2 Methods to Avoid Gender Ambiguity

One of the hardest things in writing English is to avoid using the third person singular pronouns, unless you are writing for an exclusively male or female group. Every time I see a document with a sentence like “the operator must configure his or her machine according to…” I cringe. Some writers switch back and…

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Technical versus Content Writing

Technical versus content writing — are they the same or different? The answer is YES and NO. It is similar to content or article writing in the sense that you need to create prose that is easily understood, logically consistent, and conveys useful information. Where it separates from regular non-fiction writing is in its procedural…

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Ebook Self-Publishing Alternatives: Amazon Kindle, Moodle, Tizra

Every week I hear about yet another self-publishing alternative platform. Today I had the chance to have a look at Tizra.com and wanted to compare it to Kindle and Moodle, two of my favorite publishing platforms. KINDLE (http://kdp.amazon.com/) The advantage of Kindle is obvious: where else can you expose your content to millions of daily…

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Three Options to Save a MS Word Page as an HTML Web Page

© Ugur Akinci Granted, no professional web designer would use MS Word to design a web page. There are much better tools for that out there like the mother-of-all-HTM-editors DreamWeaver. However, there are also times when you may not have ready access to a web designer or when you’d like to post up a page…

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How to Write Blog Comments that will Get Published

The chances are you’re reading a number of blogs like this one throughout the day and leaving comments with the hope that they will get published. Leaving comments have a two-fold purpose: 1) To contribute to the ongoing discussion, and 2) To get backlinks to your own website unless the site owner has turned on…

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Google Chrome Tutorial — Information Design at its Finest

© 2010 Ugur Akinci Have you seen this cartoon-style tutorial by Google Chrome? It’s one of the finest examples of information design that I’ve seen. It’s perfectly tuned to its intended audience (geeks age 16-36), is easy to follow, and chops down important concepts into easy-to-swallow visual chunks. http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_00.html  

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The Lessons I Learned from SPAM Writers

© 2010 Ugur Akinci I receive a lot of SPAM. 99.9% is caught by my fantastic spam filter (Akismet). Before I delete SPAM messages, I read some of them and find the exercise very educational. I have no idea why these parties keep sending me tens of thousands of SPAM messages a year. But every…

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