How to motivate anyone

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How to motivate anyone: pain and pleasure, the carrot and the stick. Writers are motivators. Whatever you write, the chances are that you are trying to motivate someone either to do something – or not do something.

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Thesis theme ready, refit complete: full steam ahead

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The refit of the blog has been completed without too many glitches. So we’re good to go. That said, there are still a few issues to iron out. Things might keep changing and moving around. The only really big issue at present is the fact that the header won’t display properly for anyone on Internet [...]

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Time for a refit: this blog is going into dry dock

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This isn’t a proper post, just a piece of admin, and advance warning that this blog is about to undergo a redesign. I wanted to warn the regular readers (hi Gina, hi Lyndon) that things could get a bit chaotic around here for a few days / weeks. Nothing serious – but things might look [...]

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Six ways to get more original ideas into your blog posts

How do you get ideas for blog posts? How do you add more original content to a blog, rather than relying on reusing material from others? Here are six tips.

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Writing advice – straight from the horse's mouth

Writing advice is everywhere on the internet. There’s way too much to link to on a regular basis without getting overwhelmed. But today there’s a great article on writing advice from a range of writers, mostly novelists, on the website of the UK newspaper The Guardian. It’s well worth checking out. These are not archive [...]

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10 ways to write scannable web copy

Scannable web copy – 10 techniques to help you write for readers who scan web pages.

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Add rhetoric to your writing – with the periodic sentence

How to add rhetoric to your writing – with the periodic sentence

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Marketing testimonials – how to provide proof even if you have none

How to provide proof even if you don’t have any case studies or testimonials

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A case study is a story – and that's powerful marketing

A case study makes for powerful marketing because it tells a story – and people respond to stories.

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I have a problem with 'Authority'

One of the cardinal rules for writing a successful blog is to write with ‘authority.’ BUt give it a sanity check once in a while…

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There's gold in them there blogs – the truth about how to make money online

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Blogging seems like a gold rush: everyone’s dreaming of getting rich, but the one’s making money are those selling shovels.

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Why don't newspaper journalists get to the point?

newspaper journalists should get to the point

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A punctuation mark for sarcasm? Yeah, good idea, dude.

Punctuation mark for sarcasm? No. Just no.

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A quick and easy way to add ooomph to your copy

A writing exercise with two rules: no sentence can be more than ten words long; and no word can have more than one syllable.

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Techniques that can help you get a draft written

Sometimes the words won’t flow. You don’t know where to start. The prospect of actually writing something and committing to it, getting it right and good enough, is so daunting that it freezes you. There are ways around this. Here are eight of them, discussed briefly.

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