Don't let your stories do this to editors!

I used it the other day.

I promised myself I wouldn’t be one of those editors.

But there I was, talking to a writer and using the “f” word.

“F” as in “fresh.”

For freelancers, “fresh” is our “f” word, that dreaded term that editors rely on when they want writers to come up with a new and different angle on a subject that could be a yawner.

That’s easier said than done, especially if you’re working on a piece on a topic that gets written about a lot, or that you cover a lot.

Here are 5 simple steps to defuse the “f” bomb the next time an editor tosses one your way:

1. Use colorful words. Dress up a story with precisely chosen verbs and descriptors that give it a you-are-there feel. This doesn’t give you permission to use overly flowery prose or unnecessary adverbs and adjectives. Keep your writing tight, and make every word count.

2. Find real-life examples. You might be writing about teething, tennis or tending a backyard garden for the 10th time this year, but finding examples of real people, companies or organizations that have gone through what you’re writing about is one way to put a new spin on an old subject. Since everyone’s experience is unique, telling someone’s story is a good way to put a new face on a familiar story. To do this, however, take careful notes so you have lots of details to draw upon when it comes time to tell the tale.

3. Talk to the experts. Whether it’s cars, fashion or video games, most fields have experts who track what’s new, what’s different and what people are buzzing about.

4. Find the contrarians. Nothing says cutting edge like someone who’s zigging when everyone else is zagging. Most fields have contrarians who can be counted on to express an opinion that deviates from the norm. Finding them could be tricky. But once you do, it could be exactly the opening you need to put a new spin on things.

5. Challenge your assumptions. If you cover a topic on a regular basis, you run the risk of thinking about things in a specific way. So pretend you’ve never written about it before. What questions would you ask yourself about what’s happening? Who would you talk to find out more? Where would you go? What should you read to learn more? Examine how you normally approach a subject and then determine if there could be another way in. Taking a different perspective on things could be exactly what you need to come up with the new – and yes, I’ll say it – fresh approach that your editor will love.

How do you keep things fresh?

Today is National Punctuation Day, a day to honor the fact that you know the difference between a comma and a coma, and a semi-colon from a colonoscopy. NPD was created seven years ago by Jeff Rubin, a Pinole, Calif., former newspaper reporter who says he’s written and designed 1,800 company newsletter since 1981. That’s a lot of commas and semi-colons.

Even if NPD is a just made up holiday, it’s a helpful reminder that good grammar goes a long way. Speaking as someone who almost spends as much time editing as writing, I know of what I speak. Writers who turn in properly punctuated copy make my job that much easier.

In honor of the occasion, this week’s recommended reading for writers is all about punctuation. I’ve rounded up a number of print and online grammar and punctuation resources that writers of all genres should know about:

@APStylebook – The international wire service has created a home on Twitter for its venerable style guide for news reporters. Staffers manning the account sometimes tweet about AP style questions and direct people to the service’s Website, APStylebook.com.

Eats Shoots and Leaves - The tagline of this bestseller says it all: “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.” Available in hardcover, paperback, audio, CD, audiobook and as a calendar.

Grammar Girl – Mignon Fogarty, the “girl” behind this popular podcast, Twitter account and New York Times bestseller, offers plain-spoken takes on everyday grammar mistakes.

National Punctuation Day – The official site of NPD founder Jeff Rubin, who in addition to working as a corporate newsletter writer is a professional speaker who visits elementary schools to teach kids about good grammar. The NPD website has an extensive list of grammar books and resources, readers’ photos of bad punctuation and suggestions for how to celebrate the day (“Take a leisurely stroll, paying close attention to store signs with incorrectly punctuated words.”)

Regret the Error – If you don’t get your punctuation right, you could wind up featured on this blog from journalist Craig Silverman, which chronicles grammar mistakes and other inaccuracies in popular English language magazines and newspapers.

The Lower Case – The Columbia Journalism Review devotes the back page of each issue to “Headlines that editors probably wish they could take back,” including some with bungled punctuation. Unfortunately you have to be a CJR subscriber to see it online.

