Spike Wyatt’s book on freelancing grabbed me from the title. ‘Going the Half Hog?’ I asked myself. Did this mean a half hearted approach to freelancing, as opposed to going all out aka the full hog? No, it didn’t. Instead this is a book for those who want to make a part time income or work part time as freelancers.

The book is subtitled Freelancing without Marketing – another draw for me. Sure I can get my writer marketing done in a short time, but not marketing at all? I was intrigued.

Going the Half Hog Contents

I found Spike’s book an easy, no-nonsense read. The contents list includes:

• How to freelance as a writer
• What you need to get started as a half-hogger
• The basics of online content creation
• The “natural marketing” alternative that takes almost no time or effort
• Where to find freelance writing jobs that suit you
• How to sort through the crap jobs and find the gems
• The major ways to earn – all with their pros and cons
• Avoiding the cheats and scams
• The editing and proofreading route to success

The Best Bits of Going the Half Hog

I knew I was going to love the book when I read the disclaimer, which stated: ‘the author has been known to talk crap’. From then on, I was clear that this was going to be a down-to-earth read with no pseudo-guru-speak – yay! And I was right.  Spike promises ‘real information with actual, explicit ideas and guidelines’ and that’s what he delivers. Among my favorite bits were:

• on what clients really want – most just want a reliable, professional writer who will produce high-quality work on time, every time
• on getting paid – Repeat after me: you deserve to be paid the same as full-time freelancers of similar talent for similar work.
• on running a writing business – There is no ‘right’ way to run a business, beyond a few simple concepts such as honesty, integrity, producing quality work and meeting deadlines
• on how to freelance successfully – Provide solutions. Create accurate specifications. Offer simple, clear contracts. Keep deadlines. Do quality work.

I also liked the 5 principles of being a good freelancer – simple rules which anyone can sign up to – and the questions you need to know the answers to when you get started. These are especially useful for new writers. New writers will also get value from the section where Spike provides a simple structure for writing articles for an online audience.

My one point of disagreement with Spike was on the importance of spelling, grammar and punctuation. He says: ‘I’m not saying that spelling, grammar and punctuation are unimportant: they just don’t have to be perfect for the majority of online media.’  I say: people notice these things, even if subliminally, and it’s important to get them right. That’s the only niggle – and I’m still prepared to recommend the book.

I know the experienced writers out there are wondering what’s in it for them. I can tell you where I learned something – in the section on scams and cheats. I’ve seen my share of writing scams, but Spike added a couple twists on them which haven’t yet come my way (probably because I stay off the bidding sites.) It’s always good to know about these things in advance.

The Verdict

Overall, I think Going the Half Hog lives up to its description:

With this unique, straightforward book you’ll learn everything you need to get started as a freelance writer, including content creation, ways to earn online, where to find freelance work that suits your skills and schedule, how to sort through the rubbish jobs and find the gems, how to avoid the cheats and scammers, a “natural marketing” alternative that requires almost no time or effort and lots more to build a solid foundation that you can scale up whenever you want.

With all that value, at $7.50 it’s not hard to see this as a good investment in your writing career.

Disclosure: I received a review copy of Going the Half Hog and I like it so much that if you click on the links below and buy it, I might earn a few cents.

Check out Going The Half Hog: Freelance Writing Without Marketing (or the Kindle edition) on Amazon.com

Check out Going the Half Hog: Freelance Writing Without Marketing (or the Kindle Edition) on Amazon.co.uk

I’ve never been very good with forums. I always like the idea, join, participate for a while and then virtually abandon them. But one new forum has changed all that. It’s called About Writing Squared and it’s run by Lori Widmer and Anne Wayman. It’s the home of the Five Buck Forum because it costs five dollars a month to be a member.

Is it worth it? You bet your booties it is!

Here are three of the things I like most about it.

A Friendly Space for Writers

Let’s start with the feel of it. It is a friendly space where you can interact with experienced writers who are happy to share their knowledge on any issue that troubles you. In the time I’ve been on the forum we have talked about dealing with clients, marketing, top blog lists and a range of other topics. The writers in this forum are generous people who have an opinion on practically everything and aren’t afraid to share it.

Share Your Stuff

Second, there’s a thread specifically for sharing your latest blog posts. At the very least, other members of the forum will visit and they will often comment and share as well. This is not a place to share everything you have ever written but it’s a great place to share the good stuff, especially if it’s related to writing. Often you’ll get a whole other discussion going on on the forum which will help you think about your topic in a new way and may even give you ideas for other blog posts.

