Freelance Writing: Simple Tips on Complicated Topics Extracting Information: Don’t Miss Any of Those Important Ideas, PART 3

informational techniques It’s pretty hard to find some time for writing a new blog post when there is so much stuff to do: contests, press releases, etc. But our editors will always find time to share some freelancing goodies with you.

This is the third part of our article, dedicated to information, and how freelance writers should handle it. You can find part 1 – here; and part 2 – here. But let’s go with part 3.

As freelancers, our time, and our brains, are our stock-in-trade. We need to optimize our use of both in order to make the effort pay off. We have discussed, in two previous posts, some suggestions for capturing useful ideas and data from the whirlwind of information swirling around us. Where to direct our attention, how to decide what to retain, how to build on previous work – these are just a few of the strategies outlined. There are so many stimuli bombarding us daily – how can we snatch the most useful from the air, as it were, and use them to improve our writing overall? Some strategies follow. Read the rest of this entry »

Freelance Writing: Simple Tips on Complicated Topics Extracting Information: Don’t Miss Any of Those Important Ideas, PART 2

informational techniques Part 2 of our awesome article! Let’s not waste your time! And so…

Freelancing means putting our knowledge at the service of clients who may be quite desperate, at the moment. Our customers hope, and have a right to expect, that we will bring something to whatever document we are producing that the customer could not have thought of themselves.

In fact, a most painful client feedback comment is, “I could/should have done this myself”. How can we enhance the fund of ideas and information that we can contribute to orders? In an earlier blog post, we discussed a few ideas regarding paying attention to the quality of one’s media consumption, choosing, retaining, and reinforcing useful ideas, and using them in a document. Let’s examine some more ideas on fully exploiting the information stream that we wade in daily, to succeed in freelancing. Read the rest of this entry »