Monthly Archives: March 2010

Monday’s Link Roundup.

This Monday’s Link Roundup has some sobering news for those of us whose work is fairly sedentary. You’ll want to check out Stand Up While You Read This! And not to suggest that we can eliminate editors but there’s a very cool free site that analyzes your writing. Just for fun why not give  Paper Rater a try?

  • Stand Up While You Read This! “Your chair is your enemy. It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you.”
  • Paper Rater Analyzes and Improves Your Writing. “If you like to write but lack confidence in your skills, Paper Rater is a a free, web-based service that analyzes your writing and offers feedback on your grammar, spelling, and more. Paper Rater couldn’t be easier to use. Just paste in the text you want analyzed, choose what type of content it is—essay, research paper, speech, etc.—and submit it for review. Within seconds, Paper Rater generates a report that analyzes several aspects of your submission.”
  • Caprock Quilters sew on memories. “The beginning of Operation Homefront Quilts began on a May afternoon in 2003 when Jessica Porter, a young quilter, thought of the idea of sending handmade quilts to the families of every fallen service member, regardless of the branch in which they served. With the help of her mother, Joanne Porter, and her community, the organization was lifted off its feet.”
  • Oral history of jazz in Britain. “… a collection of 200 interviews assembled between 1984 and 2003, were intentionally left unedited and untranscribed. The contributors were allowed to speak for themselves and to say what they wanted.”
  • TeleKast Is a Snazzy Open Source Telepromter App. “Windows/Linux: Whether you want to produce an amateur news segment, deliver a teleprompted speech, or just record a video message without a lot of “ums”, free, open-source application TeleKast is a solid desktop teleprompter worth checking out.”
  • Business.gov. The offical small business and independent contractor’s link to the U.S. government. “Business.gov helps small businesses understand their legal requirements and locate government services from federal, state and local agencies.” [Thanks to Pat McNees at Writers and Editors for alerting me to this site.] For Canadians there is a government site for entrepreneurs at Canada Business.

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How to Boost Your Interviewing Skills.

In a previous post, Avoid These Three Interviewing Pitfalls, I wrote about the need to go for depth when interviewing your subjects. What was missing from that article were examples of interview dialogue that could help you see the difference between  poor interviews  and good ones. I’ve included two examples here. All the dialogue is made up. One example looks at the problem of jumping off the topic before exploring the subject’s remarks fully. The second example highlights the problem of going into detail that does nothing to advance the story being told. It’s the stories that are interesting. That’s what we want to capture.

Example One:  Jumping off the topic.

Poor

Interviewer: What was it like as a child growing up in a village?

Subject: Oh, we had some good times. Everyone knew everyone else.

Interviewer: That’s wonderful. Tell me about the house you grew up in.

Better

Interviewer: What was it like as a child growing up in a village?

Subject: Oh, we had some good times. Everyone knew everyone else.

Interviewer: What were some of the good times you remember?

Subject: Well I remember in the fall we’d have the fall fair. People would come from all over. It had quite a reputation.

Interviewer: It sounds great. What were some of the things you enjoyed most about the fair?  What is one of your most memorable stories about the fair?

……and so on

Example Two Trivial details don’t add up to depth.

Poor

Interviewer: What was special about your childhood home?

Subject: Oh it was located next to the prettiest little creek. In the summer we’d go swimming and in the winter skating.

Interviewer: What was the name of the creek?

Subject: I think it was called “Crystal Creek”. Not sure though.

Interviewer: Do you think it was named after the clear water?

Subject: Maybe, although it wasn’t too clear by the time it got to our place.

Interviewer: Where did the creek originate?

Subject: Not sure. I think it came out of Lake Clare.

Interviewer: How far was Lake Clare from you?

Subject: Maybe a mile or two.

Better

Interviewer: What was special about your childhood home?

Subject: Oh it was located next to the prettiest little creek. In the summer we’d go swimming and in the winter skating.

Interviewer:
It does sound lovely. What’s one of your most memorable stories about the creek?

Subject: Well I almost drowned!

Interviewer: Really! Tell me more.

Subject: It was in the early winter and the ice wasn’t too thick. My parents had warned me to stay off the ice. But you know kids.

Interviewer: How old were you?

Subject: I think about six.

Interviewer: So what happened?

Subject: It was a bright sunny day and cold. I went down to the creek with my dog. The ice looked pretty thick so I decided to cross to the other side. I got about half way out and bang! I went through the ice! I tried hanging on the edge but I kept slipping away. I was really panicky and started shouting. What really saved me though was that my dog, Spotty, went rushing back to the house. He kept barking and my mom knew something was wrong. She followed him down to the creek. Without wasting any time she found a long branch on the ground and held it out to me to grab on to. She was a strong woman. She gave a great heave and I came sliding out and made my way back to the bank. She was pretty upset.

Interviewer: I bet! Then what happened?

…and so on

Photo by iStockphoto

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

My vote for the most unusual item in this  Monday’s Link Roundup is the “wireless tombstone”.  But if you’re looking for more substance, don’t miss Pat McNees’s comprehensive article on the beneficial effects of legacy work. I’ll admit to a bias, I was one of the people Pat interviewed  for the piece.

  • Kill Busywork: The One Skill to Focus On What Matters. “Imagine everything you do could fall into one of three buckets: 1. Bad Work. 2. Good Work. 3. Great Work. I’m not talking about the quality of the work you deliver – I’ve no doubt that’s fine. I’m talking about the meaning the work has for you and the impact it makes. Let me explain.”
  • New App Integrates Storytelling with Social Media. “Well, with Facebook anyway. I’ve written about many forms of Twitter storytelling, but Snipisode is the first storytelling app I’ve come across for Facebook. Snipisode, developed Agency Zen, lets you type or paste in a whole story and then with a click of a button snip up the story either by line or by punctuation — periods, question marks, or exclamation points. Then you choose a frequency for snips of the story to appear as status updates — daily or every two days.”
  • Die-Fi: Wireless Tombstones. “[An]Arizona company Objecs announced today that it has developed “enhanced memorial products” that add Near Field Communications tags to cemetery markers, which allow text and photos to be “embedded” in a headstone and retrieved whenever a cell phone is touched against its surface.”
  • How to Write Your Healing Story: Interview with Linda Joy Myers. “In the latest Heart and Craft of Life Writing podcast, Linda Joy explains how writing literary memoir and integrating the story arc of our lives can lead to much deeper levels of insight than we can ever get from a pile of disconnected stories. In this wide ranging conversation she also talks about using our words, our stories, to create art.”
  • Fab Forty. “Votes are in for the Family Tree Magazine 40 Best Genealogy Blogs. Come with us into a wonderful online world of family history news, research tips, encouragement and more.”

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