Rant or Rave About Writing

Third, we all have those days when we feel frustrated or need to rant. The forum provides a safe place to do that. And it’s also a great place for sharing successes. Lori and Anne also provide members only specials on all their books, monthly conference calls, webinars as well as lists of  high-paying writing markets (land one gig and you could cover your forum membership for a couple of years) and a weekly tip that will help you to improve your writing business.

I visit the forum almost every day because I know I will find information from fellow freelance writers whom I respect that will be relevant, useful and may even make me smile . It’s simply a great writer hangout. Check it out and see for yourself.

Well, I know you’re probably not ready for another list post after that mega list of writing links I posted yesterday, but I’ve been meaning for a while to share with you some of the tools I use online. You probably already know that I’m a knowledge collector and experimenter with shiny new web stuff. In my bookmarks, I include a ‘tools on test’ folder, which is all the stuff I’m trying out. What’s more important, however, is my ‘tools I use’ folder and I’m sharing some of those tools with you today.

Five Top Tools for Writers and Bloggers

Every Time Zone

Every Time Zone tells you what time it is in every time zone in the world. I work and collaborate with clients and bloggers in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, South Africa and more and I’m hopeless at working out what time it is in different places. This tool does it for me. I also take advantage of the multiple clocks functionality in Windows 7, so I can see at a glance local time, Eastern time and European time (those are the ones I need most often.

Online Stopwatch

Online Stopwatch is a simple way of timing a job. I like the fact that I can pause it if I take a break to make a phone call or look something up online. Sometimes I use it to make sure I’m keeping to the time I’ve allocated for a job. Time is money, after all, and I need to make sure that when I quote, I am accurately reflecting my time investment.

Workflowy

Workflowy bills itself as a ‘brain organizer’ and it’s true that it works well with my creative process. It’s a planning tool. I outlined one of the ways I use it in Book Planning with Workflowy on the Authopublisher blog.

Copyscape

Copyscape. I really couldn’t do my job without this plagiarism checking tool. It’s a good way of checking that posts offered to me haven’t been plagiarized or that content written by a new team member has not over-relied on research sources. (Believe me, that has happened, and Copyscape allows me to send it back for revision before it gets anywhere near a client). I’m an honest person and this ensures that anything that leaves my desk (even if not written by me) or is published on my blog meets my ethical standards.

Trunk.ly

Trunk.ly is a great way to save all the stuff I share. I know people rave about Evernote, and I have flirted with Springpad, but Trunk.ly makes it easy. I just link in my blogs and social media accounts and it aut0matically collects the stuff that I share and presents it in an easily accessible format. There’s a bookmarklet, too, for on the fly tagging and saving of research sources. Update: Since I wrote this, Trunk.ly has been acquired by Delicious, so I’m on the lookout for a replacement.

One Trick Ponies

There are a few other tools I use that do one thing well. I probably use these a couple of times a month.

• Replace smart quotes with straight quotes – useful to avoid that ugly Microsoft Word gobbledygook in posts.
• Remove line breaks
• Strip HTML tags
• Aspect ratio calculator – useful for working out how to resize images or videos to fit a particular height or width.

So these are some of the tools that support my writing. I hope you find them useful, and if you have any favorite tools, please share in the comments. I’m always ready to try something useful.

(Image: scjody)

As part of my never-ending quest to learn new things, I recently signed up for Enhanced Freelance, a new course/forum run by Thursday Bram and Jennifer Kentmere. I asked them both to tell me more.

Jen, Thursday, can you give us a snapshot of your background?

Jen: I trained in management, specifically project management, in the public sector in the UK – I did one of those shiny graduate development schemes where you get parachuted into different departments and thrown head-first into projects. I learned a lot but it wasn’t for me. I started my own business in 2008, and marketed myself to small business owners who needed help organising their businesses. Now I mainly write, but I still put my ‘consultant hat’ on from time to time.

Thursday: I freelanced all through college, but after I graduated from college, I figured that I had better get one of those real jobs that everyone seems so enthusiastic about. I started searching for a job that would let me keep using my writing skills. I actually found one of those jobs after just a few weeks of looking. But I hated every minute of it — I lasted less than a week before quitting.

So I went back to freelancing. It took me a little while to ramp up to a full-time income (maybe eighteen months to match what I would make working full-time for an employer), but I’ve been so much more happy without having to deal with an employer.

