I’ve been heads down with our team getting Conveyor ready for a launch. And most of my work is writing. When you write copy for a product, you quickly come to realize how massive an effort this is — and just how much copy is required. Tracking all your work and changes is not an easy task. And so I’ve been keeping an eye out for people describing their own writing practices of guidelines. As UX Writer is relatively new as a career choice, there’s not yet a lot of material to be found. Oh, you c…
All posts in writing
Related to the recent theme of running your own website [https://chrisbowler.com/journal/personal-websites], Craig Mod interviews Jason Kottke on the latest episode of On Margins*. Craig’s podcast is focused on books, but he interviewed Jason on the premise that his hundreds of thousands of words published on his site over 20 years is several books worth. And God bless Craig for providing a transcript of each episode!A lot of the interview is only tangentially related to the theme I’ve been har…
Austin Kleon posted this last year and it’s worth revisiting. He shared what led him back to writing more regularly, then the results. It was a success and he lists multiple reasons why. This one resonates with me: > I had forgotten how wonderful blogging is as a mode of thinking. Blogging is, for me, more about discovering what I have to say, and tweeting more about having a thought, then saying it the right way. It’s also great to be able to go as long or as short as you want to go. This kind…
Quartz does email well. Really well. The Daily Obsession is a must read.
Shawn Blanc his team have been working on a course for helping people get the most out of Ulysses [https://thesweetsetup.com/ulysses/]. Seeing Shawn’s posts had me reviewing my own usage: he touches on a few items I was either not aware of or had never thought to try. Once he shared that he’d be building this course, I finally took the time to dig into the features in Ulysses that have been peripheral to my usage. The biggest gap was my lack of understanding of the different methods for adding…
Keynote is still one of the best tools in my design/writing/thinking tool belt.
This one is an interesting link. It’s not to an article, but rather to a response to a response. Jason Fried wrote about why Basecamp does not conduct status meetings [https://m.signalvnoise.com/status-meetings-are-the-scourge-39f49267ca90#.ok00y5d3y] , then followed up on several responses to his post. This one stuck out to me, as he followed up to a person who stated, “Some of us just are not that good at writing stuff down.” His reply: > It’s worth working on becoming a better writer. So mu…
Listicle alert! Not to worry, dear friend: this one is worth a read. Chris Bailey wrote a book and shares a lengthy list of tips as to how his approach(es) to productivity not only helped him write the book, but finish it significantly ahead of schedule. The Coles Notes version: > Writing a book is a monster of a project, but projects like it become easier once you make a plan for how to tackle them. When you liberally disconnect from the internet when working on big projects, anticipate obsta…