Once, at a meeting, we all had to introduce ourselves with a little fun fact. My fun fact was that I usually read a book or two a week. I thought this was maybe a little quirky, but it was apparently NOT NORMAL. Seriously, the record skipped. Dead silence. People came up to me later to ask about how I can possibly do such a crazy thing.

The truth is, most of my reading is just for fun. I read a lot of fiction and I do a ton of re-reading just because I like it. But I also read a lot of non-fiction, lots of which is useful for my business. And I do actually have a secret method for reading lots of non-fiction pretty fast.

Here’s my secret to reading a lot

In the past, enough business came from past clients and referrals that I didn’t put any effort into being findable. But now that I’m in St. Louis, a new market for me, I wanted to be easier to find.

How My SEO Is Paying Off

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that if you Google the phrase “St. Louis Copywriter” (even without the quotation marks), www.bridgetreddick.com comes up on the first page, sometimes as high as the #4 organic search result. Awesome!

And, extra awesome, several of the results that come up ahead of me aren’t copywriters, but sites listing

Fish Publishing is an independent publishing company based in the West of Ireland. It has been running writing contests since 1994 with the goal to discover, encourage and promote new writers.

The one-page story contest (also called "flash fiction") was established in 2004. The goal for each writer is "to create, in a tiny fragment, a completely resolved and compelling story in 300 words or less."

The 10 winners and the top prize will be announced at the end of the month, but the short list of 114 (out of 1,500 entries) was announced today and my story, "Rebellion", is on it!

Some of the highlights have been . . .

• My first book, coming out from FamilyArchives.com later this year (read an excerpt).

• Content for many websites including heritagewerks.com, familyarchives.com and constitutionfacts.com and others.

• Relocated from Virginia to the greater St. Louis area.

• Dozens of word-of-mouth marketing stories for the Snow Companies on behalf of clients like Genentech and EMD Serono.

• Given hundreds of dollars to Miriam's Kitchen and the St. Louis Area Foodbank.

• Working with a thought leader on op-ed pieces published in USA Today Online.

• Content marketing, including new quizzes, fun facts and Facebook page for ConstitutionFacts.com, including flagship quiz that has been taken over 60,000 times since launch in Sept. 2009.

• Business blogging for Furniture Brands (Henredon, Pearson Textiles, and Furniture Designed) on behalf of Durbin Media of Ladue, Missouri.

• Advised many friends and colleagues about launching their own freelance businesses.

• Led corporate history projects including creation of unique history quiz cube for M.C. Dean, Inc. of Sterling, Virginia, on behalf of CorporateHistory.net of Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, working with Craig Martin Simon Design of St. Louis.

• Copyediting for publishers, including Colonial Williamsburg and the Omohundro Institute/UNC Chapel Hill Press (Chicago Style).

• Production proofreading and for MD Consult and Anheuser-Busch on behalf of Switch of St. Louis, Missouri (AP Style).

But professional proofreading is a specialized skill that’s as much about knowing where to find the answers as about knowing the answers.

So here’s my list of the proofreader’s must-have resources.

A Business Proofreader’s Must-Haves

AP Style is the default for almost all business communication (at least for now), so the AP Style Guide is

I've ordered my copy. Do you have yours?

Why we need a new style guide for the web

The existing guides weren't written for the online world.

The Chicago Manual of Style is really for books. The AP Stylebook is really for newspapers. PR people

Talk to museum people and they'll tell you the same thing — about writing exhibits. Exhibits are special, too.

The funny thing is that exhibits and websites have more in common than you might think.

How Do Museums Teach Kids & Grown-Ups At Once?

Imagine you're walking into a big natural history museum. You walk into the first gallery and look at the

Instead of moping or scrambling for business, I put my energies into expanding my skills. I focused on learning more about search engine optimization and writing for the web. I'd always spent time reading great business books, but this time I was more focused.

Websites for Web Writers

My favorite resource for a long time has been the Personal MBA.

I stumbled across it several years ago when I was looking for business school syllabi online. I was hoping to identify books that people read in MBA programs, so I could read the books without spending

So here a quick guide to dashes in common word processing and online writing situations.

Dash v. Hyphen

(-) A hyphen connects two words. Like obsessive-compulsive. (Why did I choose obsessive-compulsive to illustrate this nitpicky punctuation point? Uh, no reason.)