What’s your logline/elevator pitch?

EnhancedFreelance gives freelancers the help we need to up our game.

What makes Enhanced Freelance different from every other writing course and forum out there?

Thursday: EnhancedFreelance is different from the forums that we’ve used and participated in over the years — first of all, we’re geared more towards freelancers who have been in business for a little while. We’re not here to get people started as freelancers so much as help freelancers move forward. We’re also geared very much towards building better marketing and business practices. We’re open to all freelancers, not just writers, because there isn’t a lot of intermediate or advanced level information available for freelancers in general.

What’s the one thing you hope an experienced freelancer will get from Enhanced Freelance?

Thursday: One of the big things that I want experienced freelancers to get from EnhancedFreelance is the ability to implement a lot of these strategies a lot faster — it’s not impossible to go out and try out each of the strategies we talk about on your own. I know that because for the past several years, I’ve done exactly that. But trial and error can be expensive in terms of both time and money and I know I would have loved resources that would have let me skip that.

Jen: I’d like it if members felt they had a new focus for the way they do business, particularly if they’ve felt a bit stuck in a rut, which will either allow them to make more money in the same amount of hours, or to be able to get back some work/life balance.

Do you have a vision for Enhanced Freelance? What is it? 

Jen: I love the idea of a community where we can all get together and inspire each other. I already have a handful of freelancing friends who do this, I’d love to be able to replicate that with our members.

Why are you limiting the numbers/closing applications so soon?

Jen: We want to focus on the members we have and make sure we can give them all the attention they would expect. We’re a new site, so we want to ask for feedback from existing members to make sure we are doing things right before opening it up again in the future.

Thursday: We’re planning to reopen on a regular schedule to add new members as we can integrate them and support them. That, of course, has to be balanced with adding new content to the members’ area.

I’ve been a member of Enhanced Freelance for a few days now and can confirm that it has great articles and worksheets on several aspects of running a freelance business. These help you to work through the issues you face so your business will improve. The course will be closing to new members on October 21, so if you want to be in at the start, check out Enhanced Freelance now! (Yes, I signed up as an affiliate because I know Thursday’s work well and have followed her for years. Here’s my disclosure.)

Do you want to have a location independent business, but have no idea where to start? Would you like a sustainable business that lets you help others and see the world too? If you’ve been waiting for something to help you make the leap, then you’re in luck. Brooke Ferguson of Business Backpacker has launched the Business Backpacker Video Course  to help you do just that. Here’s what Brooke has to say about the course:

This program is different than anything you’ve ever seen.  The program you’ll learn here is 100% Sustainable, Repeatable, and continually builds upon itself.  The knowledge you will gain in this program will help you attain everything you want right now, and show you how to continually redesign your life to get better and better results.

Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?  But it gets better! One lucky reader can win the whole course for FREE! (Thanks, Brooke.)

Since I like to keep things simple, all you have to do to enter is leave a comment below saying why you’d like to win the course and how you think it can help you to achieve your lifestyle and business goals.

In seven days’ time – on October 8 – I’ll randomly pick one person to get the course. So don’t wait. Check out the Business Backpacker Video Course and leave your comment below to win!

Update:  We have a winner – Allena Tapia – congrats!

I’m always a bit sceptical about tools that claim to improve your grammar and, as a result, your writing. Maybe that’s because I’m a professional writer with an excellent command of the language and its rules. (I even know when it’s OK to break them.) But I couldn’t help but be intrigued by Grammarly, which claims to be ‘the world’s most accurate grammar checker’, so I decided to check it out. After all, it couldn’t possibly be worse than Microsoft Word’s tool, could it?  According to the site, 300,000 students as well as international business people and bloggers are using it to provide:

• 150+ Grammar Checks – Check your text for the proper use of advanced grammar rules. Get accurate error explanations.
• Plagiarism Detection – Find borrowed text before it gets you into trouble. Automatically generate references.
• Vocabulary Enhancement – Use words that make an impact. Liven up your sentences and improve readability with context-optimized word choice suggestions.
• Contextual Spell Check – Spot correctly spelled words used in the wrong context. No more embarrassing typos like then-than, to-two-too, lose-loose.

It can also check citations, and features an in-line editor.

Grammarly in Action

Here’s what happened when I put it to the test.

