The Writing Jobs

Writing a records and information management (RIM) request for proposal (RFP) can be a significant undertaking that will require resources from many different departments, including those responsible for original documents, records management, support areas such as IT, and key stakeholders with corporate compliance and budget responsibility.

An RFP effort will typically begin when a department identifies a need. For example, the IT department may be assigned to research and implement a records management system (RMS) that will work seamlessly with existing document creation software, as well as with existing paper records. The business requirements that are driving the project may involve compliance with regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), as well as with accounting issues.

Planning should begin with understanding the variables that may exist for the RIM opportunity. These are only a few of the questions that should be asked during the planning stage to help the organization understand what technologies will be required for an RMS and what solutions may be possible.

AMS: Let's talk about Edinburgh first of all. We both write about the same place, but in different ways. John Rebus's Edinburgh is a relatively bleak, dark place.

Why do you focus on that side to the city?

IR: I think of Edinburgh being a Jekylland-Hyde place -- with an elegant, beautiful, rational new town and a higgledypiggledy, slightly chaotic, half-buried old town. It's an absolutely brilliant setting for a crime novel because it almost seems as if there's a dark side to the geography, not just to the criminals' characters.

Unfortunately, many white papers are difficult to digest and come across as though slightly ‘nerdy-types’, locked in research labs, prepared them with very little consideration for their readers.

So, if you’re about to write your first white paper, here are a few golden rules to follow...

Spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in your technical content will reflect poorly on your company. In some cases it may even lose you potential customers. So, good editing and proofreading is an important aspect of all good technical content writing. So, before you publish a new or revised article on your technical site, you should remember to take time to double-check your work. In today’s world when mistakes are really costly, you need to proof read the articles for your technical site carefully to ensure that there are no embarrassing errors in it.

While, technical content proofreading make sure that all the quotation marks and parentheses are in place. Another thing to check is the punctuation. Is punctuation spaced consistently? And, for technical content, you should not double-space the sentences like it’s normally done in traditional typing. Also, make sure that the page numbers in the Table of Contents match the locations of the articles? It would be embarrassing for you, not to mention annoying for the browser if the page numbers in the table of contents don’t match the location of the articles.

Rejection is never easy. But some authors can't separate themselves from their work, and take rejection letters very personally. I get many emails from disgruntled writers who can't get past their anger to figure out why their work was turned down in the first place. So before you spend hours sticking pins in your editor voodoo doll, see if you recognize yourself below:

The complaint: "Editors practice age discrimination. I'm over 50 and editors believe only young authors can write for children."

The truth: Editors are interested in finding good books, period. It doesn't matter how old the author is. Take a look at the lists of award winners (ask your librarian, or do an Internet search for Caldecott or Newbery Awards) and note the ages of the authors. Many didn't start writing until their kids were in school full time, or took up writing as a second career. Editors also know that the best stories come from years of life experience, and older writers have more to draw from. Yes, occasionally a book written by a teenager will make the news, but more often than not it's the novelty of the author's age that gets the publicity, not the quality of the writing. And why does the editor know your age in the first place? There's no reason to mention it in your cover or query letter, unless it has direct bearing on the story. If you're writing historical fiction and you actually lived through the events in the plot, or your nonfiction book is based on years of study in the subject, then your age is a plus.