How to Make Business Cards in Microsoft Word with from microsoft business card template , image source: www.wikihow.com
microsoft business card template
It might seem like an easy step. Simply open a new document and begin typing, right? But it’s rare for that to work for me. I love to have a strong working title and an outline before I write too much. John’s written about this before, after he found he could accelerate his composing process ~600 percent by producing an outline first.
As I wrote an outline for a post this week I realised I had been repeating the same procedure for every single new article I work on. Like any good programmer, I realised repeating the exact same work over and over means that’s probably a fantastic chance for automation.
So I decided to create some templates for myself.
I began by creating a template for the common Ghost blog article arrangement. Since that structure’s particular to mepersonally, I also created a template based on how John constructions his posts, and another based on a writer whose work I respect.
For each template I’ve created a gist to show you exactly what they look like. They’re just Markdown documents, so go right ahead and save them, rename them if you like, and copy-and-paste the contents into a new file whenever you’re ready to write. Click the”view raw” link on the bottom of each gist to observe the plain text version, which you may copy into a new file on your favorite writing program.
With this template, I can begin with answering each dot line with a few notes about what I need to write in that segment. By the time I’m done, I will have a rough sketch of what the finished piece will look like. This should make it simpler to expand my notes to fully-formed paragraphs and cause them to flow into each other nicely, since I understand the arrangement of the whole piece in advance.
Using the template, I discovered that my outlining process became more involved. I’d actually planned to do a full rough draft of that post in the morning, but it took me a few hours just to have the outline done, so I put the draft off for another day.
On the other hand, I’d over 1600 words written in my outline, and a solid idea of what each segment would contain and how they’d work together to create a feeling of flow from the article. Even though outlining took more than normal, drafting took less time since I had put myself up for success. Composing the draft was just a matter of taking each chunk of notes out of the outline and filling out it into a readable paragraph or 2.
It had been quite a different procedure to how I normally do the job, and I was tempted a few times to prevent the extra research or thinking required to complete the outline properly. I frequently put off these things until I am drafting, and that’s when I should be focused on writing rather. I stuck to it, though, and by the time I got around to writing the draft I was glad I’d had.
I have actually overhauled my outline and study procedure by using this template. It is a more productive part of the process now, and makes printing easier. Hopefully it will lead to better function, too.