Contact Us
Tag

Workflow

Browsing

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

Do you find these posts helpful and informative? Please CLICK HERE to help keep us going!

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.

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

If you want your words to last as long as parchment use plain ASCII text with Markdown. When found, your writing can be republished at the click of a button. It’s digital; make lots of copies.

Markdown is . . .1

… a way to format plain text to show the formatting choices of the writer.

The syntax is natural and the formatted text is readable (Unlike HTML from which Markdown was derived as a form of shorthand). And, since most publishing software can read Markdown, directly, the writer can write once, skip the hassles of formatting, and pass the text directly on to the publisher.

Half of the Markdown syntax is just how a writer would format text, naturally. For example, you type an asterisk or a number in front of bullet points or a list of items, or hit enter to separate paragraphs. Heading levels are marked by the number of “#” signs placed before the heading. Even footnotes, tables and web links are straightforward and the text remains readable after formatting.

Storage

Plain digital text bypasses the problems of paper storage. It also bypasses the format wars of proprietary software. Your writing is created, stored, and published from the same text file. If we can read Egyptian hieroglyphs, today, perhaps people will be able to read ASCII text files, 5000 years from now.

Ideally, you make a (Digital) book available and distribute it to hundreds or thousands of people. Upload it to a website where it will be indexed, and possibly stored, by a third party. Less ambitious writers could put their text on as many mediums as they can find. Put them in a safe, wrapped in a paper printout. Tell your family about them and put it in your will. If your lucky, your progeny will see it and use the search engine of the day to find a copy, somewhere. Otherwise, perhaps one of your digital copies is readable. In terms of survivability, the paper copy is likely the weakest contender after 100 years or so.

How Long Will it Last?

Markdown_table
Markdown_table

 

Search

The presumption, even today, is that if you have the title, or the author’s name, you have a fair chance of finding the book. As more books are published in digital-only formats the odds of being able to find any book will increase.

Write Once, Publish Anywhere

Markdown makes it possible to write once and publish anywhere. Every platform I’ve needed to publish to can receive markdown text. But, it’s even better than that: Most of my writing is outlined, written, edited, and exported directly to the publishing platform and archived in markdown from within one program: Scrivener. The text can then be updated or repurposed from the same place it’s archived! It’s hard to describe the relief of simplicity this workflow provides. It makes for a frictionless writing environment that shifts the focus of the work back onto content. You just keep writing and let the publishing platforms handle the formatting details.

Markdown Benefits

  • Liberates the writer from formatting concerns both during, and after, writing.
  • Liberates the writer from proprietary software jail.
  • Gives the writer the widest number of choices in publishing platforms.
  • Enables the writer to use the same text file to feed multiple software and publishing platforms.
  • Updates and editions are made to one file: The original text file.
  • Enables the text to be read now and for the foreseeable human future.
  • Puts the writing in simple text format which will outlast all software programs currently in use.
  • Text processing programs are everywhere as are publishing software and platforms that can read Markdown, directly. Pick one and start writing.

WYSIWYG Live Preview, Yes!

Ironically, writing in simple text was a big step for me. I worked as a typesetter before, and during, college and have always loved the look of well-formatted text and book design. My professional consulting is replete with word processors, project management software, presentations, adobe frame maker proposals, etc. To make it worse, I’ve relied heavily on HTML and InDesign for the past eight years. Must I do without the inspiration of formatted text to get all the benefits of writing in markdown?

Not at all! Marked reads your text file (Even a Scrivener file!) and displays a fully formatted version of your document in real time. As you type, Marked updates the displayed document. When you’re finished you can export the document from your original text editor or right from Marked, in all the standard formats.

Workflows

Website Articles

  1. Scrivener to WordPress.
  2. Markdownify plug-in within wordpress editor box.
  3. Images stored on dropbox or website image directory.
  4. Marked shows WYSIWYG of Scrivener file, including images, while the article is being written.

Guest posts

  1. Scrivener exported to publisher’s format preference.
    A. Cut/paste of Markdown txt?
    B. Html or pdf export from Marked
    C. Other?

Client Documents

  1. Scrivener to pdf export.
  2. Indesign for special formats only.

Books

  1. Scrivener to first draft.
  2. Edit drafts in Scrivener.
  3. Send to Editor(s).
  4. Make edits in Scrivener.
  5. Final copy to Indesign.
  6. Format for Kindle, PDF, etc.
  7. Succeeding versions in Indesign.

Project Planning & Tasks

  1. Omnifocus (Text only)
  2. Drafts (MD and Text)
  3. Scrivener (MD and Text)
  4. Excel

E-mails

MailMate

Notes

  1. Evernote
  2. Nvalt
  3. Drafts (iphone/pad) to Evernote to Scrivener

Misc. Tools

  • Byword
  • Brett Terpstra’s Markdown services
  • MultiMarkdown Composer

P.S., Nine Months Later

Shortly after starting to use Markdown I began using dictation software to talk words onto the screen. Dictation has now taken such a big place in my daily writing that my typing speed has declined. One thing I haven’t yet done is to train the dictation software to implement markdown syntax. For example, perhaps I could train the software so that saying, “Bold that”, puts double asterisks around the last word?

I no longer need Adobe Indesign or Word for daily writing. I much prefer to use Marked 2 for WYSIWYG of the draft folder of Scrivener. It’s not as good as Indesign but enough to be inspired by the clean text and formatting of what I’m working on.

When writing articles I sometimes use temporary droplink addresses of image files so Marked can show me how the picture will look with the text during the writing process. I also use droplink addresses to compose e-mails to friends (Also in markdown) if they’re to include photos. If I need the images to be viewable in the long-term I use “Transmit” to quickly upload the images to my website image directory and use that address in the markdown syntax.

When composing agendas and client documents I write them all in scrivener using markdown. I then use Marked to convert markdown to the pdf files that are sent directly to the client. Client work is started, and completed, in Scrivener where it remains in its final form. The pdf’s sent to the client are beautiful and archived in Scrivener.

Best Markdown Resources


  1. Invented by John Gruber and Fletcher Penny. 
  2. https://www.whalingmuseum.org/explore/library/from-the-vault/cuffe-manuscripts 
  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible 
  4. David Diringer noted that “the first mention of Egyptian documents written on leather goes back to the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2550–2450 BC), but the earliest of such documents extant are: a fragmentary roll of leather of the Sixth Dynasty (c. 24th century BC) 
  5. Jiahu symbols, carved on tortoise shells in Jiahu, c. 6600 BC