Reading time: 3 min.
Listening time: 5 min.
We Can Do This!
Document Don’t Create.
I’m not the most creative guy in the world. I’m certainly not a professional writer or artist.
Luckily, there are maps to follow and software available, making it not just doable but relatively easy. Using them makes blogging, podcasting, and creating pictures and diagrams relatively simple.
If I follow one basic premise, document what I am doing, thinking, and learning rather than trying to create world-class, mind-blowing, world-changing content (that’s hard, unsustainable, and happens too infrequently to help anyone – for me anyway).
Documenting is easy and regularly helpful to lots of people.
Use Essay (Essay.app) To Create Your Post Outline.
Essay makes it easy to organize your thoughts to create a working outline, move things around, and edit.
You get to follow all the writing rules you learned in high school without re-living the painful hours spent in English class.
Having an outline to work from makes everything so much easier.
Here’s what I most like about Essay.app: I can get into flow and write while on a roll, knowing I can quickly move paragraphs, sentences, and ideas by dragging and dropping.
Jordan Peterson and his son created the software to help everyone become a better writer. Regardless of what you think of his politics and opinions, he’s an excellent writer. Peterson noticed that his students at Harvard were becoming worse writers with each passing year. He designed the software to turn this trend around.
Export Your Rough Draft to Google Docs for use.
Turn the good, solid, well-organized rough draft you created on (Essay.app) into something you can use.
Copying and pasting directly from the Essay.app to the following two tools I use is, unfortunately, not a one-step process. I’ve attempted to copy and paste many ways only to have my Essay.app scrambled, ugly, and hard to work with.
But I’ve found an easy workaround.
Essay.app has an export button that allows you to export as a PDF or a Google Doc quickly.
I make sure my Google account is open, click export on Essay.app, and select export to Google Docs. Within a second, my Essay.app post appears in my Google Docs account (title and all).
It’s now in a layout I can work with, transfer, and use.
Copy and Paste Into Grammarly For Editing and Clean Up.
Grammarly is a fantastic tool.
I copy and paste my Google Doc post into my Grammarly writing window.
Grammarly instantaneously highlights all my misspellings, grammar mistakes, run-on sentences, comma splices, lousy sentence structure, and so much more.
Now it’s confirmed, I’m a lousy writer.
It also confirms my writing is not plagiarized or written by AI, two things that all the search engines (Google) will ding you for.
But wait… it shows me how to fix everything and does it all for me with a click.
My post is turned into something fully corrected and readable.
Magic.
Copy and Paste Into WordPress New Blog Post.
Unlike Essay.app, Grammarly allows you to copy and paste a corrected document as quickly as any word processing software.
I copy my sparkling clean, fully edited, corrected post and paste it into my blog’s new post window.
I may need to format it a little, but it’s never difficult or time-consuming.
Just one more step before I can click publish on my WordPress platform.
Summarize As A Drawing Using Excalidraw.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Who reads a thousand words anymore anyway? Good thing this post is only 647 words : ).
Most people look at pictures and short-form videos.
Having a picture that summarizes your post is, therefore, essential.
As I wrote earlier, I’m about the worst artist ever, and my handwriting is nearly illegible.
Thank goodness there’s very easy-to-use software for that.
I use excalidraw.com.
I like all the tools, fonts, colors, and simplicity. Unlike Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, it took me about fifteen minutes to learn how to use them.
I create my drawing, add some written information, export it to my WordPress media files, and add it to my post.
What you just read was created following this process in about an hour.
I hope all this helps.
Never, Ever Give Up!
Yours in success,
Michael