Check out the Campaign for Plain English’s site and especially:

• How to write in plain English (PDF)
• Tips for clear websites (PDF)

Also, check out Jakob Neilsen’s articles about writing for the web. In particular:

• How users read on the web
• Writing style for print vs. web
• How to write for the web

If you work with websites or user interfaces, pretty much anything Nielsen has to say is worth reading.

There are some useful articles on this site too:

• How to write great case studies
• Being human is overrated (but not when you are writing)
• Bad reader, naughty reader
• Economist style and business writing
• Geeks: how to write for a non-technical audience
• Seven types of bad writing

And as a special treat for lovers of bad marketing language and daft naming conventions, please read this short piece from the New Yorker: The Privileged Few. It made me laugh until I cried.

I have updated the writing tools on Articulate’s website and added a new one. They are free to use and I hope people find them helpful. Feedback and suggestions are welcome.

Readability calculator

This is a fantastic tool to calculate readability scores for blocks of text (just cut and paste) or websites (just enter a website address or URI). Besides the usual Flesch Kincaid and Gunning Fog scores we also calculate the SMOG index. This is harder to do because you have to break words down into syllables rather than characters but it yields more useful results.

Inspiration from oblique marketing strategies

I have embedded my Oblique Marketing Strategies into the site. Now you can get instant inspiration.

Concentration timer

I use a meditation timer to help me concentrate on my work. I had a version on my website before but it didn’t work with certain browsers. Now, providing you have QuickTime installed, it works with just about everything.

I am working on a number of website projects right now. My mission is to banish ‘lorem ipsum’ by working text into page designs before development starts. (To find out why, read my article: Want a good website, on time? Prioritise content)

I wanted to find a tool that would let me create page mockups quickly and try out different combinations of copy and layout.

Eventually, I settled on Balsamiq Mockups, which is an awesome tool. The rest of this article describes the different alternatives I considered and concludes with a detailed review of Balsamiq.

Denim

Denim takes sketch-based approach which seemed a bit too low-fidelity for my purposes.

Protoshare

Protoshare is an online ‘Software-as-a-Service’ tool that lets you build high-fidelity, interactive site mockups in collaboration with other people, such as clients or graphic designers. At first, I thought this was the system for me. I really liked the ability to export designs to Word documents and the way that collaborators could work together on a single design. However, because it can create mockups that appear almost exactly like real sites, I felt the temptation to over-polish my mockups. Also, one of my designers refused to work with it. Being web-based it lacks that immediate responsiveness that is necessary for brainstorming. And, finally, the cost (£29/month) which I paid for several months, seemed a bit excessive for something I was using for a day a month. So, Protoshare is not for me but it is an excellent tool

Pencil

The Pencil Project is a free open tool that builds on the Firefox web browser. Amazingly, it turns it into a fully-featured GUI prototyping tool. It goes beyond website prototypes and lets you build all kinds of UI mockups. It includes common widgets for Windows and other OSs. It can produce pretty slick mockups and you can’t beat the price. However, I felt that it was a little too skewed towards UI prototyping than web page mockups for my purposes.

Serena Prototype Composer

Whoah! Serena Prototype Composer looks awesome and it’s free but it probably best for business analysts in Accenture who are designing complex business workflows and trying to implement them in software. Not for me.

Caretta GUI Design Studio v3

GUI Design Studio has lots of features for prototyping complex user interface stuff. The big draw back? Price. It costs $499 for a single-user licence.

Templatr

Templatr is a simple online tool that lets you build WordPress blog mockups quickly online. This could be a very useful tool for some of the projects I am working on but it requires the user to know a lot of CSS. This means it is a useful resource for WordPress designers but not really a tool for rapid mockups.

Balsamiq

At just $79, Balsamiq Mockups is the cheapest of the commercial products I looked at. There is also a free trial version which you can use to evaluate it. It plugs into Confluence, JIRA and XWiki but I use it as a standalone desktop application. There are several features that make it effective for my work:

• When you load the program, it starts with the thing you were last working on. This is a neat time-saving feature.
• Everything looks hand-sketched, which I didn’t like at first. However, it’s grown on me. Part of the value is that nobody is focused on making the mockup ‘look great’. It focuses attention on the copy (which is my schtick) and the layout.
• It’s very easy to drag and drop common design elements onto the page, such as tabbed menus, calendars etc. In fact, most of the stuff you need is built in. This goes way beyond the usual buttons and boxes that most mockup tools provide.
• There are tools to create an iPhone mockup which will come in useful later
• You can link different page mockups together using buttons and so on
• You can work on multiple pages at once and flip between them using Excel-like tabs
• The Mockups To Go website has lots of downloadable mockups that you can use as a starting point for your own designs. For example, it has a Twitter and a Google mockup.You can see more examples at Balsamiq’s website.
  

