Many people ask what it takes to become a good writer, when I think what they’re really wanting to ask is: what does it take to be an effective writer? The former can only be answered based on individual opinion, whereas the latter can’t be argued. Effective writing is concise and effortless. It says what needs to be said and nothing more, though for most writers this is a lot easier said than done. As they say, “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”

George Orwell, most famous for his novels Animal Farm and 1984, was also famous for his journalism and essays – particularly, the timelessness of his six rules for writers. Honestly, who better to learn from? His writing is friendly and welcoming. He always focused on simplicity and didn’t drown his readers with unnecessary words or jargon.

His tips have always been the key ingredient of my writing career: whenever I find myself over thinking my creative process, his tips are what I turn to in order to regain my focus.

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While ballpoint pens write equally well from most angles and positions, fountain pens require a certain touch. The ink flows more easily if you hit the pen’s “sweet spot”, the pen feels more balanced in your hand with the cap posted, and everything seems to flow better from a lower angle. Once you find that flow, writing should become natural, fluid, and almost effortless.

In this article, we’ll show you the optimal way to hold and write with a fountain pen, but ultimately it comes down to what works for you. If you’re comfortable holding the pen in a grip that’s slightly different from what’s recommended, and the pen is still writing smoothly, don’t worry about it too much. However, if you’re having difficulty writing smoothly or comfortably, try making some of the adjustments suggested below.

Got it from The Cramped. A great guide on, how to use a fountain pen.

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Since you can’t arbitrarily place icons on your home screen this means the situation is actually worse. I now have to fill in the top row of icons with ‘stuff’ just so that I can easily reach my main icons without stretching.

A great tip for everyone with either a 6 or 6 plus. It isn’t perfect, but it is the only good, non-jailbreak solution to playing your apps, where you want them.

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Circa 1800, the Cocktail was a “hair of the dog” morning drink that tamed spirits with water, sugar and bitters (patent medicine). The late 19th Century expanded the use of the word “cocktail” to encompass just about any mixed drink. Since then, the Old Fashioned—literally, the old-fashioned way of making a cocktail—has been our contemporary expression of the original drink. During the 20th Century, various bad ideas encrusted the Old Fashioned. Here we will strip off those barnacles to expose the amazingly simple and sublime drink beneath.

A cool site about making the drink; got it from Daring Fireball.

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Before he was a big game hunter, before he was a deep-sea fisherman, Ernest Hemingway was a craftsman who would rise very early in the morning and write. His best stories are masterpieces of the modern era, and his prose style is one of the most influential of the 20th century.

Hemingway never wrote a treatise on the art of writing fiction. He did, however, leave behind a great many passages in letters, articles and books with opinions and advice on writing. Some of the best of those were assembled in 1984 by Larry W. Phillips into a book, Ernest Hemingway on Writing. We’ve selected seven of our favorite quotations from the book and placed them, along with our own commentary, on this page. We hope you will all–writers and readers alike–find them fascinating.

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When I compare podcasting to blogging, I think about how blogging started blossoming online around 1999, tools sprang up soon after, and from about 2001–2004 I’d say it exploded and hit the mainstream in a big way. Blogging and Podcasting both began with early authors being technologists but both eventually saw more mainstream and famous authors join their ranks. Blogging took off in just a couple years, but why did it take Podcasting ten years before the mainstream noticed its existence?

A great article about the first ten years of podcasting, and a interesting comparison to blogging.

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NO, REALLY, IT’S WHAT THE TITLE SAYS. This is a list of the best, or my favorite at least, websites of 2014.

This is one of the few interesting lists I have seen this month.

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I have been using the Levenger Circa notebook system for well over a decade. In fact, I’ve been a very happy Levenger customer and regular consumer of their products for about twenty-two years now.

It’s actually quite hard to write about something you have used for a very long time. Mainly, because it becomes a part of your life and who you are to the point you are practically unaware of it — it’s just there. This is what the Levenger Circa has become to me.

Don’t get me wrong, a bound paper notebook is good for many things. I have way more than my fair share of them. Some I use daily. They have their place and job to do.

But, for many things, you need flexibility in the grandest sense of the word. You need the freedom of being able to re-arrange pages at will. You may have need to mix different paper types and styles. Maybe you need to mix 5×8 with some 3×5 cards with some 8.5×11. Or, perhaps annotated ruled pages, followed by a blank one, followed by two gridded pages, followed then by a zipper pouch for miscellaneous scraps. There are those times when you’d like to print off a report, punch some holes into it, and then put it into a notebook with some related handwritten notes. When such flexibility is needed, I reach for my Circa instinctively. I know a project has become a Project — one that really matters — when it has a Circa to live in.

The Circa system is very interesting. I have considered many times, but I don’t think it’s for me. But you should take a look if you are looking for a flexible paper system.

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Things have gotten out of hand. Tech writers are given far too much freedom to perpetuate inaccuracies and falsehoods, as well as a generous helping of incompetence these days. That’s why it’s time to put a bit of structure in place for those publications that don’t understand good work from bad work.

What follows are the New Rules of Tech Journalism. Wouldn’t life be grand if the sites we read every day followed even two or three of these things? I know I’m asking for 15 separate miracles, so take the below with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

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In 2006, I moved to New York and started working for David Karp doing web development for various media companies. That fall, in a brief gap before starting a new client, David said that we were going to make a prototype of an idea he’d had for a while. He had already bought the domain: tumblr.com, because it was an easy platform for publishing tumblelogs.

Marco wrote this piece when Yahoo bought Tumblr. This is my favorite post about it, and one of the best things Marco have written.

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