1. Poor

   2. Mediocre

   3. Fair

   4. Good

   5. Excellent 

        a. How much skill you bring into the writing process

        b. How you approach writing

        c. How much effort you put into your writing

        d. How you feel about writing

        e. How you organize and develop your writing

 

You do not have to be a master writer to write good content. But if any part of your operation or career is involved with writing or requires you to write, you will need to develop the necessary skills to produce content that can allow to successfully compete in the marketplace. Writing abilities can be improved and sharpened.  For example, it is near to impossible to be a webmaster, a website operator, a blogger, or a website owner, without having to produce good content on a regular basis. Similarly, it is not possible to work in the fields of communication, management, business, or even marketing without some higher level of written communication skills. Most working and published documents, and in particular website content and blogs, require regular updating in order to be viable and be optimized for search engines. Readers and visitors will return to your sites, buy your books and magazines, subscribe to your newsletters, and follow your articles, only if they know that they can expect a gratifying experience and a return on their time investment.

Whether you consider yourself a new writer or a poor writer, there is absolutely no need to panic or to be afraid of writing. And you certainly should not worry about writer’s block, which has more to do with a mindset, attitude toward writing, and even sometimes physical and psychological causes, more than it relates directly to writing. It might help to know that experienced writers, too, face some of the same challenges that all of us faces when in the writing process.  Whether you’re writing a creative piece or a non-fiction journalistic article, you can acquire the right set of skills that will allow you to write crisp, clear, and successful pages. Writing resources are readily available in various online, in libraries, and in various archives, and they can be easily learned and applied. There are rules that must be followed in all writing, but those rules are there to help make your writing readable and effective. Whatever the situation may be, do not give up, and do not be too hard on yourself. Be determined.

Some websites display little content, but this may be just right for their target audience. Others are outfitted with very poor content. In fact, I visited a professional and career-oriented website, which has dozens of pages, and the content on almost every page was an ad for the site written in very poor English and filled with typographical errors. What was most curious about this is that the lack of creativity, combined with the writing, caused the site operator to have repeated the same ad-like text over and over again on each subsequent page. The site in question is 13 years old, and an examination of the content reveals that there was no mystery in the fact that the site stood at 13 million in rank on the Alexa global traffic rating, with few visitors.

Writing is a process made of several steps. Any writing, whether an article, a blog, or a page, should not be so short as to be devoid of substance; It cannot be so long as to be rambling; It cannot be so spectacular as to be incredible, or so boring as to lack any attractiveness. So, how does the writer strike the necessary balance?  If you are writing about something that you are not knowledgeable about, research the subject. You can be sure that someone else has already written about it. Do not steal other people’s text. Get inspiration and develop the topic taking another angle. If you decide to use quote from others’ writing, credit the author, and place the quoted text in block quotation marks ““. Do not lift whole pages or paragraphs from the work of another writer. Almost all writing is protected under copyright right laws. Work on making your own writing ready for debut. Write your content based on the following attributes:

· It should be clear

· It should be convincing

· It should be substantive

· It should be credible

· It should be interesting

. It should be fluid

.It should be dynamic 

 .It should be seamless

 

Your writing will meet the criteria listed above if you pay attention to the following rules of grammar and composition, but even more important, you must apply them properly:

      1. Pay attention to your Style of Writing: Your writing style is how you choose to write, and what format you put your writing in. Your content may be creative or fact-based, meaning that it may be from your own imaginative creation or it may non-fiction. But even non-fiction can reflect creativity. Your page can be light-hearted or serious. You can use big unusual words or write in common every language. But whatever you do, stay away from jargon, slang, offensive language, and profanity. In terms of formatting, you could decide, for instance, to indent your text; you can number lists; you might like to use bullets. And most of all, you might decide to wrap your text around images, tables, or videos. You might highlight or shade certain text areas, or embed boxes within the text. In other words, you can always be creative in your style.

