For the final Sunday of the blogathon, I’m dishing up not only the best of WordCount, but the best of the best – 101 of my best posts on blogging, writing, running a freelance writing business, and social media and tech tools for writers.

Blogging

1. Dear WordCount: How should I choose a blog topic?

2. Simple steps to starting a blog

3. The well-dressed blog post

4. 8 essential reasons to put links in blog posts

5. Write killer blog post titles

6. Dear WordCount: Someone linked to my blog, is that bad?

7. How to get more comments on your blog

8. Driving traffic to your blog

9. A writer’s guide to SEO basics

10. Bad beginnings: 10 newbie blogging mistakes and how to fix them

11. 25 ways to blog every day

12. 25 more ways to blog every day

13. Cheat your way into blogging every day

14. 10 sure cures for blogging burnout

15. Give under-appreciated blog posts a second chance

16. Why writers should blog: it’s not personal, it’s business

17. The long tail of blogging

18. 5 reasons why you should obsess over blog stats

19. 6 ways to find paid blogging gigs

20. 31 lessons from blogging 31 days

21. Should you put ads on your blog?

22. 3 questions you should be asking about your blog

23. A 10-step guide to making time to blog

24. The 500 blog posts that changed my life

25. Best of WordCount: Bloggers’ favorite places to write

Writing

26. Write like a pro

27. 10 great places writers can find story ideas

28. Asking the hard questions: top 10 interview tips

29. 12 insider interview tips from 2 accomplished writers

30. 5 secrets of successful interviewers, or how to get sources to tell you anything

