Hooking Your Reader From Start to Finish

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The term academic writing may conjure up thoughts of serious sentences and dull essays.  Writing an essay doesn’t need to be thought of as dull an uninteresting. By hooking your reader, you draw them into your work.  Here are a few ways to engage you readers.

Selecting a topic that you are passionate about will help sharpen your voice as a writer. Your voice is a reader’s window into who you are. By developing your voice as a writer, you draw readers in, making them feel a sense of camaraderie with you through your words.  Developing your voice as a writer comes with routine. A good way to hone your voice is by finding and applying writing exercises designed to increase your skill.  The more you write, the better you get, and the sharper your voice becomes.

Finding a topic to write about may seem like a Herculean task. Topics seem endless. Whenever an idea strikes you, it’s a good idea to write it down. Brainstorm a subject that interests you and select the topics that are appealing and contain enough information to fuel your work.

Start your essay with an opening that will immediately grab their attention. Whether you are writing on the subject of primate behavior, the effects of music in the workplace, or math philosophy, an intriguing beginning will help readers invest themselves to move on further. The first few lines should grab the reader’s attention. If they feel you are invested in the topic, and it is worth knowing about, they will read on.

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Tips for Taking Good Notes During an Interview for a News Article

When writing a news story you might get a chance to interview an important person for your news article. Interviews are a great way to add insight into the topic that you are writing about or give the article a personal touch. However, an interview cannot be properly used by the writer if they did not take good notes during the interview. Notes that are taken during the interview are important to the writer because it allows them to have what was exactly said by the interviewee and allows the writer to present accurate facts and quotes.

Here are some tips that will help you take good notes while conducting an interview for a news article.

Learn Short Hand. Try to learn some type of short hand before the interview. You will want to be taking notes while the person is speaking but you will not have the time to write everything out in long hand. Short hand gives you a chance to capture everything without having to write it out by hand.

Write Small. The smaller that you write the more you can fit into one notebook page. Turning the pages of a notebook can take up time and allow you to miss out on important parts of the interview.

Always Ask for Clarification. If you missed something while taking a note ask the interviewee to repeat the answer. A great way to do this is to fault yourself and remind them that you want to accurately quote them in the article.

Ask Technical Questions to Stall. If you are still writing out notes you can always ask a technical question that you know the answer to so that you have time to finish your notes up.

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Forced Genius: Writing

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It’s the most tragic of diseases, an infection that plagues the mind – you stare at a blank screen, with its infinite possibilities, the documents waiting to be formed. It should be such an easy thing to create prose, to turn nonsense into fact; and yet you can think of nothing to offer. There are no words that seem admirable. There are no ideas that seem worthy. All thoughts instead shape themselves into fickle creatures, unwilling to reveal themselves to you or your deadlines. You… have writer’s block.

And this was always assumed to be a myth. You’ve never struggled with sentences before. You believed such a thing could never occur – but it has. And you are left now with nothing but the looming hours, the assignments meant to fill them.

This an common complication, experienced by most would be writers within their scholastic careers. The mind betrays all intentions, leaving an individual helpless to craft the needed pages. And the temptation is to simply walk away – to leave all work behind and replace it with easier pastimes. There can be no gain, after all, in tapping out occasional ideas, dull words.

This is not true.

The only way to cure the dreaded writer’s block is to refuse to accept it. Whether you are trying to create fantastical worlds or are proving theories with research papers, you must continue to type; even when all efforts are clumsy. Force yourself to attempt a sentence. When that is finally completed, try to conquer the concept of a paragraph. The process will be undeniably tedious but it will still offer the reward of progress: you will have pages to show. This is important (not only for your deadline but for your own certainty).

Inspiration is too often confused to a swift thing, formed only under the ideal circumstances. It can, however, be instead the effect of slow rhythms and patience. Write and do not stop.

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Eliminate Typos by Reading Your Paper Backwards

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Despite the widespread availability of Spell Check and traditional proofreading techniques, students and writers alike suffer from the occasional typo. Whether it is in your doctoral dissertation or email message to your boss, typos are embarrassing. For example, consider the implications of writing “Director of Pubic Relations” instead of “Public Relations.”