It would be nice to have a text tool that let you enter styled text without using markup. Balsamiq uses things like *asterisks* to indicate bold text. I’d prefer a little editor. But this is pretty much my only niggle.

I use Balsamiq almost daily now and I highly recommend it. It lets me concentrate on copy and layout not on technical details and yet I can share the results with designers and programmers and they can see exactly what I am trying to achieve. I can mockup a page in minutes and then tinker with it for hours. It’s painless, intuitive and responsive. It’s a bit like going back to the first Mac I had and using MacDraw and MacPaint – just straightforward and easy to use.

Dropbox is a better way to share files between different users and different computers. It beats FTP for large files and email for pretty much any attachments. I use to exchange videos, graphics and presentations with clients and my subcontractors.

Once everyone is set up on DropBox, it’s like having a file server folder that works but one that works over the internet.

Dropbox supports Linux, Mac and PC. The easiest way to use it is to install a client on your PC. This puts a Dropbox folder on your computer and you can synchronise files simply by dragging files into it.

It also has a web interface. If you access the web browser on an iPhone, you get a special iPhone version of the site. It seems to work with anything.

It’s free for 2GB of storage and $99 a year for a massive 50GB. Go to www.getdropbox.com.

You can follow me on Twitter and get links to all my posts on this blog and my flying blog plus some Twitter-specific stuff. These lovely people already do.

Get your Twitter mosaic here.

Thanks to Allister Frost for this link to 40 Useful and Creative Infographics.

Sometimes a picture is worth way more than 1,000 words. Writers need to remember this. I worked on an article for Wired and my research ended up at about 30,000 words or something. Their graphic design department shrunk it to a two-page diagram. You can see the result in my earlier article Diagrams: everything is connected to everything else.

I particularly like this diagram that talks about how a product or service is perceived. Very useful for marketing folk like me. But the whole list of 40 is worth studying.

This guest post is by Jan Felt. He is a blogger obsessed with marketing communication and career development. Read more of his work on his blog: CyberFootprint.

Two pages to go. The deadline looms. You are sitting at your computer, replying to morning e-mails. After a couple of words, Twitter starts buzzing. So, you reply and check out some links your friends tweeted. As the time flies, adding information to your article seems too much, so you add a couple of graphs instead. One page to go.

Hoping that your editor will be content with that, you add some pictures. You file the article and go for a cup of coffee. After a well-deserved lunch (I finished the article, didn’t I?) you get a message from your editor. She’s cut your graphs and pictures and the original copy has been slashed in a half, due to redundancy.

Swallowing your irritation, you start again. Two pages to go…

Focusing on writing

Does this situation seem familiar? If yes, you are not alone. The information age has made writers more connected, constantly online and much less productive. Technology has robbed us of the most important skill a writer must have – ability to pay undivided attention to the copy.

Although are no complete cures, there are some tools that can help. Distraction-free text editors can help you focus on your copy.

What is a ‘distraction-free text editor’? They are simple programs that hide everything except what you are writing. No fancy formatting, no toolbars, no Windows taskbar. It’s just you and the text. Linuxandfriends shared a list of most of the programs available.

To simplify your choice, I recommend WriteRoom for Mac and Q10 for the PC. In case you are on a public computer, you can use web-based Writer. But let’s look at those editors in-depth.

Q10

Q10 is a lightweight and intuitive free program. Its popularity is becoming widespread, due to these features.

• Built-in timer. Set it and write; it will tell you when to take a break.
• Portability. You can run the program from a USB
• Customisation. You can choose the colours for the background and text
• Memory. No matter whether you save your writing or not, next time you open Q10, the last article will appear
• Differential word count. It can keep track of how many words you write in each session.

