Susan notes: I asked my friend, author and prolific writer Jo Parfitt to share some tips on storytelling and writing. Here are her top 10 for writing Life Stories that people want to read.
When you conduct an interview you will nearly always ask more questions than you need, and spend more time interviewing than is necessary. These tips will help you to conduct an amazing interview:
1) Ask fewer than ten questions and be sure that those questions are open (they won’t get you a yes or no answer).
2) If you do an email interview then encourage your interviewee to write in full sentences. Tell them up front how many words, lines or sentences you expect their answers will be.
Susan notes: Thanks to TED for making TED Talks downloadable and embeddable, and for providing the biographical information that goes along with them.
In a brilliantly tongue-in-cheek analysis, Sebastian Wernicke turns the tools of statistical analysis on TEDTalks, to come up with a metric for creating "the optimum TEDTalk" based on user ratings. How do you rate it? "Jaw-dropping"? "Unconvincing"? Or just plain "Funny"?
After making a splash in the field of bioinformatics, Sebastian Wernicke moved on to the corporate sphere where he motivates and manages multidimensional projects.
Currently an Engagement Manager at Oliver Wyman, Sebastian Wernicke originally studied bioinformatics at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. During his time in academia, he devised an algorithm for analyzing biological networks that now aids researchers in dealing with their innate complexity.
By Jacqueline Throop-Robinson
CEO and co-founder of PassionWorks! Inc.
Susan notes: Jacqueline Throop-Robinson is an accomplished speaker, masterful facilitator and skilled coach, who has researched passion in
the workplace for seven years. She's dynamic, fun, and full of energy. She's also a member of AWR.
She and her team can
measure the extent to which people are passionate about their work,
and help them discover what drives their passion. They’ve also
identified how leaders can create environments that will increase passion in the workplace, and thus
improve business success.
I’m excited about PassionWorks!, and
I’m delighted that Jacqueline is sharing some of her insights and tools
with fellow AWR members.
The entrepreneurial path is not always easy for newcomers. Often, it’s the first time you’re actually representing yourself – and that’s a whole different ball game than having the political clout of a major corporation behind you.
It can be lonely out there, especially for those of us who are a bit shyer than we’d like to admit. Not all women entrepreneurs are naturally outgoing and aggressive.
Whatever you do - sports, business, volunteering - perhaps the only thing harder than winning is… winning again!
Getting that next writing assignment, winning new clients, starting a new book or article or dealing effectively with a challenging situation can be as difficult, perhaps even MORE difficult, the second time around as it was the first.
Bravo! You know an amazing, inspirational woman who rocks, and you want to write a story about her. Maybe you admire her from afar, maybe you know her personally - she may even be YOU! So where do you to start?
One of many ways
We started by researching (hey - that's a good place for you to start too!), to find out what the best writers in the world say about writing. Elizabeth Gilbert, author of international best-seller Eat, Pray, Love, says:
Susan notes: I asked my friend, author and prolific writer 
In a brilliantly tongue-in-cheek analysis, Sebastian Wernicke turns the tools of statistical analysis on TEDTalks, to come up with a metric for creating "the optimum TEDTalk" based on user ratings. How do you rate it? "Jaw-dropping"? "Unconvincing"? Or just plain "Funny"?