Rough Draft

Most creative people will take your head off if you butt in while they are flowing. Man. That’s for good reason. But that’s exactly what the Pomodoro technique does, a popular time management trick designed to boost your productivity. The concept is simple: set a kitchen timer for 25 minutes and work until it rings.…

Your idea stretches out to the end of nowhere. One hundred words? One thousand? What’s the angle? The structure? That’s just one decision among many you must make before you write. And just one more decision that adds to your anxiety. Fail to figure this one out and your idea sits idle. Deserted. Should this…

Language is software (your brain, the hardware). A form of coding. It communicates information, and ideas travel from one person to the next through language. As babies, our first goal is to learn the language. Master the fundamentals. Learn your scales. And most of us are fully satisfied with this. Great writers, however, aren’t. They…

Writing is weird. Unlike speaking, it’s not something we do naturally. And unless we train ourselves out of it, that weirdness renders some creative, but wooden and dense prose. Speaking is a natural act. Every single human being has the ability to do it. And at a very young age. The reason why, says cognitive…

You know that conventional wisdom that you should read everything you write out loud? Let’s put a twist on that advice. Say you lost your voice. Or are simply lazy. But you just finished a 300-word article, and are ready to refine it. It’s natural to read it out loud to see how it sounds.…

So there’s this new browser app that allows you to write/drop content into a text box and click “Edit” to determine if your writing is “bold and clear.” It’s called the Hemingway Editor. It’s simple to use, but the question remains: does it work? And how does Hemingway actual stack up against his own app?…