I Really Want to Learn How to Write… Good… uh, Well…

I was waiting for a haircut yesterday at SportClips in Eagle. I read through all the latest Facebook posts available on my phone, then I changed the setting to show “a week” in stead of 3 days, and read through all the rest of them. Still bored. So, I picked up an issue of Eagle magazine and started flipping through the pages.

The thought, “Why can’t I write like that?” popped into my mind. The words and phrases just seemed to flow together, and in some cases, jumped off the page. The contributors to the magazine were far more adept at slinging words around than I.

I guess I tend to write in a digital fashion rather than an analog fashion. I can think the thoughts, and quite often – in my mind – I word things with the best of them. But, for some reason, when it comes to putting sentences together “on paper” (well, in a text editor), it becomes halting and disjointed. The “flow” is missing.

Here’s a few examples of what I consider good, yet friendly writing (by “friendly” I mean casual yet comprehensive).

According to sources, Amazon paid from $140 million to $150 million for Goodreads, the popular books recommendation service. And while BusinessWeek ran a we-are-just-guessing story today that posited a self-described “overly simple, back-of-the-envelope estimate” of $1 billion, sources said that number is simply wrong.

and

With all the attention Google Glass is getting before it’s even launched, one would think it was an Apple product. It’s not, but it has the buzz level of the new Corvette Stingray. Now, it’s making news by doing something that other tech companies have avoided for a while. They’re going to have Foxconn build Glass in the United States.

and

Facebook introducing a modified version of Google’s Android operating system. Facebook employee, Constine explains that, “Imagine Facebook’s integration with iOS 6, but on steroids, and built by Facebook itself. It could have a heavy reliance on Facebook’s native apps like Messenger, easy social sharing from anywhere on the phone, and more.

My paragraphs don’t flow like that, with one thought segueing (that’s a good word – “seg-way”) into another. It’s almost like I’m thinking ahead, and my typing hasn’t caught up yet. Then, suddenly I’m writing about Star Wars or PHP without any kind of linkage between sentences.

I do get an email everyday from Zemanta called Blogspire that is supposed to give me ideas to write about (which is where I got the writing samples), but tying all those thoughts and articles together seems to be escaping me. I’m going to keep trying, however…

Segue….

This absolutely fascinated me. It’s from the Chitaka blog and landed on my Facebook page. Apparently, desktops are for work and tablets are for play. In other words, desktops (and I assume laptops) are used during the day in the corporate environment for actual work, while tablets (and smartphones) seem to be popular during the evening hours for Facebook posting, Twitter surfing, shopping, and the like.

I find it interesting that there is such a clean delineation between the two. I guess it seems odd to me because I use my laptop for everything, and have yet to find a real good reason to make the tablet leap. I use my phone to just check up on certain things, and I suspect I’d not use a tablet for much more than that.

Well, maybe I’ll catch up eventually…

Related articles

• Chitika: Google+ shows a 60% downward trend in the site’s traffic(nextlevelofnews.com)

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• Study: PCs Are For Daytime While Tablets Come Alive At Night(marketingland.com)

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• Chitika: Galaxy S III and iPhone 5 web traffic nearing a 50/50 split(androidcommunity.com)

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