     2. Apply the rules of grammar:  Grammar includes syntax. This is the order in which you arrange the words in your text, and whether or not you write sentences that are complete and contain a subject, a verb, and end short supplemental details. For example, we don’t say, “they was,” but “they were,” because the rules of grammar demand that our verbs agree with our subject. Now, “they were” is a full sentence, given that all we need to form a sentence is a subject and a verb. However, if we were to write or say “they were,” our reader or whoever we are talking to would ask or wonder, ‘they were what.’ This is why we add details to our sentences to make them more substantive and complete. The part that does this is called a complement. In complementing our sentences, meaning adding more details to them, we use what in grammar are known as the parts of speech. Those are adjectives to describe nouns, adverbs to describe verbs, and a whole series of smaller words, such as pronouns to replace the subject-noun, prepositions to connect words, and conjunction to connect words and sentences. Grammar also requires the use of punctuations. Without punctuations, such as colons, periods, and question marks, our writing would go on and on, and would be unintelligible.

     3. Organize your Writing: Make sure to have a beginning, middle, and an end. Use the beginning to briefly introduce the purpose of your content. Then, move on to the middle where you will write what your content is about. Develop your ideas keeping in mind what the purpose of your writing. Give details, but focus on those things that are important. Be substantive and specific. You can do that by researching the topic you are writing about in order to provide useful and reliable information to your readers. Being knowledgeable in the subject matter will show, and it will add credibility to your writing. Do not be afraid to be funny or pointed in your writing. Once you feel that the middle of your text is adequate, you can conclude by stating the benefits that can be derived from what you just wrote, or by suggesting steps the reader can take, or offering advice and solutions.                                     

Edit your text from beginning to end. Look for fat. Where you find extra wording, remove unnecessary words. If you come across misplaced words, move them, and replace misused words with others that are more appropriate. Go for quality over quantity. Look for repeat words and ideas written in other words. Redundancy in text is very offensive. If the content feels anemic, add more substance, by including more details by way of facts, figures, or clarification. Make grammatically corrections. Review your text for clarity, by identifying vague passages, and replacing them with specifics. Ask yourself if you would understand what you just wrote, had you not been the author. Finally, use check spell to correct misspelled words.

  

Last week, through highly classified leaked national security documents to two news organizations, the Guardian in the U.K., and the Washington Post, we all became witnesses to the explosive revelation that the National Security Agency (NSA) had been conducting secret surveillance operation on over 300,000,000 telephone subscribers in the U.S. and overseas. We learned that in this unprecedented scope of data-sweeping program, the intelligence and security agencies of the government scooped up telephone records in mass from major telephone carriers, such as AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint. In a twin development, almost simultaneously, we also found out that through a secret spying program called PRISM, the government has also stolen Internet records, including emails, financial records, and Facebook messages by tapping directly into Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, and others? How worried should we all be?

Since this news broke, thanks to now -out -of-work and in danger, self-professed conscientious -secret intelligence analysis contractor objector, Edward Snowden, that the government has been engaged in this massive secret spying operation on U.S. citizens, most people appeared to be too stunned to form definitive opinions one way or the other, on both sides of the political aisle.  While we do, and should, expect the government to protect us against enemies, foreign and domestic, we should also be very concerned about this extent of government's overreach and unnecessary intrusion into our private lives. 

In the name of security, the government has grabbed an extraordinary amount of power under the highly classified secret Patriot's Act, following the attack on the nation on September 11, 2001.In post 911 America, this act has been used by many in congress and in law enforcement in general to erode civil liberty in this country. To that effect, FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has been used to spy on innocent and unsuspecting American citizens. And law enforcement organizations throughout the government have used this highly classified law to secure thousands of secret warrants for clandestine operations against U.S. citizens. Ironically, the biggest supporters of this type of abuse have been the so-called small government conservatives. Those small government conservatives in name only seem to only be interested in keeping the government small when it comes to providing support for the poor or funding disaster relief. However, just like they have not yet found a ban on abortion that they did not like, they are yet to find any abuse under the Patriot's Act that they could not support. In fact, those are the same guys who tried to force librarians to release records of their patrons' rental and reading activity logs wholesale to the government after 911. Meanwhile, democrats on the other hand, cowardly cooperate with every national security policy that comes through the rusty congressional pipe, for fear that if they take any principled stance against a national security policy, however egregious, they will be portrayed as soft on terrorism comes time for their reelection. This has become a tradition in the democratic party. Over the past twenty five years, spineless democrats have thrown entire constituents under the boss in similar ways. For example, out of fear of being called soft on crime by their republican opponents who conflated race and crime in the 1980's and into the 1990's, to entice negative sentiments and inflame the electorate, democrats have contributed to the building and development of the prison industrial complex, which now accounts for the United States to house the largest prison population in the world, by allowing the failed war on drug to rage on mostly against Black Americans. 

