TIP: A Horribly Easy Way to Find and Write Real-World Examples

JOSourcing

Regular Member
Joined
May 19, 2011
Messages
229
Reaction score
87
For me, one of the easiest ways to meet a specified word count is to provide real-world (i.e. news-related) examples of whatever I'm writing about. One day, the writing gods revealed an interesting vision while I was checking my "go-to" resource for such examples: Google's News RSS feed.

Check it out: https://news.google.com/rss?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en

Do you see what I see?

Some of you might see nothing more than a bunch of news articles. I see a goldmine of pre-outlined paragraphs that could be re-formatted as meaningful examples.

Take another look at that feed, but this time look for a topic and its supporting sentences -- the things that make a paragraph. Example:

wSt9DBJ

As you can see, the topic sentence is already bolded and the supporting sentences are already numerated for you.

People -- that's a framework for a paragraph. And if I wanted to, I could work that framework into a paragraph and stick it into an article as an example of SalesForce's intention to compete with Microsoft.

Like this:

"Despite stocks dropping after its announcement to buy Tableu (see sentence #3), SalesForce's $15.3 billion purchase shows it's serious about growing beyond the cloud (see sentence #1). In an all-stock deal, the company purchased the data visualization company (see sentence #2) in June 2019. This puts Salesforce on a competitive road with both Microsoft and Oracle (see sentence #5)."
I don't know about you, but to me, that's a nice 53-word count bump.
 
Hey thanks, as someone just starting out, I really appreciate this. Do you know of a way to get an rss result like this for a custom search term?
 
Hey thanks, as someone just starting out, I really appreciate this. Do you know of a way to get an rss result like this for a custom search term?

You can use Google Alerts to create an RSS feed on any topic, but I've noticed that the results don't always provide a nice, enumerated list like the one above.
 
Back
Top