Quickie Post: Free Courses and Common Errors

Open Education Resources offers a wide variety of free courses, including seven about writing. While they may not all be your cup of tea, they may be valuable as writing exercises or prompts. If you need a breather from all of that writing talk, you can always wander over and take an algebra refresher.

Your Dictionary offers a list of the 100 most common mispronunciations. I don’t agree with all of the ones on the list (like fisical for fiscal), but their etymology is interesting and some of my worst pet peeves are there (like prolly for probably). That last example includes an explanation of haplology. The folks also explain that snuck is not a word. Who knew?

They also offer the 100 most misspelled words where you can learn just why you spell bellwether that way. The list also includes the little-known “playwright” and the wily “medieval”.

More free courses and writing tips

Audrey Owen shares some of her writing tips at Writers Helper. My favorite is top #17 – read aloud to yourself. Reading your work out loud lets you hear awkward phrasing or transitions, especially if you do so after taking some time away from it.

Print your piece or chapter and put it in the drawer for a day or three. When it's no longer fresh in your mind, take it out and read through it aloud with a pen in your had to mark the rough spots. You will catch your typos and grammatical errors more easily after taking a break from your writing, as well.

Ms. Owen also offers a page on readability. This page goes beyond the basic “grade level” determination and discusses other criteria to use when you make sure your work is well-written. She also offers three free courses, including one on writing for the web. Check them out while you're there.

If you're feeling a little wealthier, try the Writers' Village University. They offer a three-month trial membership for $40 with, as far as I could tell, access to as many courses as you can cram into that time. Their list includes courses on everything from freelance writing to mysteries, screenplays, and poetry. I have not, however, taken any of the classes so I can't vouch for their quality.

They do have a free workshop on character building. No, not making you a better person – building characters in your writing. Even in non-fiction, readers need to relate to your characters to care about what happens to them. If your audience doesn't care what happens to your subject, why would they read and recommend your work?

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.

You Learn Something New...I Follow, Now

My learning experience for the day was about nofollow here on Blogger. I had no idea that it was a default setting. I’d seen plenty of posts about turning it off on your Wordpress account but I hadn’t come across any reference to Blogger accounts until yesterday. Of course, I immediately went and turned the thing off. I am completely in sympathy with the dofollow community.

Instructions for turning off the nofollow on your own blogger account can be found at Tips 4 Blogspot. I also joined what’s known as the “D-list” over at Bumpzee. I can only guess that the “D” is for “Do Follow.” That's what it would mean if it were my idea, anyway.

After I spent far more time than necessary wandering around over there, I finally caved and checked out the Amazon Associates program. I’m still iffy on it but I thought I’d give it a try. If I’m going to blather on about grammar and writing and marketing, maybe we can all find useful resources together from the links. If we can’t, well, at least I didn’t pay anything to be a part of the program.

As not one bit of this is actually about improving your writing, I’ll throw in a link to Steven Barnes’s free 9-week writing course. He’s got a lot of other good information and motivation at his site, lifewrite.com, as well, but this one really caught my eye. Now I’ll have to take it and let you know what I think afterwards.

More Food for Thought and Free Learning

I wandered across a fun site today called The 11 Rules of Writing. While I can’t say that they are the only 11 rules, they are definitely excellent rules of thumb.

Number 11, “Omit extra words,” is one that writers struggle with constantly. It goes along with my recent post about keeping it short. I tend to pack as much into each sentence as possible and then create dependent clauses hanging from completely independent (and often parenthetical) thoughts. Knocking out all of the decoration keeps the focus on your point. Flowery phrases are a joy to create but, unless you're looking to be the next James Joyce, they are a waste of space on your page and a waste of your readers' time. Keep them for brain warm-ups like writing exercises. That way you can get them out of your system without inflicting them on innocent passersby.

Back to the subject: Rule number 6 is my food for thought today – using a colon versus a comma for dialogue in a sentence. I hadn’t thought of doing it that way, but it makes a lot of sense after reading the examples. All of the pages about the rules are quick reads, like grammar flash cards. There is also a list of other writing resources including Strunk’s ubiquitous Elements of Style.

Unfortunately, I can’t link to specific pages in the 11 Rules site because they are all in a frame with the same web address. You’ll have to poke around for yourself. There’s even a discussion forum for questions, although it looks pretty quiet.

