writing

Burn your intros: my editing rule of thumb

If there was one universal criticism of tech writing, it’s: Your intro sucks.

Here’s an example I just put to paper, for the Year of Hustle course (now sold out!):

On HackerNews, sub-Reddits and a million startup blogs, you’ll find people talking about “monetization.” This godawful malformation of a word means “to find a way to squeeze out money where there is none.” This is not the dictionary definition (which means to ‘express in money’), but that’s essentially what the current usage means.

How to Write Your Sales Page

It's Time to Redesign The Sales Page! Part 2 (Part 1)

So, last time on "It's Time to Redesign The Sales Page!" we talked about why I decided the Freckle Time Tracking sales page had to be totally redone.

Namely:

How to Write Your Sales Page

It’s Time to Redesign The Sales Page! Part 2 (Part 1)

So, last time on “It’s Time to Redesign The Sales Page!” we talked about why I decided the Freckle Time Tracking sales page had to be totally redone.

Namely:

Screw Interface Patterns

Allow me to begin by saying that this is an opinion piece. I'm not doing research into the matter, but rather boiling down trends—the good and bad—as I see 'em.

And they're mostly bad. Otherwise it'd be boring.

A Pattern Language

Pattern obsession has come to user interface design by way of software architecture, by way of a book about real (brick and mortar, natch) architecture written by a man named Christopher Alexander.

10 things I learned from screwing up my first ebook launch

... The Short Version.

I promised short, and dammit, I'm gonna deliver.

Very Brief Backstory

JavaScript Performance Rocks! is my first ebook, written by me and my husband, Mr. Scriptaculous (legal alias: Thomas Fuchs).

We launched the beta at the end of January, and the final version is going to drop in the next few days. (All the changes and additions are done, and now I'm typesetting. Again.)

It's been a true learning experience. Translation: I fucked up a lot but I grew as a person!

Felicity.

But some other writers seem to know that it takes more than [blamelessness] for a sentence to cohere and flourish as a work of art. They seem to know that the words inside the sentence must behave as if they were destined to belong together—as if their separation from each other would deprive the parent story or novel, as well as the readerly world, of something life-bearing and essential.

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