Do you know how to touch type? I mean, are you really good at it?

If you are, then keyboarding can be your ticket to a good full time or part time job. Many entry-level jobs require touch typing skills, so improving your touch typing won’t hurt your career, no matter what field you want to work in.

There are numerous jobs you can easily get if your typing performance is above average.

Administrative/ Executive Assistant

50-60wpm

At this typing level you can get an administrative assistant position. Of course, you will probably also need other technological and managerial skills – think about brushing up your skills in language(s), Internet and Microsoft Office knowledge, or CRM and other common software products.

Responsibilities of this job include creating documents and reports, filing, customer support, and administrative support such as setting up meetings or client appointments. The position can even include social media account management.

Editor / Language Specialist

60-80wpm

At this typing speed and with a passion for language you could get a job as an editor at a publishing house, a magazine, an online newspaper, or any other print or digital media agency. The proliferation of digital media companies that publish their own content makes editors a sought-after profession these days.

Your daily duties will include various levels of editing and proofreading of books, articles, white papers, and all other sorts of content. You need to have an eye for detail and good typing speed and accuracy, so that you can both spot and correct grammar and spelling mistakes.

Medical Transcriptionist

80-100wpm

If you have advanced typing skills you could become a medical transcriptionist. The profession is always short of staff and if you’re into medicine it could be the perfect entry level job for you.

A medical transcriptionist transcribes medical and legal recordings of busy doctors. While you need to be familiar with the doctor’s specialty, the profession doesn’t require any other skills, other than good typing skills and excellent language use.

Data Entry Worker

80-90wpm

Data entry is a non-demanding job you can easily excel at if you have above average touch typing skills. It can be a bit tedious and uninspiring, so you may not want to make it your career, but as an entry level job it could work great for getting you exposed to corporate culture. You can become a freelance data entry clerk too, working from the comfort of your own home, if the corporate world doesn’t sound very appealing to you.

Legal Assistant

60wpm

At 60wpm you can become a legal secretary or paralegal. You will get to draft legal documents, do extensive research, and get to work in an exciting environment with challenging cases.

As a college student, and during your first steps into the job market, touch typing could be the key to landing you your first well-paying job.

If you want to improve your typing accuracy and speed you can try practicing with Typesy™, a typing tutor that makes learning to keyboard a breeze thanks to its step by step video tutorials and customizable typing practice.

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People who’ve suffered and survived a traumatic brain injury (TBI) can see tremendous improvement after the event with the help of speech and language therapists. The recovery process might seem long and tedious, but with the guidance and scientific rigor provided by a speech therapist, the recovery comes faster. The results can often astonish both the recovering person and their family.

Coping with lost or damaged language skills after a TBI accident

One of the most stressful issues TBI survivors need to grapple with is their difficulty with verbal communication. Some find themselves with speech deficits and mild to serious cognitive impairment after a TBI accident. This not only is mentally and emotionally frustrating but it also disrupts most of the TBI survivor’s daily activities.

Common language issues include the inability to recall the appropriate word or follow through with a discussion, difficulty understanding written language, and having unusual trouble in reading, spelling, and using language efficiently.

For many people, this difficulty in communicating is aggravated due to physical limitations, again result of the acquired brain injury. Many TBI survivors are left with facial deformities that affect their mouth and lips and make speech troublesome, or make them self-conscious about trying to speak.

When TBI affects language performance, language therapists offer a systematic solution for gradual rehabilitation.

Evaluating language challenges

A language and speech therapist will first identify the linguistic skills brain injury has affected. This gives a clear picture of the situation, and the language therapist and the survivor’s relatives can use it to decide what the best course of action is.

Addressing language challenges in TBI survivors

For TBI survivors with extensive brain damage, language and speech therapists often focus on training relatives and friends to understand the survivor’s minimal or challenged communication output.

At the same time, the TBI person learns practices that help them communicate mostly through sensory and auditory output with their environment, if verbal communication is out of the question.

Another issue speech and language therapists immediately attend to is offering comfort and peace of mind to the TBI person. They offer psychological relief and support to help them get rid of their bewilderment with their acquired limitations.

Regaining basic cognitive and linguistic skills

For TBI survivors with mild damage, speech therapists aim at recuperating basic skills:

– Clear, understandable speech
– Putting together thoughts and expressing them, recalling arguments in conversation
– Problem solving and decision making
– Improving memory performance
– Improving literacy skills such as vocabulary use and spelling

With expert and systematic guidance TBI survivors can in many situations fully recover and regain their cognitive and speech skills.

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In the summer of 2014, Facebook conducted a fun literature experiment. Facebook asked people to list the top ten books that have moved them in some way.

