This eight lesson course began as a live workshop, which has now been conducted in several countries including Germany, United Arab Emirates, America, Holland and England. For several years it has also been available as an online correspondence course with students of many nationalities, living in many countries. Practical, down to earth and crammed with information, tips and secrets gleaned from the author's own 26 years as an international journalist, writer and author, this program is perfect for anyone who wants to write articles based on their own experience and get paid for it. This is the third edition and has been fully revised and updated. Lessons include: Finding ideas Being a writer How to write what editors want Beginnings, middles and ends Be your own editor Markets and marketing Making it happen and bonus chapters: How to write a book review 25 magic markets Blogging, tweeting and all that jazz
What an opportunity for an author to receive - to review a book on writing articles! In fact “Definite Articles” is not actually a book, it’s a training course. Jo Parfitt has used her years of experience as a writer and editor to provide budding authors with an easy, yet comprehensive way of learning how to put together a good article, and get paid for it.
Definite Articles is designed as a workbook with exercises to complete each chapter. This makes the experience of Definite Articles an active and creative one. For an additional fee, Parfitt offers personal tutoring when readers submit their exercises. Although one could learn substantially by just completing the exercises, the tutoring is a bonus that many new authors may take up. There’s also an additional bonus in the book – how to write a book review which is a great way to learn about writing.
I particularly liked some of the tips Parfitt provides such as how to speed write and points on learning from one’s observations of the world around us. How to distil the “Four Musts” of an article was also very useful as was the excellent example of how to conduct an email interview and turn it into an article. In fact one of the plusses of this book is the great examples.
As this is a book on writing, one small criticism is the length of paragraphs in the early chapters, although all article examples were very well edited. Highly recommended for aspiring authors.