Tools, Tag Clouds, and a Free Course

For those of you unsure of your editing abilities (i.e. all of us), check out Roger J Carlson and his site full of writing tech tips. There are tools to find your adverbs, passive verbs, and other strength-sapping parts of speech. The macros are zipped into MS Word documents, however.

Open Office Writer will read Word documents but I don’t know about other programs and I don’t know about using Word macros. I will download and try some of these this weekend and post the results. Also, I’ll do some digging and see if there are similar tools out there for various word processors. If you can open these, they will work for rich text format documents (.rtf) so you should be able to use them.

Then there’s the Word Painter software offered as a part of the “Get Me a Rewrite” course that’s free at NewsU. Chip Scanlan is the instructor for this course. It’s at the top of my “To Take” list.

If you’re a visual learner, or if you just love tag clouds, head over to TagCrowd and turn your article into a cloud. I ran one of my recent articles and was thrilled with the results. It was clear what words were the focus of the article and the key phrase was comprised of the three biggest tags. If only I was that focused all of the time!

Since the clouds organize your topics in a visual way, I wanted one for this blog rather than the topic listing in the sidebar. Now, phydeaux3 has granted my wish. I don’t know when he or she posted this step-by-step guide to configuring your tag cloud in Blogger, so it could be that my wish was granted before I even made it. Either way, I’ll be installing this toy over the next few days. I look forward to the results.

Exceedingly Useful Tool Alert

Roy Peter Clark may be my new hero. He has a list at the Poynter Institute web site of 50 great tools to help writers improve. These are not the oft-repeated “Know and Love Your Semicolon” type of tips (useful though they may be) but actual concrete examples of ways to improve your writing and how you edit yourself.

He started in April of 2004 and spent most of a year compiling the list, posting a new tool each week. The first post was a real eye-opener and my “learn something new” thing for today. I’d never hear of right-branching sentences but I’ll definitely remember to use them to improve my writing now that I have. I have a long backlist of articles and posts that will benefit from some editing attention.

In fact, the whole writing site is a terrific resource for free information. See Chip Scanlan’s post about the science of using active verbs. The entire point of the Poynter Institute is to help journalists do their jobs better, but not with dry and somewhat superior direction. The various writers show healthy senses of humor and doses of creativity.

While I’m blathering on about news, I thought I’d mention a new Digg-like site with a twist, Thoof. The theory is that not only do you add sites and click on the sites others have submitted but that the home page will tailor itself to your interests by showing you articles similar to those on which you have clicked. The site launched a week ago, so there does not appear to be enough of a database to judge their system in practice just yet. I may join anyway, just to see if getting a few articles in on the ground floor gets them added attention.