The Writers' Block firmly believes that manual curation is essential to the Steem environment. As much as automated systems can be great for supporting friends and for supporting manual curation initiatives, the real key to making Steem work is hard-working humans selecting quality material to curate.

The goal of the TWB curation initiative is to support some of the best output of our own members. In a dream world, we'd have the VP and manpower to trawl Steem and support great content beyond our own member rolls, but we just don't have that right now. Our members work hard to perfect their craft, workshopping and editing their writing and helping each other, and they deserve our support.

Throughout the week, leaders of the TWB community nominate links for voting with the @thewritersblock community account. No one may nominate their own links and the preference is for supporting materials that have been workshopped in our community, but we also upvote well-written texts from active members and also other materials we feel are beneficial to our community, such as writing articles and contests.

As a supplement to our curation trail available in Steemauto, we now offer this weekly highlights post, showcasing some of the materials receiving our upvote. Our thanks go to everyone who is already supporting TWB and its members by following our curation trail, delegating VP to our account, or providing other support to our members. If you only have a few votes to spare this week or limited reading time, we recommend checking out the following links.

The highlights are selected by the leadership as a group from the posts already receiving our upvote in the previous week.

Just click the image for the post to visit it or click the author's name to check out their entire blog.

Nonfiction

@jonknight: 5 Ways to Make Your Site More Engaging

@jonknight goes deep into listing ways to make your website better and easier to use, as well as more attractive to both visitors and Google.

Poetry

@damianjayclay: Together Bears

What does a poet do on his anniversary but write a poem for his loved one? And yes, even our top poetry Bear workshops his poems!

@idenkcall: Writing Weirdness

Weird things happen sometimes when you hang out in the TWB Discord. This is an example of one of them: Unintended Poetry. About writing this time.

Writing-Related

@therosepatch: How Reading Makes You a Better Writer

Reading is an essential element to being a writer, especially for being a great writer. @therosepatch discusses why reading is important and breaks through excuses to not read.

@jasminearch: Don't Be Dense. Use the Right Tense. Part 2

With part 2 of her educational Tiny Teaches series on tenses, @jasminearch--previously @tinypaleokitchen--gives more examples on the types of tenses and some thieving humour along with it.

@damianjayclay: Landmarks and Signposts

@damianjayclay offers some tips for how to get yourself back on track when you're pantsing your writing and get stuck or when your plans have gone astray.

General

@gmuxx: Trip to USA: The Curious Case of the Missing Case

TWB Admins @rhondak and @gmuxx are having quite an adventure finally meeting up IRL for the first time. Rhonda spends hours behind the wheel rescuing Muxx from the DC airport and Muxx's luggage goes AWOL.

About TWB

The Writers' Block is an active Discord-based writers community. Our primary focus is on peer review workshops for improving work from a variety of genres. Our focus is not just on Steem, but on producing quality texts for any form of publication. We currently have workshops for fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and songwriting. Our Poetry Academy and Writers' Workout channels provide exercises and other instruction for improving skills in those genres.

Our organization is open to writers at any point in their journey, whether new and aspiring or already published. If interested in checking our community out, follow the link below. When you get onto our discord server, please have a nice chat with our greeters. We just want to make sure new members understand what our community is about and have expectations we can fulfill.