Are you starting the year feeling a little jaded about your writing career?

Laura Emily Dunn, who is a student here and a contributor to the freelance course, has boosted her career in a  novel and interesting way this year.

Based in the UK, at the start of this  year she produced an infographic on the British Prime Minister’s clothing choices, which gathered  much attention from national press and broadcast media, as well as writing commissions for her.

Having long planned a trip to Washington for the inauguration, anticipating a Hillary win, Laura ended up going on the Women’s March and covering both inauguration and march for media in the UK.

Laura’s quirky and creative infographic has boosted both her slate and address book, to start the year in style…

Business Writing Skills Refreshers

So what has this all got to do with these doodles here ? Well I’m trying to learn to cartoon, so these are my early attempts at characters. Cartooning, like infographic making, is at core a writing skill – though as I’ve found out, it helps if you can draw too. I can’t currently, but am diving deep into the whole art of cartooning, where there is much that applies to business writing.

Scott McCloud’s fascinating Making Comics describes five critical aspects of cartoon storytelling: choice of moment, what to include; choice of frame, the right distance and angle to view those moments; choice of image; choice of word and choice of flow. All these choices can apply to our business writing too – what to cover, how subjective or objective our writing is, and the images, words and sequences we use.

Why not take a subject you write about and if you’ve not experimented before try it as:

• poetry
• a few scenes of drama script
• podcast
• monthly newsletter update
• state of the nation ( subject ) update – speech
• coloring book
• cartoon or comic strip

Or make an infographic, like Laura did.

You never know where pressing refresh on your mental browser may take you…

Here are three links  which may help refresh too:

Improve Your Writing: 10 Essential Tips To Improve Your Writing Style

Business Tools: Freelance Writing Tools

Career Development: How To Think Like A Content Marketer When You’re Really A Freelance Writer

Laura’s blog is here and may your writing zing in 2017!