Content Creation for Media with Modern Tools

Today's world is fast-changing, tech-savvy and innovative. Writers also have to become technocratic by utilizing the benefits of the latest technology available on their fingertips, contemporary with the times. What you need is a good writing atmosphere to write a good piece of article. In the present day world, various pollution, unfavorable environment, low lighted cluttered attic, unfavorable sitting directions, discomfort due to furniture, power failures leading to heating or exhausted backups, mosquitoes, houseflies, and wasps are all common culprits in the third world tropical countries creating a nuisance to the writers. To the extent possible, we can choose fresh air and good natural light from windows to refresh the creativity element. It is always good if we sit facing the eastern or northern direction, which will develop a pleasant mood for writing. Evening and night time writers can face towards the west, the creation will be better and the results will be amazing.

When these are all favourable, the writer's mobile phone, TV programs, children, guests, etc. also may influence the writer's mood and creativity. These all altogether form a production management subject, taking all things with a positive mindset, will bring long-term success for the writer's career. However, the TV may be avoided, though, mobile phones are inevitable as they have tools useful for the writer.

Smart tools

Mobile smartphones are incredible companions of the modern writer. Basically, you may install an English dictionary app in your mobile phone, which can save you from bulky conventional printed dictionaries, though hard copies are the real assets of a writer. English dictionary apps are available for android mobile phone, which are free.

Mobile phones have a speech-to-text conversion bot, which is accurate, provided you pronounce English correctly. There is plenty of such application software available, which have this type of capability to convert your dictation into text. I personally use Google Keep with satisfactory results. The resulting text can be copied on to the word processing applications and used for articles.

So, the basic requirement for a modern-day writer is a laptop or desktop computer with word processing software and basic operating knowledge. This enables an author to become independent to prepare and preserve contents digitally.

Coming to the above-mentioned steps, here you may follow some more detailed account as follows:

These are the three main steps involved in the preparation of the article:

1. Draft content preparation

2. Reading thoroughly

3. Perfecting it.

In the present day, writing an article on a piece of paper or dictating it to a stenographer or sitting beside a typist for word processing, are all almost outdated. People rather do not prefer to engage themselves for serving the customers for computerizing the articles. Everyone has become more and more professional and they desire an independent environment.

Draft content preparation

A writer or an editor may prepare a draft manuscript in computer software. You may use an A4 size document with normal margins but with 1.5 or 2 line spacing it looks fine for good readability. Times New Roman font gives the least problem subsequently during further processing. Times New Roman 12 font size will help you for better readability.

Reading thoroughly

The Second reading of the draft document by you makes realize some need for improvement. A refinement may give better content flow, avoiding fluffy descriptions, making up a lack of understanding, etc. At this stage, you may need some additional reading or reference. Avoid procrastinating at this stage or bypassing, both will make heartburns.

You can use in-built spelling and grammar checking facility available in the software. Here one should select a native dictionary of your own country, otherwise, it will confuse you. If you are from the US, use American English, If the UK, always use British English. Indian English is also available in recent software.

You may use grammar correction software available online. Grammarly plugin for Google Chrome can be used without additional expense.

Perfecting with corrections

Then give the article to a colleague or if you are a one-man army, go through it for the third corrective reading, probably after an interval of a couple of days. This will bring in some more improvement to the article.

If you are giving it to another person, tell him/her to use track changes in the software. This would help you to identify the changes he/she has made and accept or reject the same.

Subsequently, after receiving it from your friend, you may accept the changes, reject the changes, make it without markup or revert to the original depending on your choice.

If you or your colleague are not at all familiar with all these, then manually block the letters and change the font colour of the corrected text.

If you prepare your articles like this, you may save a lot of your time and expenses for emailing, blogging, presentation slide making or offset printing purposes. It is more important if the content is timebound and newsworthy material. If you keep looking for assistance, you may feel disheartened due to undue delay in preparation. I personally prefer to do these above steps for my articles, which has helped me to reduce my proofreading efforts during subsequent design layouts. Once the article is prepared in softcopy, as far as the publishing is concerned, it is easy with a minimum basic format, especially for articles containing scientific or language contents. A softcopy is always useful when you want to compile your articles in the future for reuse of it in part for the content of another article. This type of process has become very common now. It will also give you much more self-satisfaction and flexibility at work.