My Wife Has Trouble Writing Articles

My Wife Has Trouble Writing Articles by Ronald Doherty

My wife works in a stressful job as a membership and careers advisor, and part of her job is to write articles for submission into various trade magazines.

I know it’s going to be a tense night when she comes home from work and sets up her lap top up on the dining table. She doesn’t come in and say something like, “Honey, tonight I have to do an article on the recent careers expo, could you help me please?” Partly because words like Honey went out of our vocabulary a long time ago. Partly because as a Taurus, or spouse, she is too bloody stubborn to ask. So I set about getting the meal. Tensions build.

The way she goes about her article is wrong. She builds up the tensions. She resents having to bring work home, hates computers, hates writing and hates me because I won’t do the articles for her. If I was a word inside her computer, the moment she opened the lap top, I would run and hide. If I was a good word, I would let all the crappy words go out before I made my entrance. Words take on feelings and you can sense the feelings when you read an article.

I have suggested to her that she use WhiteSmoke. Do the article, even if she is in a foul mood, (I didn't actually say that bit to her) and then use WhiteSmoke to coax the good words back out into the article. WhiteSmoke does a grammar and spell check and suggests enhancements. For more information please visit my site.

The enhancements introduce diversity of language and can be used to help create better emotional tones. She reckons that is my job but, by that time we have gone five rounds and all my good words have also gone into hiding. If it was on my computer I would let her White Smoke her articles and save her massive time and energy and help her to find the article tone she is looking for.

In addition to being too uptight, every time she has to write an article she starts at paragraph one and then tries to just keep going. That is a habit she learned from the old typewriter days. It was the way she learned to use a keyboard so it is her primacy learning experience and therefore instinctive and hard for her to go beyond. sometimes you just have to learn how to let go and move on.

She will get a few words down and then just stare at the screen like a startled jellyfish with stinging glances in my direction. Anyway, she freezes up, gets massively tense, and doesn’t enjoy the process so her creativity shuts down. Why don’t I write her articles? I could, but pretty soon she would be found out. I can teach her tricks and short cuts and she can use them to develop her own style as a writer.

She is not a writer and writing is a necessary part of her job so cheat. Well not really cheat, but use the available technology to speed up the processes and create more time for other things in her life, like being nice to me.

I reckon she should be using voice recognition to ‘talk’ the article into a document, then whip through it to clean it up and then WhiteSmoke it to give it a lift. Her stock answer is “Well, are you going to pay for those things”? My stock answer is that she should pay for them and get them reimbursed or write them of as a tax deduction.

When she is really bogged down (and I have finished the dishes and cleaned up) I will gently ask “Would you like me to help?” If she is frustrated enough and the article has to be in the next day, she will reply “Yes”.

At that point I stipulate that we have to start again and do it my way and I get her to close the lap-top. That sounds harsh but she is in too deep and sometimes it is best to ditch and restart. If I try to fix her article it is going to take hours. If we start over, the article can be done in less than half and hour.

What I do then is simple. I use a writer’s formula. First I ask “Who is the target audience?” In this case it is the membership in a construction environment so I draw a cartoon hand with the thumbs up to convey the thumbs up that guys give each other when they like something.

That step sounds trivial but it is really important. If I can get my wife to think of someone and then move into a talking mode, as if she was just chatting with to one of the guys, then her writing to that audience will improve. The stiffness and uppity business language disappears from her writing and her work becomes far easier to read. A lot of people try and write to too broad an audience. It doesn’t work.

Then, I ask how many words are required. Usually it is 200, 500, or 800. In this case she wanted 250. Now I know who I am writing to and how much. I can break the task down, 250 words. 5 paragraphs, is 50 words per paragraph. (47 words in this paragraph)

Next, on a blank sheet of paper I space five words or short phrases equally down the page as follows: Intro, point 1, point 2, point 3, and conclusion. Then I get her to give me a few words on each heading. Up to ten is fine. I do a word count 30 words – 120 to go.

Because there is a structure in place, and we have been mulling over the whole piece for a few minutes now, ideas are starting to flow. I ask for about 10 to 15 words for each point. That gives enough information to define the point but not enough to run out of ideas. It also adds another 50 words. The total now is 80 with 130 to go.

I go back to each point and build it up a bit. As we discuss each point I will pick up the elements and jot down about 20 to 30 words for each point. Let’s say 25. That adds 125 words so we are now up to 205 words. This whole process has taken less than ten minutes and we are almost there.

I then get my wife to open up a blank sheet on her lap top and put in the material we have just done on paper. We could have gone straight to the lap top but she had frozen and locked up so we needed a fresh start. Also, I wanted her to use the blank paper approach because one of the great tricks is to jot down the outline in the morning over a cup of coffee, forget it for a while, and then just pick it up from the rough notes and write the article.

She gets the first draft less than 20 minutes after we started. She chucks a few more words in each paragraph, give or take a bit as required, and the word count is up to the required 250.

She reads the article, is not happy with the fourth paragraph so she ditches it and writes a new, single paragraph in a few minutes and presto – the article is done and it is her article, not mine. In the morning, on her way out she said “Oh, thanks for helping me with the article” – and she meant it.

Ronald Doherty is Australian, has children born in the last century, works in a major bank call centre out of necessity, loves, gardening, and surfing, when time and budget permits. He enjoys writing, and the concept of story, especially when great food, a bottle of good red and a chiminea fire are involved. If you found the above tips useful and would like more information please visit < a href = www.cashmakeronline.com>Click Here

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