There is no scroll bar but you can use arrow keys or page up and down keys to move through the text. Novelist might prefer Liquid Story Binder (paid) or StoryMill. Other than that, there are no tragic flaws in the software. Q10 will surely become your writing buddy.

WriteRoom

WriteRoom is a paid programme ($25), but you can use it for a limited time for free. If you are serious about writing in a fully customisable high-performance editor, the purchase will make sense. Joe Turner offers a more comprehensive review of the application.

JDarkRoom

For the experimenters, try JDarkRoom first. It works with Macs as well. What is so special about this application?

• Scrollbar. Unlike in Q10 the text does not appear static
• Formatting. Supports rich text and formatting (bold, italic)
• iPhone version. Yes, you can use it on iPhone

Writer

Writer is a web-based editor, allowing you to easily create and access your documents from anywhere. All you have to do is to create an account and start writing. All your documents will be saved on the servers. You can create a decent writing environment by switching your browser to full screen. Though, it seems like a good idea, a part of the upper toolbar is always visible in Firefox, making it slightly more difficult to concentrate on your writing.

Writespace

There is also an add-on to MS Word 2007 called Writespace. It works directly with Word 2007, so there is no need to copy and paste text from one editor to another. On the other hand, it has several drawbacks. Writespace eliminates all previous formatting (bold, italic, underline), which you might find annoying. Furthermore, the installation process is really slow and difficult, especially if you have a firewall. As Kaushik put it, “apparently, this add-on isn’t for all.”

Maximising returns

Writing everything from start to finish only in these simple editors is very difficult. All editors save their work as .txt files, making the final version of the documents visually unappealing. Don’t use these programs to format the text. Microsoft Word is much better at it. However, when it comes to transcribing ideas from your head to the computer screen in a calm environment, there is no better software than these programs.

I use Q10 to create the first draft, which is spellchecked and finalised in MS Word. If I am writing for the web, the WordPress WYSIWYG editor serves as a good tool to put finishing touches on the post.

Using the right software is only a part of the equation, though. To create a good copy, it is important to have a proper physical environment. Matthew has already outlined the essentials of concentration on writing, so check there first.

Overall, the experience with the distraction-free text editors taught me that good writing often results from simplicity and calm environment.

What is your experience? How do you keep out distractions?

• Email Etiquette 101. How to use BCC so you don’t send everyone’s email address to everyone else. Great video on YouTube that shows how to do it in different email programs.
• Internet safety 101. The Get Safe Online blog has some great videos that teach the basics of internet safety – how to avoid rip-offs, protecting your PC, safeguarding your online identity.
• Emails that people actually read. David Silverman has written an interesting post on the Harvard Business Review blog about writing an email that actually gets read.
• Be a better writer. Cathy Curtis has a nice article on AIGA which reiterates the lessons we’ve learned about writing for the internet: How the web made me a better copywriter.
• Fix your website. If you have a blog or a website, check this article out: 15 essential checks before launching your website. All of this stuff is easy to overlook and (mostly) easy to check. And yes, I know, the favicon for BadLanguage.net has disappeared.  Do as I say, not as I do!
• Typography 101. 25 years ago, the only people who knew about typography were designers, printers and, well, typography. Now a printer is a thing not a person and we’re all typographers. Check out this excellent article, which should be mandatory reading for anyone who uses a word processor, website or email: 8 simple ways to improve typography in your designs.

• Monster List of Freelance Job Sites on FreelanceSwitch
• How I Personalized my Twitter Home Page on FreelanceWriting
• 12-step programme: stop killing the apostrophe on Ballywick
• One-year, full-time MSc in brand leadership at the University of East Anglia
• Is this for real? Succeed … or else!
• Q10, another distraction free editor (Hat tip: Litlets)
• Stoicism 101: A practical Guide for Entrepreneurs. (I wonder whether Tim Ferris makes money from his book than from his food supplement ‘4-hour-a-week’ business.)
• A-Z of working from home.

BBC Magazine has a great list of 50 buzz phrases to avoid, including:

• Going forward
• Touch base
• Low-hanging fruit
• Pre-plan
• Granularity
• Anything 2.0
• Drill down

Plus I heard a new one the other day (from two different sources): “socialise” meaning to share an idea with colleagues and see what they think. Or perhaps I should say “run it up the flag pole and see who salutes it.”