How to enchant your audience

• If you try to sell right off the bat without building trust, the sceptics will quickly click away.
• If you delight your readers with your product or idea, if you provide real solutions to their problems, they’ll want to find out more.
• Use the following tips to engage, delight, and ultimately sell:
• Understand your readers. Know their fears, dreams, and desires. How can you engage with someone you don’t understand?
• Don’t write for a large audience. Choose one person, picture him, and write to him as if he’s a friend.
• Use a conversational tone of voice. Nobody wants to chat with a company.
• Be engaging. Using the word you is the most powerful way to be more engaging.
• Be remarkable. So much content is out there, how can you stand out? Disclose your point of view, tell your personal story, and develop your own writing voice. If your readers feel they know you, they will connect with you.
• Use familiar language. Check Twitter, Facebook or Google’s Keyword Tool — and find the wording your readers use. 
• Avoid jargon. Always choose the simplest possible expression of your idea. Avoid obscure words.
• Don’t insult your readers. Being clear doesn’t mean you have to tell your readers things they already know.

Be likeable. Do great things for your readers, help them out, and be generous. It’s obvious isn’t it?

Some OpenEducation Resources on the Web

Open Education Resources, K-12

• CK-12: flexbooks, FlexMath, and more (see story about El Paso partnership)
• Curriki: big community around big library
• Gooru: search engine for education
• OpenEd Institute: biggest Core-aligned catalog
• Khan Academy: 6000 videos on math & more
• OER Commons: dedicated to innovation in open education content & practices
• PowerMyLearning: grade level collections
• NROC: high school science & math
• iCivics: open resources for learning civics
• Literacy Design Collaborative: tools & prompts for writing across the curriculum #
• Edmodo: free learning platform with tons of open content
• Learning.com: Curriculum Foundry helps organize OER #

Postsecondary OER

• Academic Earth: free online courses from the world’s top universities
• iTunes U: view a course, make a course
• Saylor: 250 college courses across 13 subject areas
• Writing Commons: Freshman English from USF
• Connexions: open library from Rice
• MIT OpenCourseWare
• Wikipedia & WikiEducator
• PhET Interactive Simulations
• Washington State’s Open Course Library Project: resources for 42 courses

Anytime Learning

• Coursera: the world’s best courses for free *

• General Assembly: learn from experts on business, tech & design *
• Udemy: online courses from expert teachers *
• LearnZillion: great instructional resources for teachers *
• edX: non-profit created by Harvard and MIT
• Udacity: IT and coding nanodegrees
• Canvas: open online courses #
• MentorMob: education search engine
• TED-Ed: create customized lessons around TED videos

Some High Caliber resources

• National Science Digital Library
• The Learning Regestry
• Lumen Learning
• OERCommons OERCommons - where My lesson are

How to write content your readers will remember

You’ve made so much effort.

You write, and write, and write. People are reading your content, but your message doesn’t stick. Your readers are forgetting it, and fast.

Don’t worry.

The following nine simple tactics will make your message unforgettable:

1. Use sound bites. These are easy-to-remember, easy-to-quote nuggets of wisdom, just like proverbs. And haven’t generations of people remembered proverbs?
2. Avoid routine common sense. You won’t win reader loyalty with your breathtaking grasp of the obvious.

Content Creation -- The Daily Way

Are you forever chopping at and changing your text?

Use the following tips to structure your writing up front, so your message isn’t buried deep in your post:

1. Write your headline first. Include a compelling reason why anyone should read your content.
2. Then write your subheads. These will help structure your post.
3. Don’t forget captions. People are more likely to read your captions than your copy, so don’t miss this opportunity to communicate!
4. Delight with your opening paragraph. Remember, your opening paragraph has to draw your readers into your story. Each sentence has to make them want to read the next.
5. Energize with your closing paragraph. Make sure you write a few kick-ass lines that inspire your readers to take action or change their beliefs.
6. Create fascinating bullet points. Most people won’t read every word of your content. They’ll scan the headlines and the bullet points.
7. Don’t disappoint. Remember the compelling reason in your headline? Make sure you deliver on it.

The Girl in the Spider's Web (Millennium, #4)

by David Lagercrantz

3.8 of 5 stars 3.80 avg rating — 2,247 ratings — published 2015

This fall, Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist return in the highly anticipated follow-up to Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. In this adrenaline-charged thriller, genius-hacker Lisbeth Salander and journalist Mikael Blomkvist face a dangerous new threat and must again join forces. Late one night, Blomkvist receives a phone call from a trusted source claiming to have information vital to the United States. The source has been in contact with a young female super hacker—a hacker resembling someone Blomkvist knows all too well. The implications are staggering. Blomkvist, in desperate need of a scoop for Millennium, turns to Lisbeth for help. She, as usual, has her own agenda. In The Girl in the Spider's Web, the duo who thrilled 80 million readers in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest meet again in an extraordinary and uniquely of-the-moment thriller.

The Willing Suspension of Disbelief Believe

I grew up in writing under the impression that the Willing Suspension of Disbelief was a fact. I never questioned it, as it fit my personal experience with books and stories -- even movies -- perfectly.  The way it was explained to me by one of my first mentors said, "You can get away with anything. The reader is 'willing to believe' -- just don't remind them they are reading a book. Don't break the spell." What that meant was -- the sky can be purple, the planet square and the ice on the poles burning -- no problem. However, if you have your character put some ice into her glass and it doesn't explode, or you give a lame reason for how the gravity works on a square planet, you break the spell. The reader will toss your novel aside and never return. You broke a trust, a trust that is sacred between author and reader.

There are so few Sacred Trusts left in the world, so you can imagine my state when a Neuropsychologist showed that this wasn't true. The Suspension of Disbelief wasn't how we did things at all. 

Kurt Vonnegut - The Short Story

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.



"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"

She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is doing