I followed the lovely breadcrumb trail from there to the ESL handouts at the Purdue Online Writing Lab. There is an amazing array of topics there, all of which can be useful to writers. The handouts are accompanied by exercises and quizzes, too. These help to carve those crazy rules into your resistant brain.

I’m so glad to have discovered that many ESL sites are devoted to the oddities of English grammar that trouble nearly everyone attempting to compose in this complicated language. I'm getting an excellent review, as well.

Blog Carnivals, Pay-Per-Post, and a Free Course

Ah, the blog carnival. By a hundred other names, they still make me cringe! I cannot imagine filling this page with a list of links to blogs with which I am unfamiliar in an attempt to get my technorati authority up. It just feels too much like cheating. I’d rather get links by posting content that people have actually read and liked well enough to volunteer them.

That said, I did find quite a few good things on this particular list. It’s worth a perusal and even tempted me to add myself. I stood strong, though, for you. Okay, for my own integrity. The thought of an instant, reliable blog roll is great. Unfortunately, you cannot guarantee the quality of the blogs listed without checking them all yourself. Who has that kind of time?

Now that I’ve bashed one method of promoting your blog, I’ll turn to defending one way of making money from your blog. In the interests of disclosure, since I haven’t mentioned it for a while, I do sponsored posts. Well, I’ve done two. While neither of these were exactly on-topic, nor were they subjects that I felt were out of place on this blog. They were also honest assessments of the services reviewed. I am not above getting paid to look at sites, but I won’t stoop to saying nice things about them if I don’t believe what I write. Happily, Blogsvertise doesn’t require that I say nice things to get paid. That’s why I chose them! That isn't a referral link, by the way, as they don't offer a referral system - you sign up, you accept a job and write it, you get paid, you keep your money.

As a bonus for reading all of the way to the end of this ramble, here’s a 16-session free writing course developed by Melissa Fry at Gateway Community and Technical College in Kentucky.

NewsU - On-line Courses, Some Free

In case any of you don’t check the discussion boards as Associated Content (or don’t write there) I wanted to draw attention to the link to NewsU. They have free courses for registered users on a lovely pile of journalism and writing topics. I registered today and immediately ran across two courses I will likely go through this weekend when I can focus.

I’m excited to find another resource, especially one that keeps a syllabus of the courses you have taken. I can’t help but think that taking these courses (and having proof) would be a boon to your resume when writing proposals for freelance jobs. Even simply adding a sentence like, “I have taken a course in headline writing from Jane Smith and one on copyediting and proofreading with Bob Jones,” can add a bit of cachet to your curriculum vitae.

More places for learning to write on-line

If you’re having trouble writing well enough to get paid, check out the free on-line tutorials at journalistopia.com (Danny Sanchez again, although I did not realize it until I checked for this post). This is a site I intend to explore more thoroughly as there are a ton of great links and videos offered.

Speaking of a pile of useful information, check out the useit.com site for papers on web writing. Some of these articles are nearing a decade old, but there are new ones as well. All of them contain at least a little nugget of useful information. They cover a wide variety of subjects, including how other people will read your text. Now I’m worried that my blog entries are too long and that I’m keeping too many of them on the screen. I think it’s likely that both of those are true, hence the short entry today.

Links for Writing Better News On-line

In my browsing today, I ran across Paul Bradshaw’s post about the future of magazines, which made me think of Associated Content as a sort of out-of-control magazine trying to be everything to everyone.

The problem with that is that things are spread so broadly that it’s hard to find anything specific. Having enough sub-categories to make things findable will only make the submission process harder. Then again, not having specific enough categories makes browsing an exercise in frustration or boredom, wading through 700 articles that do not interest you to find three that do. I think everyone knows that people are not that patient in reading on-line.

And following a trail of breadcrumbs from Mr. Bradshaw's post, I found this post from Danny Sanchez filled with resources for learning about journalism on-line, many of which are free. I know I’ll be checking some of these out. I don’t do well with third-person writing and I could use some pointers on story composition. From who better to learn than the pros? I dugg this one and couldn’t believe that no one ever had before.

I’ve submitted this blog to two places, already. There’s
and . I've also submitted both of my blogs to Blog Listings and .

I may tackle a few more from this submission site list later. I have my older blog on these two as well so I already had accounts set up.

While I’m tiptoeing forward, I’ll be checking out AdSense here on Google as well as finding more freelance and on-line journalism blogs to help expand my knowledge base. And of course, I’ll be posting my findings and experiences here.