Free Printable Holiday Wish List for Kids from santa wish list template , image source: makinglemonadeblog.com
santa wish list template
It may look like an easy step. Simply open a new file and begin typing, right? But it’s rare for that to work for me. I like to get a strong working title and a summary before I write too much. John’s written about this earlier, after he found he could accelerate his composing procedure ~600 percent by creating a summary .
As I wrote an outline for a post this week I realised I was repeating the exact same procedure for every single new article I work on. Like any good programmer, I realised repeating the same work over and over means that is probably a good chance for automation.
So I decided to create some templates for myself.
I began by creating a template for the most common Ghost blog article structure. Since that arrangement’s particular to me, I created a template based on how John constructions his posts, and another according to a writer whose work I admire.
For every template I’ve made a gist to show you what they look like. They are only Markdown documents, so go ahead and save them, rename them if you prefer, and copy-and-paste the contents into a new file whenever you are ready to compose. Click on the”view raw” link to the bottom of each gist to view the plain text version, which you may copy into a new file in your favorite writing app.
With this template, I can start by answering each dot point using 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 easier to enlarge my notes to fully-formed paragraphs and make them flow to each other well, because I know the structure of the whole piece in advance.
Using the template, I discovered that my summarizing procedure became more involved. I had actually planned to do a full rough draft of the post in the early hours, but it took me a few hours just to get the outline done, so that I set off the draft for a different day.
On the flip side, I had over 1600 words composed in my outline, and a solid idea about what each section would contain and how they’d work together to create a feeling of flow from the post. Though outlining took longer than usual, drafting took less time because I’d set myself up for victory. Writing the draft was just a matter of taking each chunk of notes out of the outline and filling it out into a readable paragraph or two.
It had been quite a different procedure to the way I normally work, and I had been tempted a couple of times to avoid the additional research or thinking necessary to complete the outline correctly. I frequently put off these things until I’m drafting, which is when I should be centered on writing rather. I adhered to it, though, and by the time I got around to writing the draft I was glad I had.
I’ve actually coined my outline and study process by using this template. It is a more productive part of the process now and makes drafting easier. Hopefully it will lead to better function, too.