The status game was popular and the results were quite revealing. The 100 books that Facebook users loved and were most affected by were Harry Potter (with a 21.08% appearance rate in Facebook statuses) and second-place To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee, which had a 14.48% appearance rate.

Facebook decided to aggregate data from other non-English speaking countries too, and so the results now reflect what people in other countries and other languages most appreciate in the realm of literature – no matter the translation.

Italy

The Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling

Cent’anni di solitudine – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Il ritratto di Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

Orgoglio e pregiudizio – Jane Austen

Il signore degli anelli – J.R.R. Tolkien

France

The Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling

Le petit prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Ça – Stephen King

Le seigneur des anneaux – J.R.R. Tolkien

Les fleurs du mal – Charles Baudelaire

India

The Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling

The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho

The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini

The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

Mexico

Cien años de soledad – Gabriel García Márquez

El principito – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Harry Potter – J.K. Rowling

El perfume – Patrick Süskind

Aura – Carlos Fuentes

Facebook Statuses and Literary Predilections

J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series dominate other countries’ lists besides the American and British readerships. It’s an epic series that has and continues to have a universal, sweeping appeal across the globe irrespective of the readers’ age, occupation, gender, and social status.  Even if some people tried to stick a”Young Adult” genre label to it, this didn’t stop it from inspiring millions of readers of all ages.

The  Facebook list also reflects the extensive popularity of authors like Jane Austen, George Orwell, J. R. R. Tolkien, F. Scott Fitgerald, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Stephen King.

Books are a very personal matter. They help us unearth new worlds and explore imaginary kingdoms, they are our companions, our teachers, our friends and our supporters. Books move, surprise and make us wiser. They also stay with us forever. We never forget our favorite heroes. Instead, we pay a visit to them every now and then by re-reading their story and re-living it with them as an homage.

Have any of these books listed above moved you in one way or another? Which books would you add to your top 5 list?

Are you a collector of time assets, or do you find yourself always in debt? Thinking about time as an asset or debt is a unique way of looking at productivity. People often think of productivity as a short-term goal. They’re focused on how to save 10 minutes in the morning by preparing breakfast the night before, or how to shrink a boring office meeting down to 20 minutes only. Although these and other similar strategies are efficient in saving people a couple hours per month, they miss a valuable point. Looking at short-term one-time solutions like this is shortsighted, because in focusing on them we are not taking into consideration how certain actions can save time not just in the present, but also in the future.

When we’re thinking of how to be more productive, how to fit more projects in the twenty-four hours we only get each day, we should be looking at strategies that will save us time for many, many years to come.

“Time as Asset”  (also referred to as Time Asset and Time Debt) is a concept coined by Patrick McKenzie. This approach helps us understand how valuable some productivity-boosting skills truly are.

When you think of ways you can be more productive, it’s best to try and think of more long-term strategies. For instance, it makes more sense to increase your reading speed than it does to skip reading an important report. Increasing your reading speed is an asset; it’s a time asset that will save you many hours over the course of the coming years.

Time Asset: Keyboarding  – How to Cut Down on Typing Time

One way to be more productive in the long run is to improve your typing speed and accuracy. This will substantially reduce your typing time because you will no longer have to look down at your keyboard to locate “C” or to find the shortcut “Ctrl+X”.

Ultimate Typing™ is a program that will help you pay off your typing time debt and help you increase your typing time assets. Over the years, you will save hundreds of hours of typing, just by committing yourself to improving this one skill today.

Time Asset: Reading – How to Cut Down on Reading Time

We read for work, for pleasure, for education, for keeping up with the world. One time asset you should be looking at investing in is reading. Reading efficiently means you can stay on top of developments and new knowledge, and you can be more efficient at any reading-related project, from doing research for a report, to putting together a white paper for a new software release from your company.

By improving your reading speed you will be able to save hundreds of reading hours because bad habits like sub-vocalization and regression won’t be slowing you down. Consider how 7 Speed Reading™ might be the key to improving your productivity, today and for as long as you live.

Time Asset: Language  – Minimize your Language Time Debt

If your spelling and vocabulary are poor, then your productivity more than likely suffers from it. A person with an extended vocabulary and excellent spelling skill is more efficient at writing.

eReflect’s user-friendly software products Ultimate Spelling™ and Ultimate Vocabulary™ help you improve on these two seminal language skills. When you master these skills, you won’t have to rely on thesauruses, dictionaries, and spellcheckers every time you put together a report or have to write your next pitch.

