Time to start blogging again.
At the beginning of this year I had great intentions to blog regularly and I did…
At least for the first few weeks. I then at the last minute travelled to the UK and my plans went amok.
I lost my laser driven focus to write at least 500 words every day as life got in the way and sadly I stopped.
Today Hemingway sent me the version 2 of their writing app. It is designed to make you write better. It does this by doing the following:
- Grading sentences as Hard to read or very hard to read.
- Letting you know whether phrases have simpler alternatives.
- Tells you the number of adverbs you have in a post. It suggest 7 or less per article, I am presuming it adjusts according to the length of the post.
- It tells you when you are writing in passive voice or not.
It will also give you the following:
- What grade level you need to have achieved to read the writing
- How many paragraphs, sentences, words, characters and letters you have written. Get to the end of this post and you will see how many there are in this one.
- And how long it will take to read. I’d be interested to hear how accurate that is. So if you get a moment let me know in the comments how long it took you to get through this post!
So excited was I to get version 2 that I have used it as a spur to get me writing again.
Incidentally I also have another tool designed for helping me write called Scrivener. I will take a look at that in another blog post, it’s pretty powerful but also quite complicated!
I have a few rules for my blog posts:
- I have to write at least 500 words every day.
- I have to make it into a blog post. Now the chances are that they may not be very interesting. However I hope that the more I write the better they will become.
- I have to write the post in one go – I cannot take a break until I finish it. Ideally I want to be able to write this in less than an hour. I cheated on Today’s post – tomorrow I will get better.
To be honest I think it is going to be tricky to do this every day; but I have a secret weapon. Or at least I hope I do.
A friend of mine sent me a link to a great blog post. It’s all about how the top 1% achieve anything. To give a very quick summary he talks about how Seinfeld became such a great success – and indeed the advice he gave to aspiring writers.
It is really pretty simple – essentially you mark a calendar with an x every day you do some writing.
In today’s computerised society there is of course an app for that. Rich20Something in his post mentioned it. And it is one that I have written about and used before. It is called Coach.me and is both a website and an app.
It is also incredibly powerful. I have used it in the past and it has gone a way to helping me change my life. However I haven’t been using it as vigorously as I should have been.
If I look at my Coach profile I see a number of archived goals and a number I have pretty much neglected of late. The only one I have really been doing pretty much consistently since first using it is exercise.
Unfortunately several more have dropped by the wayside. So let’s see where I can get to with a more concerted effort.
I’d love to hear your thoughts and if you use Coach.me or indeed just mark a calendar with an x, I would love to hear your success stories.