31. A reporter’s convention survival guide

32. 25 tips for better writing

33. Writing basics: the deck

34. Writing basics: the nut graph

35. Writing basics: the quote

36. How to write fast

37. More tips for writing fast

38. A few words on writing short

39. When it comes to writing, economize

40. 7 steps to cutting a story that’s too long

41. How to handle rewrites without wanting to kill yourself or your editor

42. 10 tricks to get the words flowing again

43. Best time management tips for writers

44. The writer as content curator

45. Best blogs for writers

46. First v. best

47. 10 things J. K. Rowling taught me about writing

48. William Zinsser and ‘On Writing Well’

49. Why is ‘Mad Men’ so great? It’s the writing

50. My 5 favorite books on writing

Freelancing

51. Freelance 101: getting started as an independent writer

52. How writers can squeeze more money out of their work

53. 10 ways to make editors fall in love with your work

54. Are you a freelancer writer or journalist entrepreneur?

55. Beat the recession

56. Top 10 blogs for freelance writers

57. Promote yourself through your email signature

58. 10 more ways to promote your freelance writing

59. How to become a niche writer

60. Dear WordCount: What do newspapers pay?

61. Why ex-staff writers make good trade magazine freelancers

62. The freelancer’s guide to e-newsletters

63. How to write, produce and market an ebook

64. WordCount Q&A – One freelancer’s DIY book publishing success

65. How to know if you’re freelance editor material

66. Do you tell editors what you’re doing when you’re not writing for them?

67. Surefire ways to get editors to get back to you faster

68. Why freelance queries get rejected

69. Should writers blog about juicy subjects or save them for story pitches?

70. The race to the bottom

71. The great freelance rate debate continues

72. A guide to hyperlocal news

73. Novice freelancers, instead of Helium, try hyperlocal

74. AOL’s Patch hyperlocal hiring spree – boon or bane for writers?

75. Top 13 signs a magazine is going under

76. Making life work as a writer and mom

77. 10 businesses freelance writers can start today

Social Media & Tech Tools for Writers

78. Writers’ 6 top tech tools for getting work done

79. 10 basic web tools for freelancers

80. Goodbye Google: 8 Internet search alternatives

81. My favorite freelance technology innovation: Track Changes

82. Research This: Del.icio.us and Google News Alerts

83. What freelancers should know about podcasting

84. How writers can use LinkedIn

85. The secret to my LinkedIn success (The Renegade Writer guest post)

86. New ways to uses LinkedIn to find story sources

87. Link your WordPress, Six Apart blogs to your LinkedIn profile

88. Best WordPress plug ins for writers and bloggers

89. WordPress users can add ratings to posts, comments

90. How to use Facebook to promote your writing business

91. How not to out yourself on Facebook

92. Is it OK to friend your editor on Facebook?

93. A writer’s guide to getting the most out of Twitter

94. The use and abuse of Twitter to flog your blog

95. There is no such thing as a dumb Twitter question

96. When one Twitter account isn’t enough (TwiTip guest post)

97. 10 keys to hosting a successful Twitter chat

98. How to fit blogging, social networks into your writing day

99. Social media 101 for a small business

100. A little password protection goes a long way

101. 8 secrets for getting better HARO query results

But if you look it up in the dictionary and you’ll find the word has other meanings.

One is: “the careful, thrifty management of resources.”

Another: “an orderly, functional arrangement of parts.”

And another: “efficient, sparing or conservative use.”

When it comes to writing, economy is a good thing.

Just like cash-strapped families cut back during the recession, writers should economize when it comes to the words they use.

Less really is more.

I’ve come to this conclusion after a spending most of the last year editing. If my experience is close to the norm, and based on what I hear from other editors I think it is, I now know why editors are famously cranky. They spend way too much time whittling down wasted words, changing passive voice to active and finding meaning buried in jargon.

So I’m on the stump for a new economic stimulus plan – getting writers to use fewer words.

The best practice for developing an economic writing style is being forced to fit a complex topic into as few words as possible, something news wire reporters and headline writers have down to a science.

Though most freelancers probably don’t perform that kind of work, we still have to write to a word count, making it imperative that we practice economy of scale in our writing.

Cutting out needless words and phrases and paring stories down to the bone isn’t the most fun part of an assignment. But if you can get past the emotion of killing your words, you can end up with writing that is, as they say in the news business, light, tight and bright.

And that’s the kind of writing that brings editors back for more.

Here are 10 suggestions for economizing:

1. Don’t use the same word more than once in a sentence.

2. Use active voice – your writing will be livelier, and you’ll use less words in the process. If you don’t understand the difference between active and passive voice, here’s a concise explanation, courtesy of good old Strunk and White.

3. Don’t use 10 words to describe something when five will do.

4. Include only the most relevant details. Save the rest for something else, such as a reporter’s notebook, your blog, a tweet, another story.

5. Read your story out loud to discover awkward phrasing that can be rewritten to be shorter, clearer or better sounding.

6. Finish a story the day before it’s due so you can sleep on it and come back in the morning with a fresh eye for what can be cut without changing the meaning.

7. Ask a writer you respect to read your manuscript for sections that are confusing, rambling or just plain boring.

8. Don’t quote when you can paraphrase. Save space for only the best quotes – they’re the spice in the stew.

9. Don’t feel obliged to quote everyone you interviewed for a story. It’s OK to paraphrase (see above) or use sources as background for consensus viewpoints expressed in the piece.

10. Unless the story, situation or publication requires it, there’s no need to include people’s full titles on first reference in a story, especially if they’re extremely long, ambiguous or full of jargon. The same goes for company divisions, or association chapters. Use a short-hand description first and then include a more complete description on second reference if necessary.

Olympic athletes aren’t born doing those things. With the rare exception, it takes years, maybe even decades, to reach that level of achievement – something spectators like you and me understand almost intuitively.

Yet when it comes to our work as writers, we expect to come out of the gate a Nicholas Kristoff or Seymour Hersh.

But writing, like sports, doesn’t work that way. To attain a certain level of mastery takes time and effort. While it might not take the 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell says it does in Outliers, it’s not something you can start out at and be perfect right away (unless you’re a J.D. Salinger, and face it, we’re not).

Good writing takes hard work. To be an Olympic caliber writer takes Olympic caliber training.

So how do you train like a gold-medal champion?

