Freelance Writing: Simple Tips on Complicated Topics Extracting Information: Don’t Miss Any of Those Important Ideas!

informational techniques Capturing useful ideas as they occur is a writer’s secret weapon for incorporating current interest, color, novelty, and, originality into a project. Since we can’t anticipate what we are assigned, anything that we see or hear in daily life could conceivably turn out to be useful.

How can we maximize our chances of gleaning usable ideas from our environment? How can we recognize, take note of, and retain, successfully, potentially useful information? These are skills worth cultivating. We’ll examine some approaches.

The first strategy is to ensure our minimum daily requirement of nutritionally dense nourishment for our brains. By exposing ourselves to intellectually stimulating sources, we increase our chances of capturing relevant ideas. Similarly, we should go light on the empty calories of media and activities.

To accomplish this we need to be proactive about our media exposure. We can use the time we spend at work, or, if that is distracting, then when we are doing chores. At the risk of sounding biased, the choice between top 40 pop music, or an article on lip gloss, on the one hand, and a piece about an author, statesperson, or scientist on the other, seems clear. Unless your field of writing IS, in fact, the review, critique, and analysis of top 40 popular music, isn’t a serious interview or news program more likely to contain usable notions? Read the rest of this entry »