The Most Ridiculous Newspaper Typos Ever – From The Huffington Post.

Unnecessary Quotes – Why didn’t I think of this? A “blog” devoted entirely to the “unnecessary” “quotation marks” that “people” can’t seem to “get enough of,” (see how annoying that is), and a great example of how bad grammar can be good fun.

Woe is I - The Kindle edition of Patricia T. O’Conner’s hit guide to “better English in plain English.” Of special interest is Chapter 6, “Comma Sutra: The Joy of Punctuation.”

Writing Tools –  Poynter Institute’s in-house writing coach Roy Peter Clark devotes today’s edition of his excellent weekly Writing Tools column to punctuation. In Let’s Celebrate White Space, Clark gives his usual great advice. Read the entire thing, but here’s a snippet on the role proper punctuation plays in writing:

Inside the text, white space is a writer’s and a reader’s best friend. White space helps emphasize what is most important on the page or screen, provides a kind of visual index that clues in the reader to the main parts of the story, and ventilates tedious grayness, relaxing the eyes and reassuring the mind.

You could call this the audio edition of my weekly round up of recommended reading for writers.

Over the past week, I’ve heard not one but two radio interviews with well-known authors who’ve shared insights into their writing process. I don’t know about you, but I’m always fascinated to learn how other writers create, compose and think about their work. Hearing about what inspires another writer, when they do their best work, or how they share questions and frustrations with writer friends makes me feel more connected to the profession.

Here’s the stuff:

Jean Auel on OPB’s Think Outloud – Emily Harris, host of Think Outloud – the thinking man’s version of a morning talk show – interviews the Pacific Northwest author of the Clan of the Cave Bear series. Before she was a bestselling author, Auel worked at a Portland area electronics company and got an MBA. The idea for the first Clan book  just “buzzed” into her head, Auel tells Harris. After thinking about it all day she told her husband she was going to try writing a short story about it, sat down at her kitchen table that night and wrote until 3 a.m. The rest, as they say, is literary history.

Jonathan Frazen on WHYY’s Fresh Air – Acclaimed for his 2001 novel, The Corrections, Frazen is back again, finally, with Freedom, which is already drawing raves. Frazen, who’s 51, tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross he didn’t really feel like a grown up until he worked on this book and dealt with the emotional aftermath of the suicide of his close friend and fellow writer David Foster Wallace.

Also of interest this week:

Twitter literature contest – Write a killer simile in 140 characters or less and win lunch with former Booker Prize judge Frank Delaney. This is the latest Twitter writing contest – he calls them Twallenges, but I’ve had it with the “Tw” words – staged by Delaney, a writer and former BBC broadcaster. The simile contest starts Monday, Sept. 13. Three winners will be chosen; if you can’t make it to New York for lunch, choose a copy of Delaney’s next novel, The Matchmaker of Kenmare, out in February, instead. The simile challenge rules are here, or follow along on Twitter at #FDsimile.

And more:

• Alex Bogusky Tells All (Fast Company) – Extended profile of a real life Don Draper who ditched it all to find his bliss.
• Manners Count: 3 Rules if Social Media Success (Kristen Lamb’s Blog) – Online or off, it pays to play nice.
• Welcome to the Nerd Blog (ProPublica) – New playground for programmer-journalists, or is that journalist-programmers?
• I write a nasty book. And they want a girly cover on it (The Guardian) – Frazen’s new novel (see above) prods feminists and women writers to complain about bias in the publishing industry.

Even the terms we use to describe ourselves has changed. Independent writer, journalist entrepreneur, web journalist and multimedia content producer have taken the place of freelance writer, freelancer or wordsmith (although truth be told, I never cared for that one, or “scribe”).

Here are a dozen words from the new freelance lexicon:

Click through – What writers want people who visit their blogs or the websites that run their stories to do on ads on those pages. Like the BlogHer ad you see on this page. Yes, like that one over there on the right. Go ahead and click on it. But come back.

Content assets – The nom du jour for a writer’s output, synonymous with “story,” “article” or “piece.” More publishers buy all rights to work created by contract writers so they own the “content assets” and can repurpose them as they see fit. More on that below.