Time as Asset is an excellent way to conceptualize productivity. It takes into consideration a valuable aspect of productivity: that productivity is  an ongoing goal we must think of  as a continuum, rather than a one-time thing we conquer one task at a time.

Millions of people use Wikipedia every day to look up information, and chances are you’re one of them. Since this global resource went on line in 2001, it has grown to be the website everyone turns to first when they want answers to a question about a fact, figure, or statistic. In fact, it has become so common that it’s like breathing oxygen – it’s so much a part of our daily lives that we don’t even think about it any more. That’s why you might be surprised by these five facts about Wikipedia – which you can all find on Wikipedia itself, of course!

Surprising Fact #1: Wikipedia is even more multilingual than you thought.

There are more articles in English (almost 5 million) than in any other language, but when it comes to languages in which more than a million entries have been published, English-language articles make up less than a third of the total. Other top contributors are from authors who speak French, Spanish, Polish, Swedish, or Cebuano, one of the languages used in the Philippines.

And there are even more languages used on Wikipedia when you look at smaller total numbers of articles. Native speakers in Japan, Portugal, and China will all find at least 100,000 articles written in their language, and so will people who live in Norway, Lithuania, and the Basque country of northwest Spain and southwest France.

Surprising Fact #2: Earlier versions of Wikipedia articles are stored, not deleted.

Most people think that an online entry in Wikipedia can’t be trusted because anyone can go in and make changes and edits. While it is true that articles are open to editing, there are also thousands of dedicated editors who watch for people who are making destructive changes, which they call “vandalism.” The website also has automatic subroutines that watch for the same thing happening at the database level. If a page has been tampered with, the previous correct version can be restored.

Surprising Fact #3: Wikipedia is updated thousands of times per hour.

Somewhere in the world, someone is updating a Wikipedia article right now. Actually, there are likely a hundred people editing articles right this very second, and another hundred just started on a different set of article edits and additions. In many categories of information, such as politics and current events, Wikipedia is one of the most up-to-date resources you can find.

Surprising Fact #4: No matter where you start in Wikipedia, you’ll end up on the same page.

The next time you have a few minutes to spare, try this trick:

1. Go to any Wikipedia page, such as eReflect’s Wikipedia page.

2. Find the first internal Wikipedia link on the page (not one that is in parentheses or italics).

3. Click the link. Now look for the first internal link on that new page.

4. Repeat step 3.

More than 90 percent of the time, if you keep clicking on the first internal link of every article, you’ll eventually end up at the Wikipedia page titled “Philosophy.” Now that’s food for thought!

Surprising Fact #5: Wikipedia contains information on anything you can think of – and more.

If you’re interested in learning something new, but you don’t know where to start, you can always type in a random word or phrase in the “search” box at the top of any Wikipedia page. You could also click the “Random Article” link on the left sidebar menu. It’s a great way to get new ideas and inspiration for more reading and research, and you’ll see articles on topics you never even dreamed of, like these:

– the prehistoric South American mammal called Nesodon, which weighed over a ton

a) Big Time, the live album by Tom Waits released in 1988

b) the names of the global rulers and heads of government in 503 AD

c) 19th-century Cuban revolutionary Ignacio Agramonte

A word of warning: using Wikipedia’s “Random Article” link will lead you to entertaining articles and interesting facts, but it can be addictive. There’s always more to learn with just one more click . . .

Most people don’t really want to go back to work in the office after a nice relaxing vacation, and for many of them one of the main reasons is the huge backlog of e-mail messages waiting for them. With all of the e-mails coming in every day it’s necessary to make sure you don’t waste time on the ones that aren’t important, but that you do get the most out of the messages containing the information that you need. To save time and get through your inbox in the most efficient way, try these useful tips:

Start using keyword searches. Even if you’ve got 50 e-mails from the same department, they might not all be about the same thing. Do a quick keyword search using a term that you know is likely to be in the messages that you need to see – for example, the word project or meeting. If you’re working on something specific with a group, pick a term that relates to your current task, such as upgrade or rollout. The most timely messages should pop to the top of the list, and the messages about the upcoming birthday potluck will fall to the bottom.

Identify key collaborators. Many e-mail services allow you to set up different groups and assign people to those groups. If you can identify the people whose messages you almost always need to read right away, you can put them in one or two separate groups, and go to those messages first.

Stay away from the crowds. While there might be company-wide e-mails sent out that you do need to read, many people use the “send to all” feature much more often than they need to. You’ll probably be able to immediately see whether you’re one of a hundred others on an e-mail list, and just by looking at the number of people who received the message you’ll get an idea if you’ve been sent the message for no particular reason other than that you’re in someone’s e-mail address book.