Under no circumstances should government overreach and abuse of power be considered OK. As citizens, we should remain vigilant and let our voices be heard. The government's power is only as great as it such derives from the governed, or at least it should be. Our intangible rights, such as our right to privacy, freedom of movement, our right against unreasonable searches and seizures, are invaluable to our human dignity and are inextricable from our right to life. In fact, our need for privacy is a very basic need. This right is based on our trust that the government is on our side and will protect those fundamental rights that the Founding Fathers refer to as inalienable. And among those are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, all of which will be compromised absent our right to privacy.

While answering reporters' questions about the PRISM spying program last week, President Obama said, "we can't have 100% security, 100% privacy, and zero inconvenience." To call not spying on hundreds of millions of Americans and foreigners worldwide a certain inconvenience is outrageous. It is true that some of us have called on the government to provide us with hundred percent of security at all cost. That is clearly in error. The reality is that we do not, and can never  expect to reach one hundred percent level of security. As for our privacy, any amount of violation of privacy is too much, and should not be tolerated. The president's comment  minimizes the impact of this extreme heist of personal data by the government. This is like saying that a justice system that sends thousands of innocent people to prison, and has been known to even put innocent people to death, is not perfect. The problem here is that some of this has been brought about by our own apathy and complacency, combined with an attitude that if it is just happening to the other guy , that makes it OK. Furthermore, the government demands we take our shoes off at airports, so we do. they want to look through our body with X-Ray machines, we oblige. They want a pat down, we indulge.

Fortunately, it is also President Obama who told the country that "the change is you - You are the change; you have to make Washington change." This means that we are all responsible for letting our public officials know what we expect, and none of it includes the grabbing of our emails, text messages, voicemails, and financial records. We must all get involved in our own governance. This is our life, and we must take ownership of it, starting with protecting our records in every way possible. In this age of Internet and cell phone this is not an easy task, given that we literally leave a track behind us with every phone call we make, every website we visit, and every message we send out or receive, not to mention every financial transaction that we engage in. We need to be aware of this in order to more closely monitor and protect our movement, records, and activities. But it is our personal oversight over the government and civic engagement that will bring about the most meaningful protection of our civil liberties. In this respect, to become engaged means perhaps, finding an organization to get involved with, writing or calling the President and Congress, starting a petition, or writing a letter to the editor. Better yet, hold a community meeting to discuss issues and policies, or send a letter to your neighbors to alert them of important policy issues. When undertaken by any citizen, each one of these activities can go a long way to creating a healthier nation; for a citizenry educated in its civic duties is by far better prepared to contribute to making this democracy a more perfect union.

Read: The National Security Agency (NSA) PRISM & What You Can Do to Protect Yourself 

          Love them and care about them anyway.    

I am now working on my next 2 books, "And Such is Life - Relationships" Book II and "Ainsi Va la Vie - Nos Relations" Livre II. the 2 new books will be released on March 31, 2013. 
"And Such is Life - Nature" Book III and "Ainsi Va la Vie - La Nature" Livre III are scheduled to be released on April 30, 2013. May 31, 2013, "And Such is Life - Destiny" Book IV and "Ainsi Va la Vie - Le Destin" Livre IV will be released and be made available for purchase on amazon, on kindle ebook store, and on this site.

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