Content mill – Websites providing how-tos, service pieces and other evergreen information, in some cases along with national and local news, created by a massive number of contract writers word slaves, including professionals and hobbyists. Includes sites such as Examiner.com, Associated Content, Suite101 and Helium and well as companies such as Demand Media, which produces content for multiple sites. Depending on what you think of them, also referred to as content sites, farms, aggregators or “demonic.”

Deliverables – See content assets.

Hyperlocal – Popular term quickly veering on overuse for coverage of current events happening in a community that is produced and published entirely online. Definitions of coverage, events and community varies, but could include written, audio, video, map-based, real-time or reported coverage of a city or town, individual neighborhoods within a city or town, or specific industry, topic or subculture within a given city or community.

PIE - Short for “payment in exposure,” what some start-up websites try offer as compensation to writers they’d like to work for them for nothing. Yeah, right. Here’s what author Harlan Ellison says about that.

Repurpose – Verb meaning to use a story in multiple media, publications or venues. As in, “I’m going to assign a 4,000 backgrounder on credit cards divided into 12 sections so we can post it on the website first and then repurpose individual sections to run in our weekly e-newsletter.”

SEO – Short for search engine optimization. Catch-all phrase given to techniques used to push web pages high within Google and other search engine results, making it more likely someone will click on the contents, thereby increasing page views, and hopefully, advertising click throughs. Value and effectiveness of SEO in non-web content writing is widely debated.

Site producer – The Big Kahuna running an online content or news site, or portion thereof. Online equivalent of “editor.”

Uniques - Short for unique visitors, a measure of traffic to a website. Used to determine ad rates. Usage: “I need to get uniques to my blog up to 250,000 a month so I can charge $5 CPM.”

Web content writer – Individual who specializes in writing SEO-based copy for websites, including content farms. Works for low pay and/or share of ad revenue, creating writing practice based on quantity v. quality. Not to be confused with writers whose works appears on the web, though some freelancers do both.

Web style guides – Writing style rulebooks created by Yahoo and others to explain formats and other usage, incorporating tenets of both SEO and AP style.

All of my life, I’ve been accused of being too serious. I think it has to do with being the oldest of five – all those younger siblings to help take care of as I was growing up.

I like to think I have a good sense of humor. Translating that into print is a whole different story. It’s why I appreciate writers who can be funny, because it’s so much harder than it looks.

Maybe because I’ve been thinking this lately, or because it’s a Friday and I’ve finished all the work that was due today and I’m ready to kick back, my recommended reading for this week is about being funny.

I’m Comic Sans, Asshole – McSweeney’s runs a regular column called Short Imagined Monologues where the writer assumes the persona of some real or fictitious character to expound on a particular point. This week’s installment from designer/writer Mike Lacher, will make the font fanatic in you smile. (Warning: language may not be suitable for work.)

What it’s like to own an Apple product – Great writing sometimes involves a lot of pictures and a little writing. The Oatmeal, cartoonist Matthew Inman’s website, is a case in point. A friend turned me on to The Oatmeal a couple months ago and I was immediately hooked. My all-time favorite: How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell.

Burkas and Birkins, I Watched 146 Minutes of Sex and the City 2 and All I Got Was This Religious Fundamentalism – Lindy West’s review of SATC2 in The Stranger, Seattle’s alt-weekly, is dead on, hilarious and also NSFW. Here’s my own much tamer SATC2 review, at SecondAct.com, the new site for people over 40.

Finally a shout out to three writer/bloggers from the 2010 WordCount Blogathon who managed to be funny on a daily basis for an month:

I Hate My Message Board - Tracy O’Connor’s blog, which Writer’s Digest included in its top 10 websites for writers in 2009, gets bonus points for the kooky pictures she uses to illustrate posts.

Two Hands and a Road Map - Tara Phillip is so good, even her About Me page is funny.

East Coast Musings – Parenting blogs aren’t my thing, but I make an exception for Rachel Vidoni because she’s like that friend who always says exactly what’s on her mind and its always hilarious.