I pasted a 900 word blog post into the checking window, selected ‘blog post’ as the type of content I was checking, pressed the review button and waited a short time. It found 53 issues, each of which had a pop up card with short and long explanations of the grammar point being flagged. You could even vote on whether the information was useful before moving on. How many of those did I agree with? Here are the notes I made as I was going along.

• Incorrectly saw the ‘in’ in LinkedIn as a preposition at the end of a sentence – perhaps that needed to be added to the dictionary.
• Pronouns – though I didn’t agree with the error it highlighted, it indicated that I could have omitted one pronoun.
• In one sentence, it didn’t pick up that picture was being used as a verb and flagged it incorrectly.
• Grammarly correctly found one missing comma around the phrase ‘of course’.
• Then to the spell check – it didn’t recognize blogging ( in this day and age, come on! ) but at least it offered the option to assume the word was correct.
• Did plain text need a hyphen? Perhaps!
• It didn’t pick up my bullets on copy and paste so incorrectly flagged lower case letters.
• Some people might find the tips on word choice helpful, but didn’t do much for me. When I described something as beautiful, that’s what I meant, not beauteous, divine or lovely.
• Perhaps where I used good, I could have replaced it with brilliant or nifty.

Out of 53 issues, I agreed with 3 or 4, and I loved the ability to save the grammar report as a PDF.

Testing Academic Grammar

My second test was with a dissertation excerpt ( the other categories are academic essay, report, book review, research paper, presentation and business document). It found very few errors, disliked the use of square brackets and ignored Harvard referencing which is common in UK academic institutions. However, it did give examples of how to fix the references using three forms of referencing common in the US. This would be extremely useful to students, who often struggle with this area.

I performed the test again on a piece of writing I knew was flawed (I won’t say who it came from) and it correctly identified spelling and punctuation errors (though I would have loved to see some word choice suggestions. For this person, who struggles to write clearly, Grammarly definitely has some potential benefits.

Good Grammarly Features

Things I liked about Grammarly included:

• being able to see a summary report with one click – there’s a link at the top of the screen
• as much or as little explanation of errors as you can cope with
• the plagiarism checker – I checked this with a post I knew had been scraped and correctly identified it as 100% plagiarized, though it didn’t find the original source
• the fact that you can choose from several different types of documents.
• the ability to ask questions about grammar points from the review screen via a pop up form – answers appear on http://answers.grammarly.com/
• the online grammar handbook – http://handbook.grammarly.com/
• the grammar checker is better than the one in Microsoft Word, in my opinion

Who is Grammarly for?

Most of the writers I know write too well to need a tool like Grammarly, but as a teacher, I knew plenty of students and beginning writers who could have used the help. Like other tools of the type, Grammarly isn’t a substitute for knowing the rules yourself, but if you’re a poor writer, it can help you improve. A year’s subscription will set you back $7.95 a month, but there are 20% increases for quarterly and monthly plans.

When I got the email asking me to take a look at the Blog Headline Action Guide and Toolkit (aff) (by Jered Slusher and Jean Sarauer), I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did. In some ways, you could say the information it contains is common sense, but if you are starting your blog and want to draw your readers in, this is a good resource. It’s also pretty useful for bloggers who are feeling out of ideas and creative spark.

What’s Inside

Here’s the first part of the table of contents:

• Why Strong Headlines Increase Traffic, Subscribers, and Sales
• The Essentials of Irresistible Headlines
• 9 Simple Steps to Writing a Great Headline
• How to Evaluate & Transform Your Headlines

The first section of the book takes you through all the places where your blog headline will be seen, from search engines to status updates and more. It explains why it’s essential to use your headlines to draw readers’ and sharers’ attention when there is so much competition.

In part two, the authors highlight some headline writing techniques, citing examples from a wide range of blogs. There’s also a box at the end with the takeaways from those two sections. Part three gives you a 9-step headline writing process, making key points about identifying your reader, making them interested and checking that you’re not making any unsubstantiated claims. Part four picks apart some headlines, using a ‘hot or not’ formula, providing some additional lessons on which headlines work and why.

Taking Action on Blog Headlines

As usual with books of this type, I find the toolkit section most useful. It includes worksheets to allow you to put all the principles in the book into practice:

• Headline Writing Tip Sheet
• The Headline Checklist…
• 9-Step How to Write a Headline
• 5-Step Headline Transformation…

and, best of all:

• 175 Sure-Fire Headline  Formulas

Is It Useful?