Spell Check Doesn’t Work

The main problem with Spell Check and similar software is that it does not catch unintentional typos. In the example above, both pubic and public are words in the English dictionary. Artificial intelligence has not caught up, so the computer thinks there is a “pubic” relations director in the workforce. One cannot rely on spell check to serve as a virtual proofreader. You would be surprised at how many errors spell check does not correct, especially considering how much students and young professionals rely on the technology.

Quick Proofreading Doesn’t Work

Reading your documents and messages before publishing them was thought to reduce typos, however; a recent study indicates the brain automatically fills in the blanks or gaps in your text. As a writer, you know what the text was supposed to read, which causes you to unintentionally fix typos in your head. Alas, an archaic solution exists that saves you from public humiliation or a poor grade.

Read Your Paper Backwards

When you finish writing your document or prose, navigate to the end of the document and read each word aloud in reverse order. By reading them aloud, the sentences will not make sense, thus you are forced to focus on each word, one at a time. Keep the noise to a minimum though to prevent break room chatter amongst your coworkers. Forcing your brain to compute the meaning of every word reduces or eliminates typos and wrong words (i.e. there instead of their).

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Automate Your Proofreading Efforts with Grammarly

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Being an effective writer does not necessarily mean you know how to write according to syntax (the traditional rules of grammar). While most journalists identify major issues, such as comma splices and sentence fragments, they rely on their copy editor to catch the minor grammar errors. Freelance writers, students, and other professionals do not necessarily have their own editor, which is where Grammarly (http://www.grammarly.com) fills the void. Reminiscent of your college English professor, Grammarly identifies nearly all grammar and syntax errors ever known.

Grammarly is the star of recent writing news stories, as it is designed with students in mind as their target audience. Ideal for academic writing and research, Grammarly enables someone to copy their text into the web application, press a button, and watch the computer use the traditional “red marker of death” while it identifies problems. Each paper is given a score between 1 and 100, identifies the professionalism of your work in relation to word choice, readability, and grammar.

Grammarly cross checks each paper with hundreds of databases to check the work for plagiarism, similar to how CopyScape works but with increased accuracy. Once the paper is checked for more than 350 potential problems, it is up to the user to make the necessary corrections. Sometimes, Grammarly offers helpful advice or the corrected word (or phrase). Most of the time though, the program highlights the erroneous text, identifies the problem, and explains how to fix it.

Teacher or Copy Editor?

Most importantly, Grammarly does not fix the text for you. While you can recheck the document after the corrections are made, the computer does not solve your grammar flaws. Click on an error, read about the problem, and attempt to remedy the situation. Because Grammarly makes you think – and use your brain – schools and institutions support it. In many ways, Grammarly is your virtual English teacher who grades your papers and provides feedback. In the end, even the best copy editors would not do your dirty work.

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Pre-Planning for Academic Research Papers

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Often times writers forget the importance of the writing process when creating academic prose and research materials. While someone can write an effective article or brief without having to go through the process, longer research papers require additional care and finesse. The writing process for academic prose includes drafting a thesis, taking notes, and outlining your ideas. To ensure the utmost professionalism, allocate enough time to complete all of the steps, as you will save time when writing the paper.

Develop a Thesis

When someone sets out to write a research paper, they more or less have an idea or topic in mind. The first step is to analyze and narrow down the idea into a manageable paper. Great research papers are focused and cater to specific audiences. Generalized theses result in a fragmented and chaotic paper, with tons of data and commentary that is not substantiated.

Source Material

Once you have a clear topic and direction for your paper, start reading up on your topic and finding primary sources to backup any claims or assertions you are planning to make in the paper. All of your commentary needs to have evidentiary support, preferably first-hand studies, journal articles, first hand interviews, and other legitimate sources. Once you have enough source material, begin taking notes on everything. Taking notes ensures you will not accidentally plagiarize the content, and helps you develop a solid understanding of the topics.

Create the Outline

Perhaps considered the quintessential element of the research process, outlines create order in an otherwise chaotic environment. Review your notes and begin breaking the paper up into multiple sections and subsections. A good outline tells you what belongs in each chapter, paragraph, and sentence. Note major chapters by using roman numerals (I, II, III), sections (A, B, C), paragraphs (i, ii, iii) and sentences with (1, 2, 3) to maximum clarity.

While outlining seams tedious, you know what belongs in your research paper, and where. Pre-planning simplifies the writing process and increases efficiency in your work flow.

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