A lot of that has to do with the Blogathon Google Group Rebecca Allen helped get started earlier this week. As of May 6, about 75 blogathoners had signed up and conversations about guest posts and blog topics are in full swing. If for some reason you didn’t get the invitation, or had trouble signing up, let me know.

Between the conversations going on in Google Group and on Twitter – at #Blog2010 – I’m getting to know more about this year’s blogathoners and reading lots of posts. There’s so much good stuff out there, I’ve decided to devote the remaining Saturdays in May to a list of especially engaging entries I happened upon this week.

Here’s this week’s edition of Around the Blogathon:

Build-a-blog workshop – Writer and website designer Ron Doyle is using the blogathon to crowdsource a redesign of his blog, BlogSaladBlog.com. Each day Ron picks a different element of his redesign and asks readers to vote on the direction he should take. So far so good, with the possible exception of the color scheme readers chose for him – not sure how well rust, tan and green are going to look together.

Scofflaws, reveal yourselves – In a completely different type of interactive experiment, Kathy Murray is asking readers to fess up if they’ve ever broken the law. A long-time journalist (and former newspaper colleague of mine), Murray runs Out and Employed, a blog offering job advice to ex-offenders that grew out of a class she teaches at an adult detention center.

Trust your gut – Tastee Pudding blogger Amanda Hirsch writes about how scary but important it is to trust what your instincts tell you about what you do for work, where you live and how you live. Good advice, especially for self-employeds like freelance writers who too often say “Yes” to projects for the money despite the alarm bells going off in their heads over circumstances of a project.

Idioms R Us – Speaking of trusting your gut, that expression is called an idiom and idioms are the subject of the blog, About English Idioms, Joanne Mason started recently and is using the Blogathon to get up and running. Mason is a freelance writer, long-time ESL teacher and tutor, so who better to unravel the mysteries of why we say face the music when we mean accept the consequences of what we’ve done than someone who’s made language her career.

All-in-one blog reader – Keeping up with 110+ blogs participating in this year’s Blogathon is daunting. Dylan, who blogs at DiscordianZen put together an RSS feed that groups all the blogs in the Blogathon onto one page, making it a real time saver.

During the 3rd annual WordCount Blogathon, I’m using Sundays to re-run some of my favorite posts.

Today’s Best of WordCount edition is about inspiration.

During the days leading up to this year’s Blogathon, I’ve heard from writers who admitted to being apprehensive about their ability to blog every day. Part of the answer is being organized and planning ahead to give yourself enough time for the extra writing.

But the other part of the answer to managing the extra blogging is being inspired to do it. Sometimes all it takes is a shower, walking the dog or seeing something in the news or on TV to spark an idea, and you’re off and running.

Here are a number of posts I’ve written about those ‘aha’ moments.

Hopefully you’ll see something in them that will inspire you:

• Drano for writers: 10 tricks to get the words flowing again
• Good intentions: writing with purpose
• Keyboard yoga
• Long walks, hot showers and ‘aha’ moments
• Write like a champion today
• 5 reasons why freelancers need to take vacations

In honor of the 2010 WordCount Blogathon, which starts May 1 -tomorrow! - today’s edition of my weekly roundup of good reading and good writing is devoted to bloggers, blogging and blogs.

ProBlogger - Whenever I have a question about blogs, ProBlogger is my first stop. Lately I’ve been researching advertising and ProBlogger didn’t let me down. I found the most comprehensive explanation of anywhere I looked on how a solo blogger like me should set blog ad rates. Is this great writing? It won’t win any Pulitzers. But if you’re a blogger, it’s a veritable fount of information.

Break the blogging rules – Do this, don’t do that, make sure you remember SEO. Don’t you ever get sick of people telling you what to do on your blog – including me? If so, you’ll love these blogging rule breakers. First, Seth Godin. An Internet marketing trendsetter, Godin’s blog, which is simply called Seth’s Blog, breaks all the rules: no links (in some posts), titles that are anything but SEO, subjects that are all over the place. But the stuff he talks about – priceless. Next, Lisa Barone, chief branding officer at Outspoken Media, whose recent post The 5 Old Blogging Rules Killing Your Readership has been making the rounds. Barone argues that tried-and-true blogging rules about short posts being better and page views being the end all be all are outmoded ways of thinking. Even if you don’t agree with what she says 100 percent, it’s food for thought.