I think the value that this book brings is collecting information about headline writing in one handy place. It also gives good guidance for people that struggle with headline writing. Is it worth the $27 price tag? That’s really your call. At the moment, that price includes monthly headline training updates and a 1-on-1 email consultation, so it looks like a good deal to me. If you’re still unsure, perhaps this interview with Jered will help you decide. As for me, I plan to use the Blog Headline action Guide the next time I’m feeling short of headline writing inspiration.

Coming soon: Jered Slusher reviews the headlines on Get Paid to Write Online and assesses why one headline in particular works well.

by Courtney Ramirez

Successful content writing is about two things – using the right keywords and creating engaging content. And the second part is where research can really stump you. There are dozens of ways to find the right keywords and in many cases your client is providing them. But where do you go to find great research to create engaging, compelling and (most importantly) accurate content?

The truth is – it can be hard. With websites like ehow.com and other content farms paying writers a pittance to produce keyword rich content, even the simplest of keyword searches can produce poorly written, barely researched and inaccurate information. It’s gotten to the point where the first page of Google is completely unreliable for some keyword terms.

In addition, it can often be hard to get information from the right perspective that fits your client’s needs and individual perspective. Take global warming for instance. If you’re working on an article from a client that is coming from a conservative point of view, how are you going to find the right resources that support that view?

Fortunately, there’s a new search engine that has solved both of these problems for me, and I hope you get a lot of mileage out of it as well. It’s called Blekko.com and despite the funny name (it reminds me of trying to give my kids medicine) it has some great features that make it an excellent research tool for writers who care about accuracy and perspective.

Blekko.com is good for search for two specific reasons. First, it is being heralded as the world’s first “spam free” search engine. The team at Blekko actively works to eliminate spam from their results. In fact, they have completely banned a list of 20 sites from their search engine results that are considered to be content farms (see the list). This reduces my search time significantly because I don’t have to wade through dozens of results from AnswerBag and other similar sites. If you see a site in the listing that isn’t appropriate, you can click the “spam” link and it will be removed from your personal search results.

On top of this, Blekko categorizes results with what it calls “slashtags” – these take a little getting used to but are really helpful when you get the hang of it. A slashtag is a way of classifying information within the search. So for our “global warming” search, we’d use “global warming/conservative” and Blekko pulls up a list of results from websites with a conservative point of view. The same goes for /liberal or /ecofriendly.

Slashtags can also help you organize information by date, which is critical if your content is related to a specific event and you need to get the latest. Other slashtags can be used to narrow down your results to specific websites (like /youtube if you want to see videos on the topic).

Finally, Blekko makes search easier for me because I can create a customized list of my own slashtags with websites and resources that I prefer to use. While I haven’t used this feature as much, I look forward to exploring it more.

There’s a lot of bad content online – so it’s important to choose your sources wisely for creating the original and engaging content that your clients are looking for. Give Blekko a try and it might make your writing process easier. Be sure to watch the intro video and you’ll be using slashtags like a pro in no time.

Courtney Ramirez is owner and head copywriter at Six Degrees Content, where she blogs about content marketing and connecting with search engines and readers. Follow her on Twitter @CourtneyRamirez or @6DegreesContent.

Are you using a client questionnaire? I’ve been using one for a few months now and Taylor’s post on How To Please Your Client Every Single Time reminded me that I’d planned to tell you more about it. Like many writers, I’d been running my writing business by asking clients about their requirements, but I created this list of questions from scratch every time. That’s just not efficient. If you have to ask your new clients the same questions before you start a job, it makes much more sense to keep them all together in one place.

Researching Writing Client Questionnaires

That decided, I set off to find out what should be in my questionnaire. I found some great resources such as How To Extract The Facts with a Web Design Client Questionnaire on Freelance Switch. Although this is aimed at web designers, I thought it offered a lot of useful pointers for any freelance service provider. Section 1 of Smashing Magazines big list of useful web design checklists also provided some food for thought. Although I don’t remember seeing it at the time, Noupe’s tips on creating the perfect client questionnaire are also helpful. Those lists are intended to help you create your own questionnaire, so that’s just what I did, adding a couple other useful things I’d thought of or seen around.

My Writing Questionnaire

My questionnaire has four sections: contact information, company background, about the project and budget/finance. The first section is pretty straightforward, but includes questions on the client’s time zone (useful for all of us location independent people) and the best way to contact the client. In the background section, I ask clients to describe their company, how they differ from their competitors, how they want to be seen/found by customers and how they solve their customers’ problems.