Specialize. You don’t see Apollo Anton Ohno competing in short-track speed skating and figure skating. Ohno’s a champion because he’s devoted umpteen years of his life to one thing and one thing only, and that devotion’s made him the most decorated American Winter Olympian ever. To get good at something specialize. If you want to be a business reporter, pitch and take assignments to write business stories. If you want to be a copywriter, actively seek out copywriting opportunities. Ditto for any other niche writing market.

Find a coach. Watch the Olympic figure skaters before and after they enter the rink. There’s always a coach there to encourage them before they’re on and critique them once they’re done. Writers need coaches too. You could hire a coach, but you don’t have to. Coaching could come from attending a writer’s workshop, reading books on the craft, or putting some really good writing blogs on your RSS reader (including this one, hopefully).

Practice. Olympic athletes are in the spotlight once every four years, but they practice constantly. Practice is what allows U.S. snowboard superpipe champ Shaun White to do tricks like the Double McTwist 1260, which he invented and so far has been the only rider to have landed successfully. Thankfully, practicing writing is a little easier than doing double flipping, triple twisting maneuvers on a snowboard – although getting a reluctant interviewee to open up sometimes feels like it. The best practice for writers is writing. If assignments aren’t pouring in, aim your writing energies at query letters, keeping a journal, blogging or taking a writing class – anything that helps sharpen your skills.

Use the right equipment. Bode Miller didn’t win a bronze medal in the downhill on any old pair of skis. He used the right equipment and tuned it to the conditions on the mountain that day. To get the most out of their work, writers need equipment that’s tuned to their special needs too: a laptop that has enough umph to be a main workstation yet is light enough to take on the road, a telephone headset and Skype, a smartphone with a built-in camera, software for making podcasts.

Surround yourself with like-minded professionals. Skiers on the World Cup circuit travel, train and live together – U.S. skier Lindsey Vonn‘s chief nemesis on the World Cup circuit is also her best friend, Germany’s Maria Riesch. This is a hard one for me, because it’s against my naturally competitive nature to want to share too much with writers who could potentially take work away from me. But the reality is, there’s no way I could write all the stories there are to write about topics I cover. So why not accept that and spread the wealth? And good karma has a way of finding its way back to you.

Visualize greatness. Olympic athletes train mentally as well as physically, picturing themselves performing at their peak. When I was 15 my parents sent me to a weekend seminar led by a local high-school football coach whose specialty was teaching athletes how to visual success. Over two days we learned what affirmations were and how to use positive mental imagery to picture ourselves doing whatever it was we wanted to do. Sounds hokey but it works, especially the visualization. I’ve continued to use some of the techniques up to this day. If you think of yourself as a successfully employed freelance writer, you will be. That doesn’t mean that all you have to do is think about it. You have to do the things that will make you successful – the querying, the interviews, the writing, the rewriting.  But by picturing yourself as successful you won’t be mentally sabotaging everything else you’re doing to get there. And when you’ve got that big interview or have a call with an editor at your dream magazine you’ll be calm, cool and collected because you’ve been there before, in your head.

* * *

If the Olympics inspire you, you might want to check out the Pen Olympics now going on at Edittorent, another blog for writers. There’s a new competition every day – Monday’s was Doggerel Sled Racing.

To get ready, I’m asking writers going to the camp, as well as WordCount readers and my crews on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to help me decide what topics to cover in the presentation.

I talk up the benefits of crowdsourcing in other aspects of freelance work, so I figured this is a good opportunity to practice what I preach.

The class is geared to entry-level reporters, writers and bloggers who’d like to learn some tricks of the trade from a old fart veteran. The class could also be helpful to freelancers or citizen journalists who’ve come to writing or blogging from a different career and need a better mastery of the basics, including doing research, finding sources, making corrections and prepping for interviews.

If you’re coming to Digital Journalism Camp, or will be reading the live blogs or tweets from conference sessions, what should I cover? Use this poll to tell me what you’d like to see. Feel free to provide additional feedback using the comments section.

If you can’t make it to the conference and don’t follow the tweets, I’ll be sharing some of my tips and tricks here in coming weeks.