Writers are usually pretty easy to pick out in a crowd. In the younger, hard-scrabble days of winning our first scribbling gigs more out of bloody-minded pluck than actual talent, writers tend to be a bit skinny. As the years and the writing credits pile on, our bellies start sticking out even as our legs petrify into bony sticks.

Our jobs consist of too much sitting at the desk, tapping away on our keyboards as our veins atrophy and our arteries clog.

I was perhaps worse off than my contemporary wordsmiths. My professional sitting-down career combined with a general lack of exercise in my leisure hours. Too much television and video games. Not enough exercise.

By my early thirties, I had a bad case of what Seinfeld called the Jimmy Legs (AKA Restless Leg Syndrome). Not just at night, either — it got so bad this year, I couldn’t sit down at my desk for more than 15 minutes without needing to get up to walk around, stretch, jump, do whatever I could to get the blood flowing and the muscles moving.

So I started working out again. I bought a bike for jaunts down to the seawall. I joined a gym. I gave myself extra time to go places by walking instead of going by car or transit.

My Jimmy Legs got better. In the last couple of months, I was able to sit down for about half an hour before feeling the need to move, which seems to be a lot closer to the normal range of human toleration for stillness. But the feeling wasn’t quite gone. Not completely. It still bothered me.

I had an epiphany. Why was I exercising my ass off just so I could sit down? Would it be so awful for me to stand up? It’s only been normal for people to sit down at work for less than one per cent of human history. Maybe we’re just not built for this.

Maybe the discomfort we feel when we’re sitting down at our desks isn’t just an abnormal physiological twitch; maybe that’s just our bodies telling us, “Hey, dumb-dumb! Just because you’re not hunting big animals on the Savannah doesn’t mean you can treat me this way. You want to live to see 100? Get off your ass!”

So I took a stand.

On a typical weekday morning in my Vancouver condo, I got up and made a bowl of cereal and I ate it standing up. I drank my first cup of coffee of the day standing up. As my wife left for her day job, I prepared to face my workday — something I normally did with my Macbook from the dining table in my living room, or from the table on my balcony if the weather was nice. But I grabbed my computer, set it on top of a bookshelf in the bedroom and propped it up a bit higher with a thick encyclopedia just enough to comfortable typing height. And I set to work, standing up.

I stood and worked for eight hours. Well, not a full eight hours. I took a break for lunch and wandered into the other room to catch a few minutes of the BBC and Star Trek before getting back to my copywriting projects.

Surprisingly, my knees, feet and back held up just fine. In fact, by the time my wife got home from work, I felt great. My Jimmy Legs were now, well, Jonathon Legs. I was back to my old self.

Between standing most of every workday and keeping up my exercise routine, I feel healthier than I’ve been in a long time. I’m also more focused at work. No more twitching, fidgeting, stretching in my chair as I pound out my web copy and sales letters for clients. I’m all business, all the time. Productivity’s shot up.

My Jimmy Legs aren’t completely gone. I still feel the urge to take a quick walk around the corner if I’m sitting down too long with friends at a restaurant or watching a movie with family on the couch. It’s going to take more than a few months of concerted effort to undo more than a decade and a half of damage caused by inactivity. But if my discomfort was a 9 out of 10 before I made these changes in my lifestyle, it’s now at a 2 out of 10.

I get the feeling there are a lot of other writers out there who are in the same situation right now that I was in. Probably, a lot more people who aren’t writers are in the same boat. Your feet are like numb blocks of ice. You have trouble concentrating at work and can’t sleep at night unless you pace the living room first. And you’re sick of it.

Well, people, isn’t it time for you to make a change? Will you take a stand?

Take care of the little things and the big things take care of themselves. When you can’t get the basics right, your customers start wondering about your credibility.

On a related note, I would also recommend staying out of the village of Crestwood if you can avoid it.

Inspired by the enthusiasm of the local non-profit participants, WRITEIMAGE is offering a FREE communications and copywriting consultation for any non-profit in British Columbia, valid until the end of September 2010.

That’s right. This isn’t just for Netsquared Camp participants (though I would certainly like to work with many of them on their worthy causes). If you’re in BC, you get a free consultation of up to one hour on a topic of your choosing related to communications strategy and copywriting for non-profits.

Want to know more about:

• Communications strategy?
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) through your written content?
• Best practices for sending out email newsletters?
• Strategy for press releases and media management?
• How to build web traffic through a blog?
• How to get more leads or donations through strong calls to action?

Contact us to schedule a consultation on communications and content strategies and tactics for your non-profit. Email info [AT] writeimage [DOT] ca or call (604.230.2638).

Now, what precisely happened at N2Camp this weekend? I’ll be giving an overview a bit later, but here I will shamelessly promote my own involvement. Priorities, you understand.

I gave two presentations. One was a case study on how an organization I work with, the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee, used social media and more traditional marketing methods to help change public opinion in Canada.

The second event was a facilitated discussion about the Cost of Social Media. We took input from social media consultants and related contractors as well as from the managers (or people role-playing managers) of various types of organizations. While we did float around some costs for various social media tasks and positions, it’s clear that the compensation for these sorts of jobs will vary widely. That said, I stressed the importance for contractors of at least being able to provide a ballpark figure — simply responding, “that depends” may be realistic and pragmatic, but it’s going to turn off the people willing to buy services.

