writing Archives - McGillespie

Communication

581 Sensory Words to Take Your Writing from Bland to Brilliant

By Guest Post April 27, 2019

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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Business

13 Tips for the Work-at-Home Author

By Guest Post March 13, 2019

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

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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Creativity

10 Tips to Improve Your Writing Skills

By Guest Post February 19, 2019

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.

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Creativity

Writing Tips: How To Turn A Thesis Into A Book That Sells

By Guest Post February 12, 2019

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.

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:

Problems the book addresses for a specific market;
Value that will be provided to the reader in terms of pain points addressed;
A proposed title;
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
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

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Community

Killing Creativity With The Rise In Zero Sum Thinking

By Guest Post January 28, 2019

by Larry Robertson

Synopsis: Creativity has everything to do with mindset – beware the zero-sum mindset.

Pause a moment longer to take a more considered look at it, and it’s easy to discern that creativity is always, always, always a multiplayer game too. Indeed this is fact doubly true. Not only are breakthrough creative ideas a result of an accumulation of many smaller ideas, but inevitably those many contributing ideas come from many contributors too, rather than some single, mythical, creative genius source. To punctuate the observation, consider that MacArthur Fellows, those famous creative folks who have the moniker of genius thrust upon them, are the quickest to tell you that, in the words of mathematician and Fellow Maria Chudnovsky, whatever they create rests on the broad shoulders of others before them, and that their greatest hope is that what they create will do the same for other people and other ideas yet to come. In short, the multiplayer nature of creativity is true both in any individual creation and across creations and time.

If all of this strikes you as somewhat self-evident, you might be asking yourself, why make the point? Considered in a thoughtful moment, the answer is just as clear, though in the current environment, all too easily missed. Our world is increasingly dominated by the short view, the quick answer, and the implicit goal of finality. On a growing list of subjects, we humans are also increasingly leaning towards not only an us versus them view, but strategy, a textbook zero-sum strategy where I must win, and you must lose, and together we fail to advance. At the very least, if our endeavor is a creative one, with this mindset we’re pretty much done before we even begin. But as zero-sum spreads to an ever-widening number of endeavors, it’s important to do the math. Inevitably, the conversation is about far more than pennies.

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Creativity

How to Create an Easy Habit of Daily Writing Without Willpower

By Terence Gillespie January 28, 2019

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.

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Communication

7 Tips for Writing with Speech Recognition Software

By Terence Gillespie January 22, 2019

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.

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.

Education

Transcripts for Writers, Believers, & Outliers

By Terence Gillespie February 6, 2018

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.

Communication

Recommended Course on Scrivener 3.0

By Terence Gillespie January 5, 2018

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.

Communication

The Best Review of ‘Grammerly’ I Could Find

By Terence Gillespie June 28, 2017

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

Belief

FaceBook Announce of DivineCouncil.org Website & Forum

By Terence Gillespie May 20, 2017

After more than two months of prayer, council, and “counting the cost” over on the FaithLife forum, the DivineCouncil.org website and forum is up and running!

We hope DC will be the first, and a role model sister-site, around the territory mapped out by Michael Heiser in his recent book, the Unseen Realm.

Facebook is fun, but if you’re tired of conversations scrolling off the screen (and other FB pitfalls) the forum part of the site is built on a wonderful platform that enables the best means of discussions, fellowship, resource sharing, and live chat, available, today.

We love the new forum, and yet DC is a full-blown website, blog, etc. It’s a multi-author website (with three contributing writers, so far). If there are any believing writers, artists, photographers, small group leaders, etc. looking for a place to share, DivineCouncil.org could serve as an outlet for you.

We pray it may fill a need for the Kingdom, empower small groups, and be a worthy site for the Church.

Over 50 people have already signed on to the forum in the first week!

See you there!

DivineCouncil.org Website
DivineCouncil.org Forum

Belief

The DivineCouncil.org Forum & Website is Born!

By Terence Gillespie May 20, 2017

A few months ago, there was a 60-day preview of Unseen Realm on LOGOS and Michael Heiser asked some of his more veteran readers to help shepherd newcomers to the material on the FaithLife Forum.

Growing out of those discussions has been what I hope to be the first sister website and forum for writers, artists, and those looking to interact with others on the material: DivineCouncil.org.

What is it?

It’s a full website & forum with three writers contributing to the front page blog. I hope the site may also serve as an outlet for others. So, if there are any believing writers, artists, photographers etc. Looking to contribute, this might be a good fit for you.

The forum part of the site is structured around the Unseen Realm in terms of the overarching missions of Jesus.

So What?

There’s a special resource manager setup to disseminate materials to small groups and make it easier to find things to bring to your church. Each resource can be reviewed, and have discussions formed around them, so people know how they can be used, the ideal audience, attributions, etc.

There’s also a live chat area, so you might be able to catch fellow listeners online for a brief chat while you’re on the forum.

Better than Facebook!

Facebook is fun, but if you’re tired of conversations scrolling off the screen (and other FB pitfalls) the private forum environment is more conducive to organized and focused discussions that can be searched later by yourself and others.

So, if you’re looking for a more private and trusted environment for discussions around this material you have another option available in which to do that.

What Next?

Over 50 people have signed-up to the forum in the first week, and the platform will scale up to as large as it needs to be.

Nathan, Terence, and Zechariah hope DivineCoucil.org will fill a need for the Kingdom, empower small groups, and be a worthy site for the Church.

Over 50 people have already signed on to the forum in the first week!

See you there!

DivineCouncil.org Website
DivineCouncil.org Forum