Highlight the important information. If you can use your e-mail service to automatically assign a color flag to certain senders or keywords you’ll have an easy way to visually sort through your inbox before you go any further. You’ll be able to quickly spot the red-flagged or urgent messages and handle those first.

Let the system do the sorting. This might be something you need to work with a systems administrator on, but it’s likely that there is a way for you to set up folders and have the e-mail system automatically route messages into those folder, either by keyword topic or by sender. In addition, you can make sure that people who you need to communicate with by e-mail set up their systems to use the same method, and your folder will serve as the go-to spot for all of your e-mails, so that they don’t get lost among the hundreds of others you receive in your main mailbox.

The apostrophe has two main functions.

The first is to show omission of letters and the second is to show possession, which is what we’ll look at here.

Using the apostrophe to indicate possession

It’s easy when you write about the dog’s dinner; the man’s stunningly beautiful wife, Lavinia; Lavinia’s personal trainer, Lars, and so on.

It starts to get tricky (for Lavinia’s husband and for us) when we get to Lars. Is Lavinia Lars’ best client? Could it be that she is Lars’s ticket to that new Porsche he’s had his eye on for some time?

If he was plain old Bill there wouldn’t be a problem — she would be Bill’s best client and the ticket to Bill’s new Porsche.

We’ll assume (rightly, as it happens) that Lavinia is a Lady Who Lunches, and when she does lunch with her friends, they visit a women’s club. It’s not a womens’ club. When a word is made plural by changing some of its interior bits, you don’t make it doubly plural in the possessive.

When a word ends in ‘s’ and an additional syllable is pronounced in the possessive, add apostrophe S (even if you end up with 3 s’s). So you’d have the ladies going to their tennis class before lunch, and Lavinia being very chuffed when her coach, Mr Harris, told her she was the class’s best player. Although it’s difficult to know whether Mr Harris’s opinion is very reliable — he’s a push-over for a pretty face and a flash of a shapely thigh.

When writing about joint ownership, possession is shown only on the last noun, but where individual ownership exists, possession is shown on each noun.

Lavinia and her husband’s new yacht was the venue for a fancy-dress party.

Lavinia’s and Raoul’s sailor suits were a hit with their guests.

T’riffic Tip

The very best way to remember when to use the possessive apostrophe — in any circumstance — is to substitute the word ‘of’ …

The women’s club – the club of the women

Lavinia’s personal trainer – the personal trainer of Lavinia

Her husband’s new yacht – the yacht of her husband

This is also the way you test for those really tricky ones:

three months’ experience – the experience of three months

So, if you’re tempted to use an apostrophe but you can’t substitute “of” … then leave it out!

Banana’s only $2 kilo – the … of … bananas, kilos? … @#!

All these shop’s sell clothes – the … of … shops, clothes? … @#!

OK … you get the message. Don’t just whack in an apostrophe every time you end a word with S!

About the Author: Jennifer Stewart is a freelance writer whose site, http://www.write101.com has been helping people solve their writing problems since 1998. Visit now to read numerous articles on how to write well — for profit or pleasure — and sign up for your free Writing Tips: mailto: WritingTips [email protected]

Social media has become a strategized corporate priority. Businesses of all sorts and sizes are jumping onto the social media marketing bandwagon, some because everyone else is doing it, others because they’ve truly realized the power social media has to offer.

For social media marketing to work, a solid plan has to be in place. Blindingly engaging in social media doesn’t lead anywhere. How are you going to quantify the success of your social media marketing if you don’t know what your milestones are?

Having a social media plan ensures you can engage with your company’s followers, create awareness and visibility around your brand, and hopefully turn more visitors and followers into loyal customers, thereby increasing sales.

Some questions you need to answer for your social media campaigns to be effective are basic. How do you write effective tweets? What’s the best time to post on Facebook? Do you really need to use Instagram too?

Once you’ve got these answers and a content marketing editorial calendar, you need to take into account the following questions:

Should you ever self-promote?

If you have a blog post you want to tweet about, you don’t just create promotional tweets. This is the number one mistake businesses make: using social media as marketers only, and not as end users.

To appeal to your Twitter followers you need to make them feel they’re on the same page as you are, sharing the same concerns and the same tastes. They need to feel you are sharing something because you care, not because your primary goal is to promote your blog and have more people read and comment on it.

That’s why you need to be careful when you repurpose content for social media. You don’t make it “pitchy,” you simply make it useful and shareable.

For instance, don’t say, “Hey! I just published my new post on how to increase productivity. Please share and comment if you like it!”

Try this instead: “Productivity is a state of mind you need to embrace. Are you guilty of these 3 sabotaging habits? Read more here.” A teaser tweet like this doesn’t promote, it educates; it doesn’t sell, it helps.