Project Details

The biggest section deals with the project they are hiring me for. I ask about content and word count, where they plan to use the content, who they are trying to reach and what they want the content to do. I ask about tone, deadline, how the work should be delivered and who I should contact with queries. A key question is what the client thinks is most important about the project – this gives me a steer on what to emphasize. I also ask about how often the client needs to be updated on progress.

Finishing Touches

Finally, I ask about the client’s budget and how they plan to pay, with my payment terms and outline contract terms at the end. This means no new client has to ask about how to pay – the only question is where.

The questionnaire is just two pages and it has proved to be extremely useful. Not only do I get a lot of information about the current writing job, but I can also offer clients advice on other services that might help them to achieve their aims.

(Photo credit)

Not one finger touched the keyboard in the making of this post. Instead, I dictated the post using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. This is not the first time I have used the software. I first tried Dragon NaturallySpeaking back in the early 1990s. I was writing a dissertation and I wanted to save myself some time and trouble by dictating it. It wasn’t that successful. The software did not recognise my speech very easily, it took weeks to train and I spent so much time making corrections that it would have been easier just to type it out. So I was intrigued to see what would happen this time around.

Installation and setup

It only took a couple of minutes to install the files, set up my microphone and do a couple of other housekeeping tasks. Then I started the training process. To my surprise, it was extremely quick. It took no more than 5 to 10 minutes to read through the training file, which also gave some handy tips on how to use the software. Once it had saved my voice files, I was ready to start using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I decided to put it to the test initially by dictating a paragraph or so see how accurate it was. I was pleasantly surprised by how easily Dragon recognised my voice, coped with my UK turns of phrase and generally got it right. There were very few errors. Once I had finished dictating, I closed down the program and it saved my updated voice files. This process enables Dragon NaturallySpeaking to learn and to improve accuracy over time.

Putting Dragon to the test

Then I decided to give it a real test by dictating this post. To get started I clicked on the microphone and the Dragon bar, opened Windows live writer and began to dictate. You can see the results for yourself. While there were a couple of minor errors, I didn’t spend any more time correcting those than I would have done had I typed out the entire post. I would say that I had to make no more than five corrections in this post of more than 800 words.

Mastering voice commands

One area that can be tricky to master is the use of voice commands. These can be used to handle standard program functions, though the standard version of the software does not allow commands for all programs. For example, when I dictate text into Microsoft Word not only is it easy for me to create new lines and new paragraphs, but I can also save documents, format text, create bulleted lists and more. When dictating in Windows live writer however telling the program to save did not work.

Old issues resolved

When I originally bought Dragon NaturallySpeaking, one of the things that annoyed me was how long it took to start the software and how slow it made my computer. Neither of these issues applies now. Another issue that has been sorted out is that the program no longer interprets every breath as a potential word. That means I can take time to think without having to turn the microphone off. That said, the microphone is very sensitive so if you fumble your words by dictating everything that it thinks you have said will appear.

Useful features for writers

There are far too many features in this program for me to list them all in this review, so I have tried to focus on the ones that writers will find most useful. For example, you can import documents so that the program becomes familiar with the phrases you usually write. You can change the program mode to allow you to focus on numbers or spelling. You can correct certain words to help the program understand your local accent.

Health benefits for writers

There is also a lot of additional functionality in other versions of the program, such as the ability to run your whole computer without having to type anything. Even with the standard version that I am running I can see the possibility of reducing the amount of typing that I do — and this is one way in which I see the software being particularly useful for writers. If you are suffering from the occupational hazards of wrist strain, tendinitis or RSI, using Dragon NaturallySpeaking means that you will be able to keep working — or writing — without impairing your health. (Of course, you may find that you drink a lot more. I don’t know about you, but I don’t spend a lot of time talking when in my home office.)

The verdict

If you are the kind of writer who thinks faster than you can type, Dragon NaturallySpeaking will certainly be useful. It is worth learning the voice commands that work with each program as this will make you even more efficient. But even without those you can use Dragon NaturallySpeaking effectively. My verdict, one day of use, is overwhelmingly positive (which is why I’ve signed up for their affiliate program). If this is what you get after only five minutes of training then I am looking forward to seeing how the program improves after days and months of use.

If you have ever used Dragon NaturallySpeaking or other speech recognition software, then please share your experience in the comments. And if you have specific questions that I haven’t covered in this review, please feel free to ask.