions I become aware, again, how extensive is the infrastructure that keeps my life on track, websites administered, and materials published for their respective purposes.

Everything is Easy?

Far from complaining, I find my work to be thrilling and a joy. However, I also know something about websites that most people don’t: the “cockpit” and tools on my screen are similar or identical to those on the desks of thousands of other website administrators. There are many great choices for tools “out there”, but the best of the breed are usually obvious. Equally well-known is how many tools (dozens or more) are necessary to accomplish the work and still carry on something of a normal life. And those knee-deep in using them know something else that need rarely be mentioned or discussed: The oft-heard advice that “having a website is easy” or “just throw it up online” or “my friend makes $10k a month on his blog and does almost nothing” is worse than bad; it’s defeating and destructive.

Just recently, I learned of a good man who was lured into a one SAS-(software as service)-does-all program for administering the totality of his business website needs. As of 2019, no such automated service can fulfill this promise. Such a promise can only be made (let alone fulfilled) by an actual person (or persons) doing the work. Yes–even in 2019– actual people still have to do the grunt work to keep a good website going; piece-by-piece, update-by-update, integration-by-integration, codemod-by-codemod, glitch-by-glitch, support-call-by-support call.

Automations like drip marketing are awesome, spreadsheets can do wonders, google drive is cool as long as it’s free, and there are lots of great courses out there to help. My new favorite beast(s) are Zapier integrations to take the drudgery out of inter-app coordination!  But, don’t be fooled: there’s still a SWAMP of technology to wade through to keep everything in place for a functional website that fulfills its purpose well.

Pro Tip: Before you start a website for your business (or pay for an automated do-all-service) ask, beg, or purchase the advice on everything it really takes from someone already doing it. . . .successfully.

Library on McG Will Remain

The free-resource Library on McGillespie.com will remain and another one created on OutliersAcademy.com for resources related to the OA categories listed, above.

3 Websites for Life!

In retrospect, the unfolding of these three websites (over ten years) was natural and inevitable. Now with the “birth” of OutliersAcademy.com, I have the same feeling with regards to websites as when our second child was born. There is an indescribable feeling of “completeness of platform.”

In 2019, I’m more committed than ever to nourishing my family … and these three websites … for life!

I’ve spent the past two weeks coming up with a format to create and disseminate transcripts of video and audio materials I find important enough to have in text format.

With the proliferation of videos and podcasts, transcripts have become more useful in my work. As a writer and teacher, transcripts enable me to:

  • Skip long videos and podcasts (by reading or scanning them, instead.)
  • Search hundreds of videos, podcasts, or lectures by keywords.
  • Listen and read at the same time.
  • Come back up to speed quickly on an “old” video or podcast.
  • Quote the text without having to transcribe or retype.

I use DevonThink to store, scan, and search thousands of documents. Transcripts make videos, podcasts, & lectures available to that research workflow.

As each transcript is completed, I’ll make them freely available on either DivineCouncil.org (Spiritual) or McGillespie.com (Business, Family, Legal, Government, Health, Personal.)

Note: Each transcript (pdf) will be digitally signed by yours truly for web security. If you see my digital signature, you’ll know the document has not been altered from the signed original.

I was thinking of creating a course on Scrivener 3.0 when I found an excellent one by Karen Prince. Now that Karen has made this one I might focus on teaching advanced tips (if making one, at all):

Scrivener 3 Full Course on How to Use Scrivener 3 for Mac by Karen Prince.

The subtitle of the course is “Master all the Major Features of Your Scrivener Writing Software to write eBooks and Paperback books”. Karen specifies the Mac version but there’s few differences between the mac and pc versions.

Karen has an excellent teaching style (and voice) and the course will take you way beyond the point of being productive with the software. My only gripe about the course is the length of her videos (which some might view as a plus). I would prefer videos be kept to bite-sized chunks of 5-minutes or less whereas Karen’s are often in the double-digits in this scrivener course.

I purchased the course on sale for $20 though it’s listed for $80 between sales.

BTW, if you’re a writer and don’t yet use scrivener you’re almost certainly wasting time, writing worse, or writing less than you might. I made the switch two years ago and it was more than worth the week it took to come up to speed on the workflow.

One of my favorite ways to read the Bible is to listen to it being read aloud. By listening, instead of reading, I can more easily focus on the story the words are intended to convey. If that seems child-like it’s because it is. It’s also the most demanding and thrilling “reading” I’ve ever done. And, if sophisticated describes “the degree of complexity or that which appeals to those with worldly knowledge or experience” then, yeah, it’s that too.

I would argue that books are the “new kid on the block” for human communication. People have been telling each other stories since there was a second pair of ears to hear them. And the first person to exist probably told stories to themself! How long after storytelling did books come about? Nobody knows. But there’s is no doubt about which came first.

This advanced story layout is the centerpiece of my morning routine. I highly recommend this layout for writers or anyone looking to reach a deeper understanding of the narrative structures of the Bible.

Story of the Bible (Logos Layout Basic Version)

As one writer writing (and administering) two websites and a forum, I rarely have the luxury of consulting an editor. And yet, the talented editors I’ve consulted with, now and then, have often made suggestions that greatly improved my writing. Therefore, I’ve been intrigued by the commercials for “Grammarly”, a background program that makes editing suggestions while you write.

I’m still considering the app and have only just installed the free version, yesterday. While in self-imposed Beta testing I thought it might be useful to pass along the best review I found on Grammarly, so far.

When I first heard that there was a piece of paid software that simply did a spellcheck, I thought that was ridiculous.  Why would anyone pay for spellcheck or grammar check when every computer comes with that ability for free.  Then I heard that Grammarly will even run a spell check while I write blog posts like this one.  But WordPress already does that.  Who would pay for software that fixes a problem I don’t have?  In this Grammarly review, I seek to share that answer.

The Review Outline:

  • My English Qualifications
  • Writing Pays My Bills
  • Taking Grammarly for a Test Drive
  • My First Grammarly Test
  • What is the Difference Between Free and Paid
  • Does Grammarly Make Mistakes?
  • You Must Be Online
  • Check Your Workers
  • Dealing with Plagiarism
  • Vocabulary Enhancement
  • How Does Grammarly Work?
  • Web Interface
  • Standalone
  • Chrome/Firefox Plugin
  • Word Plugin
  • I Read Some Negative Grammarly Reviews
  • Are You English or Canadian?
  • Can it replace an editor?
  • Advanced Techniques
  • Final Review of Grammarly – Is it Worth the Money?

An Honest Grammarly Review by Jonathan Green