Before computers, writer's block buried your muse under a pile of wrinkled paper and left you bemused. Its synonyms are synonymous with writer's block: addled, muddled, overwhelmed, paralyzed, perplexed. These are the feelings writers get when they convince themselves they can't write.

When your fingers do the talking, sometimes they trip over your words and leave your ideas in shambles. That's why it's helpful to establish and use a personal style guide.

Write what you know. That's what they teach you in school, but in the world of professional copywriting you'll often be called upon to write content on subjects that are foreign to you.

One of the questions new freelancers often ask is, "Who owns the copyright when the work is done?" Keeping in mind that I am not a lawyer, here is my view on copyright ownership and transfers. With a few exceptions, any intellectual property that can be put into a tangible form is copyrighted from the time of completion by its author or creator whether or not it contains a copyright notice.

How many times have you seen phrases like "we can offer you", "we will develop" or "we have created" on a web site?
Verbs like can, will, and have take your web copy out of the present and either put it in the future or the past. Using future tense and past-tense phrases is one of the biggest mistakes copywriters make in writing web copy.