Writer-bloggers we love – When it comes to blogs on writing or blogging, some writers have it down cold. Susan Johnson is one of them – and I’m not just saying that because she’s a 2010 Blogathon sponsor. Johnson’s blog, The Urban Muse, is well-organized, has lots of extras and above all, is always an interesting read. Other blogs about blogging worth checking out: Blogging Basics 101 – the name says it all – Copyblogger and Daily Blog Tips. Want more? Here’s Daily Blog Tips’ list of top 25 blogs about blogging.

Keep it simple stupid – I’d never heard of the Center for Plain Language until yesterday when I heard American Public Media’s Marketplace reporter Kai Ryssdal interviewing its director, Annetta Cheek. In the interview, a transcript of which you can read here, Cheek explains how she and a group of federal government employees formed the nonprofit after becoming frustrated with how poorly government agencies and businesses communicated with their constituents. As a follow up, Marketplace put up this list of common business jargon and what it really means. Here are a few examples, with the center’s suggestions for clearer alternatives:

• Instead of “economically marginalized” use “poor.”
• Instead of “negative economic growth” use “recession.”
• Instead of “in the event of” use “if.”
• Instead of  “We obtain information that causes us to believe that” use “We find that…”

Sadly, the problem with obtuse writing isn’t limited to government officials and corporate executives. I see it on a regular basis in magazines and newspapers as well as in stories I edit. For business and technology reporters particularly, it’s an easy trap to fall into because industries have their own jargon-filled vocabularies and sources use it in interviews. But our job as writers is to translate the jargon into plain English. Keeping it simple and readers will thank you for it.

AP style or SEO? – Speaking of language, the Associated Press’ announcement that it’s switching from “Web site” to “website” in its AP Stylebook sparked an interesting online debate (at least interesting to word nerds like me) about what’s more important for journalists to know today, AP style or SEO. Anybody who ever graduated from j-school got AP style drilled into them. But is it still relevant today when content lives and dies by whether it’s searchable by Google? Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles takes the position that SEO trumps AP style. Be sure to click over to his post because he’s included links to a number of excellent resources to help journalists understand SEO.

Eat My Shorts – This week the tagline I use for this standing Friday feature – to do great writing read great writing – is slightly misleading because some of the great writing I came across I didn’t read, I listened to. I’m referring to a segment on last week’s edition of PRI’s This American Life radio program. “Eat My Shorts,” co-produced with ProPublica calls into question the excuse heard a lot on Wall Street and in government hearings that nobody saw the financial meltdown coming. The piece does so by examining the actions of a hedge fund named Magnetar that figured out how to game the system – and made a mint doing it.

TAL fans will recall that Alex Blumberg, one of the investigative reporters on the project, also worked on the show’s now famous May 2008 segment, The Giant Pool of Money, which NYU recently called one of the top 10 journalism projects of the past decade. This 40-minute program is riveting, as fine a piece of explanatory journalism as you’ll get. It’s also a great example of how dramatic, influential, and dare I say even sexy, good business journalism can be.

ProPublica and the 2010 Pulitzer Prizes – Speaking of ProPublica, the five-year-old nonprofit investigative news agency walked away with the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. ProPublica reporter Sheri Fink took the award for her story Deadly Choices at Memorial, on life-and-death decisions made by doctors at one hospital during Hurrican Katrina. Fink won the honor in conjunction with the New York Times Magazine, which ran her piece.

ProPublica’s win marks the first time a nonprofit news organization has won a Pulitzer, recognized as the highest honor in U.S. journalism. It’s a big step for the New York-based outfit, and for the dozens of other nonprofit news organizations like it that are forming all over the country. Look for those organizations to use this a rallying cry for assistance, both from experienced journalists they hope will come to work for them as well as donations they hope to attract.

Read the entire list of 2010 Pulitzer Prize winners here.