I’m sorry my posts have been scarce this week!
My paying gig took me to Chicago this week for a writing workshop. Not the fun fiction that I write about here, though. It’s the bills-paying marketing writing that I do for work.
I do find it fun to do some marketing writing. Sure, it can get boring with pamphlet language and class descriptions, but ad copy is fun! I like playing around with words until I find consistency, parallel structure, opposites, and alliteration. All the things things that help ads get stuck in people’s heads.
Sometimes, I have to admit, writing for a living burns me out on writing for myself. When I get home I’m tired of starting at computer screens and checking the thesaurus. Another unfortunate side effect is that I have to be so brief with marketing language. When I finally sit down at my own keyboard at home, the most complex, flowery sentences come out. They’re not easy to read. They are often full of adverbs.
Luckily, I have two pieces of software that help with both of those problems.
Scrivener is my chosen word processing program, and I love it. I set word targets and a date and it calculates my daily word total to meet that goal. It’s super motivating!
At this class, I learned about Hemingway. Paste your text into the app or on the website. Then it highlights trouble spots like adverbs, passive voice, and those complicated sentences I love so much. It almost make it a game: write and re-write so that you cut as many of the highlighted passages as you can. It’s fun, if you’re a nerdy word-fan like me.
Do you write for work and for pleasure? How do you separate the two? Leave me a comment!
The Merry Manuscript 