by Jessie Seigel, AIW Board Member If I had ten lives, one of them would be lived as a linguist. Language, phonetics, and the structure of the ways in which people speak their own languages and of how they carry that into English fascinate me. Modern Irish (what the Irish call Irish and others sometimes [...]
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Active Voice: A Great Way to Keep Writing Crisp
a “Verbal Knightcap” by Robert M. Knight, AIW Board Member The use of active voice might be the least understood element in English that most people think they understand. They understand even less when they get the use of active voice confused with the use of action verbs. And many do. Many editors can’t keep [...]
Get Your Message Out: Use 21st-Century Communications with 15th century Venues
by AIW President Claude Berube Pubs. They took their name from Public Houses. When I lived in rural England, it seemed that every few miles there was a village of fifty homes, an Anglican church that dated from the 1200s and a pub that seemed just as old. There the regulars and even a few [...]
Write What You Know? Hell, no! Know What You Write!
by Jessie Seigel, AIW Board Member As a writer, I find myself perpetually at odds with the adage: write what you know. Too often it is taken literally, as an injunction to approach only subject matter that comes from one’s own experience. Frequently, this results in fiction that is simply veiled autobiography. Unless the life [...]
The Internet’s Missing Ingredient
by Clyde T. Linsley, AIW Board Member For the past few years I’ve been writing fiction almost exclusively, but most of my 40-some-odd years as a professional writer were spent writing nonfiction. And mostly, it was journalistic writing. I wrote for newspapers, radio, television, I edited magazines, and I wrote for various web sites. Nearly [...]
How Do You Know When it’s Time to Drop a Client?
by Deborah Wunderman, AIW Board Member I have worked as a freelance proposal writer for 10 years in the Washington, D.C., area. During this time, I have encountered many wonderful clients and some not-so-wonderful ones. The economic crisis has demanded much tightening of budgets and doing more with less. It has also brought to the [...]
Why I Write: Jessie Seigel
by Jessie Seigel, AIW Board Member Why do I write? Today, I write because characters keep roaming through my head—characters with pasts and futures that I must put down on paper or no one but me will know they exist, and they’ll fade away. Last year, or the year before, the driving motivation was often [...]
Why Join?
by Cecilia Sepp, AIW Immediate Past President & Chair, Member Engagement With the onset of social media, many people the last few years have been declaring the death of the association. Their argument is basically “Why pay when you can get the same thing online for free?” I am not one of these people, and [...]
The Gap that Shouldn’t Be: Journalistic Writing Versus Everyone Else’s
a “Verbal Knightcap” by Robert M. Knight, AIW Board Member A long time ago, mainstream writing and journalistic writing said goodbye to each other, and English has been poorer ever since. Each has much to learn from the other, but I maintain that mainstream writers can learn more from journalistic writing than the other way [...]
Publishing Ideas: The Classroom as Commodity
Have you taken a class recently? Will you in the near future? If you’re a writer, then take advantage of what a classroom experience presents. This is true whether you’re taking a humanities course (English, History, Political Science, etc) or a science course. In addition to earning a grade or credit hours, make the course work for you as a writer. Being in a classroom environment offers three important commodities to a writer.
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Read the Latest News from AIW
- A Message about a Promising Future for Washington Independent Writers Association, Inc. (“WashWriters”) from: May 18, 2012
- Great conference – thanks to all! June 17, 2011
- Washington Writer’s Conference – June 11 June 10, 2011
- The Washington Writer’s Conference-June 11-Updated Program! June 7, 2011
- The Washington Writer’s Conference, sponsored by AIW and The Writer’s Center May 23, 2011
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