Writing Practice Prescription

By
Barbara McNichol
As writers, we can get caught up in an idea or feel particularly attached to a word or phrase. Our writing can suffer as a result. When editing your own manuscript, dare to be brutally honest with yourself. To help you, here’s a list of tips and techniques for steering clear of common pitfalls [...]

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“Just the facts, Ma’am, just the facts,” may be good advice to keep your writing simple and on track, but there’s no reason why you can’t arrange those facts to put color and a little grin into the essence of things.
Consider the standard tagline used by many authors: “XXX is YYY who ZZZ. He/she lives [...]

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Mindstorming, sometimes called prospecting or the “20-idea method” sets the stage for letting your creative juices call forth suggestions for your writing as well as ways to improve your fortune and productivity. The process of mindstorming involves taking a question and then doing some personal “brainstorming” with your writing. This exercise is a great jogger [...]

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Author Shannon Brownlee in her book, Overtreated–Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, notes that our American Healthcare system cost us $2.1 trillion in 2006. The 2016 prediction of cost soars up to $4.1 trillion.
Worse, in spite of numerous past attempts to fix the system, 47 million Americans or one in six [...]

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Heart-health expert and CEO of the American Foundation for Women’s Health, Mellanie True Hills, sends an email noting that, “maybe writing can not only cure chronic disease but also keep you from getting it in the first place.” Her comment stems from a blog entry she read on the SHI Symbol International’s Weblog:
“Research from Arizona [...]

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There gets to be a place in chronic illness where you realize that being ill is not going to stop you from living well.
–Rachel Naomi Remen
When you carry the burden of a chronic disease or health condition, life can be downright hard and seem quite unfair. Still a ray of freedom resides in the [...]

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Marlene Buckler, MD, FACEP, has arrived at a point where she thinks that she may be able to help more people not by actually practicing medicine, but by writing and speaking about it. In a recent article about her in the Pelican Press she is quoted at the beginning of the article as saying, “Stay [...]

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