This is the difference between promotional content and educational content. Your social media marketing should mostly revolve around educational, informative content your users will find helpful and will be eager to engage with.

Do you A/B test your strategy?

What works for a multinational brand won’t work for your 5-employee company. The best way to see what works for you is to test various types of content. Experiment with copy, with audio and video, with infographics, with sweepstakes, and so forth.

See what engages your readers the most. What is making them share and comment, and what leaves them indifferent?

You cannot predict what will work, you need to A/B test it to find out – and then adapt your strategy according to the results.

Do you offer quality content, all the time?

You might waste a lot of money on a promising social media campaign only to realize it didn’t have the expected results. The most common culprit is poor content quality and lack of coherence and direction.

Don’t be present and active on every social network out there, because you’ll be spreading yourself too thin. Pick no more than 3 social networks to engage with, and make sure you give your full attention to your communities there.

Instead of wasting time and resources on being present on all social media, make it mission to offer high-quality, engaging content in just two or three channels. This way your followers will instantly realize you’re dedicated and will be coming back to engage with your brand.

Focusing on only a few social media outlets also has the added benefit of helping to ensure the quality of your content. The less you’re consumed with, the better the outcome.

Ultimately, for a social media marketing campaign to work, it’s all about undivided attention and valuable content that’s fresh. Good luck!

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You want more user engagement. But then, so does everyone else.

What makes a piece of online content shareable? What urges people to comment on and engage with a brand? Is it the images? The tone? What kind of influence do words really have?

One of the most talked-about topics on the subject of creating online content is headlines. There’s an ever-growing body of literature on how to craft the most brilliant, share-worthy headlines, the ones that will prompt your readers to engage with you.

A headline might seem like something you don’t need to waste too much time on, but the truth is that the headline is generally the only thing a reader will read. It’s the headline that makes them decide whether your 1,200-word post is worth their time.

However, even TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) pieces do get shared and commented on, and this is entirely because of an effective headline.

When it comes to crafting your content, word choice for your headlines is the alpha and the omega. Here are a few tips to increase engagement with a few tweaks on how you craft your headlines.

Social Media Matters

There’s no single rule as to what kind of words work well in headlines. According to QuickSprout, words like contest and coupon don’t increase engagement on Facebook.

On the contrary, if you use words like submit, deal, and discount on Facebook you’re more likely to get a lot of shares, likes, and comments.

The important thing to take away here is to tailor your content for each platform and medium. Never use the same copywriting formula across different social media, because it will cost you time and lost earnings.

Not all social media sites are created equal; the demographics and types of consumers who use each can vary widely, and it’s your responsibility to know what resonates with whom, and where.

QuickSprout reports that for Facebook you’re more likely to boost user engagement with words such as these:

When

Tell us

Comment

Post

Would

Inspire

Win

Event

Blacklisted words: contest, promotion, sweepstakes, coupon

Twitter is a completely different realm with different user engagement trigger words. QuickSprout says these are the words to focus on in Twitter:

Help

Retweet

Social

Check out

How to

Please

LinkedIn is a professional social network that calls for a more formal discourse. Words that are more likely to boost engagement in this realm are:

Developed

Improved

Under Budget

Researched and Accomplished

Specific Words To Use In Your Headlines

There’s a lot to learn about the best words to use in your social media content. Be sure to also be aware of meaningless buzzwords you should avoid at all costs.

Knowing what works well with which social network is not enough. You also need words that work well across the board.

The words, you, what, how, and when are among the most popular words in headlines for articles whose content goes viral.

Things Get Personal

Among the most popular words that you will find in a viral headline are the words you (588 instances) and your (202).

This indicates that when headlines directly address the reader they have a better chance of getting shared, retweeted, commented on, and liked by people.

When it comes to headlines, what makes them irresistible? When they’re in the form of a question. Question headlines address the reader directly and this directness makes it hard for a reader to skip over or ignore it.

Take HappyPlace’s popular series of posts that follow the same structure each time:

5 Things You Should At Least Pretend To Know Today

This is a headline that targets people’s need for being “in the know.” To intensify this insecurity, the headline editor makes sure they reference the reader in the headline so that there’s no question who the headline is talking to. Can you resist clicking to read?

Takeaway

Use the words you, your, this, when, what, and how in your headlines whenever possible.

These words take an abstract concept and make it more specific. Using this makes a headline more immediate, specific, and personal. The words when and how can be used to create questions, and
question headlines attract engagement.

Lastly, don’t forget to tailor your headlines for each social network for maximum results.

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