Overview of N2Camp coming in a bit. Check in later!

Congratulations to Amanda Farough of the violet Minded design blog, who won two tickets to the Neanderthal Arts Festival running from July 21 to August 1 in Vancouver. (Thanks to superblogger John Chow for picking the winner out of the hat!).

My fellow VBM assistant coordinator and Left Right Minds website development god Shane Birley will be in touch so Amanda can claim her prize.

In the meantime, here’s a quick shout out to the participants. Despite admittedly lackluster service and unusually under-par refreshments at our location, I think we all had a good time meeting other creative types, getting introduced to new blogs and learning a bit about how to make our online dreams (well, the G-rates ones, anyway) come true. Cheers to:

Get up, grab Starbucks, go for a walk. Next, sit down for three hours and tap out a few proposals and blog posts for clients.

Eat lunch. Go for another 20-minute walk. Come back and develop a website content site map. Then update some content. It’s end of month, so time to do the bookkeeping.

One more blog post to go.

I’ve been sitting down too much. My ass hurts.

I should go for a walk. Why the hell am I sitting here writing this blog post? No one’s paying me to write on my own blog.

It’s a compulsion.

I shouldn’t complain. I mean, let’s face it: I’ve got a great gig where the odds of getting the black lung are pretty low.

Stewart’s work revolves around making sense of numbers for business. For many businesses, telling a persuasive story with numbers is precisely what’s required for backing up a business case, analyzing areas of opportunity and winning over investors.

Stewart has posted a compelling white paper explaining how financial storytelling works for businesses and other organizations. You can find it on the Financial Storytelling blog. Here’s an excerpt:

One examples of is Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple. Over a number of years his keynote addresses have demonstrated many examples of Financial Storytelling. Unhindered by the world of tradition investor relations, his keynote addresses are a rich illustration of combining numbers with story. Whether he is talking about a new product launch, market share or music downloads (to name a few), Jobs blends in the numbers to illustrate, validate and communicate the success of the
business.

Apple is a marquee brand which continues to thrive. It’s success is communicated by it’s CEO through storytelling. Jobs has made the important emotional connection between the company’s products and its customers, shareholders, employees and even it’s critics. Financial Storytelling has helped Jobs back up his highly effective presentation style with the authority of real numbers.

“Why You Need to Become a Good Storyteller” by Camp Connelly

Lisa gets Homer back on track, building him a basic website he can use to post his news and ideas. He starts posting unique information on Mr. X. All the Muck That’s Fit to Rake. He posts unique and useful content that can’t be found anywhere else and voila, his site is an overnight success.

Sadly, Homer strays from a more ethical journalistic tradition and just starts posting weird rumors like that Spanish and Italian are the Same Language, or New Race Discovered Living Six Inches Under Denver — All Named ‘Mortonson’. Soon enough, the website is abandoned entirely. The world is a sadder place for that.

Homer, won’t you do us all a favor and relaunch your website? Maybe integrate a blog in there, throw in some RSS feeds and actually build in some navigation buttons up top? Your voice has been dearly missed on the Internet and we want you back.

By the way, if any of my readers are thinking of relaunching their own websites after years of neglect and may need some professional help to update their written content, feel free to contact us. Cheers.

“A big part of our job is to find out what’s happening,” she noted. By reaching out through online channels journalists in a newsroom aren’t just asking each other “do you know someone who…?” they can ask social networks. She said she’s found people for stories such as accountants, residents of Tsawwassen, business owners etc. just by searching Twitter or asking questions online.

Lisa added that Twitter is “a social scanner, like a police scanner.” You can find news and immediate information about an event, region, or issue. Chances are you can also find someone on the scene or taking Twitpics, immediately documenting the situation.

As usual, I would add a cautionary note: don’t just dive into social media. As with any part of your communications strategy, come up with a plan including specific goals and target audience, get a qualified professional to write the content, consider syndication and think about how you’re going to sustain the effort long-term.

Naturally, the worst examples come from academia. Still, they do have lessons for writers of business materials and marketing content.

Here are the best of the worst (Or would that be the worst of the worst?):

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

If that is the way this writer talks, he must be a blast at dinner parties.

Here’s another gem:

If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate need to be decoded as the “now-all-but-unreadable DNA” of a fast deindustrializing Detroit, just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through violence upon the racially heteroglossic wilds and others of the inner city.

Perhaps if he moved “Robocop” closer to the beginning of the sentence and got rid of “heteroglossic”, this passage could be salvaged… or not.

It’s so sad. Communication is at the heart of what human beings do. It’s depressing when higher education turns out people with tremendous smarts and the inability to order a cheeseburger without using the word, “entelechy”.

Using big words in rapid succession doesn’t make you smart. It certainly won’t help you sell 99 per cent of all products on Earth. Good writing gets your point across in a way that your target audience will understand immediately.

When in doubt, delete all references to “lugubriousness”. You’ll thank me later.

When you’re too busy focusing on your core business activities like planning stuff, making stuff and moving stuff, you hire a copywriter to help you sell all of that stuff.

A professional writer can help take care of your website content, newsletters, case studies, blog posts and more.

See? Even Little Kids Understand the Importance of Publicity and Persuasive Writing