Posts Tagged ‘original content’
A writers toolkit
1) Way Back Machine
http://www.archive.org/web/web.php
Have an idea where you noticed content in the past, but the old pages are no longer cached? Try this site, and you might just find the old site you are looking for! Looking for the May 1998 edition of www.arthritis.ca? Type it into the Way Back Machine and a ‘snapshot’ of the page as it was on that date will appear. Even more fantastic is that most of the hyperlinks on the pages still work!
2) Grammar Girl
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com
For those with business degrees or even if you are in the 6th grade.. Perhaps you studied it in college, but even then there are bound to be times when you just aren’t sure; ensure or insure? Do you use ‘that’, or ‘which’. How about the whole ‘who’ / ‘whom’ issue? Grammar Girl comes to your rescue, with an awesome search engine and short articles perfect as a refresher
3) Reporter’s Desktop
http://www.reporter.org/desktop/
Don’t judge a book by its cover, this has everything doing background research would want. Seriously! Please don’t make me list them all, check it out and see for yourself. With sites like this, fact checkers might shortly be out of business!
4) Investigative Reporters and Editors
http://www.ire.org
Ok, so the webpage looks like it could use a bit of help from a graphic artist, but once you get past all the text, there are some very useful links here. Don’t be scared off by the membership charge. There are lots of free areas available without a purchase. I suspect that a membership might be useful for freelancers needing serious research, but for those of us who are just trying to track down the right database or a specific source for an article or two, there is a free database library listing.
Browsing will help you identify which government database contains your listing. For a fee, you can download the portion of the database you want, or even go a step further and have the experts at ire.org pull out the information you are seeking. Additionally, there are numerous tip sheets which can help with suggested methods of investigation. This site is copyrighted by the IRE and is affiliated with the Missouri School of Journalism.
5) Editor’s Association of Canada
http://www.editors.ca/resources/index.html
Not sure where to start? It’s likely that the American Editor’s Association has something similar, but I’m a Canuck, so I’m going with this one. I like their linked list of reference resources. You can spend a while browsing before deciding where to begin. Just reading through these links has spurred my imagination for new article fodder. Writer’s block? Take a stroll through this site and I bet you will find a way to get you going again.
http://www.loveclients.com/
If you are writing for the web, and specifically for clients whom demand solid Search Engine Optimized content, then you can not go past Loveclients. They offer access 24×7-365 with an Seo Agency. A fantastic resource for learning the ins and outs of keyword density & search engine optimization.