Freelance writing is an excellent option for someone with good language skills. There is freedom in terms of scheduling your time, especially if you are working with monthly periodicals. Even online and daily publications have plenty of lead time for everything except the hard news. Choosing a niche is the first step toward landing your first assignment, though before you can cash in you will need to make contacts. Here's a sampling of several major categories of writing:

Business writing is a broad term used to describe a number of types of internal company communications as well as Careers in business communications include such positions as grant writers. The written materials for each of these disciplines are very different. For example, the punchy language and concise writing style that is specific to marketing materials is very different from the more formal style used in press releases.

Jennifer Fuller, a freelance writer under contract with a mutual fund company, writes the communications materials that go to the employees of the company's largest retirement plan clients. "It's financial writing but it's also talking to the average Joe, folks who may or may not know much about investing," Fuller explains. "There's an educational slant: the benefits of a 401(k) plan; how much you should you be saving; how to decide what's good for you financially."

The purpose of public relations and marketing communications materials is to impact the public perception and awareness of a company, product or service. Public relations writing can serve many purposes; it can include doing media publicity; dealing with specific groups or segments of a community; special event promotion; and marketing communications (though many companies have separate marketing departments to handle this).

Writing styles in the public relations category vary widely depending on the goals for the particular project. Press releases are generally newsy and informational, and contain quotes from company principals and a certain amount of company background information. Marketing communications on the other hand generally use more flashy language, contain graphics and are designed to attract customers' attention. A public relations writing project may involve a degree of collaboration with technical writers and product designers or managers, since the information being communicated is about the company's product.

Technical writing covers a broad swath, ranging from textbooks, to procedure manuals, operating instructions, product documentation and beyond. The common theme running through this writing form is a need to clearly convey information so readers can use that information to do something, decide something, create something or understand something. It takes a concise style and poignant use of words to write in this fashion, a skill that you can easily recognize in its absence when you are trying to decipher a badly written instruction manual.

Technical writers are also document designers skilled in categorizing sections and ordering chapters and in layout and document publishing.

Journalists who report on events, happenings and trends are often specialists in specific subject areas. Consider the traditional newspaper practice of assigning a reporter to a beat. This system allows the reporter to become expert in the defined area, and to form relationships with the people who are important in the field. It also gives the newspaper the assurance that they've got people paying attention to all the important areas. A writer's expertise in a subject gives them the credentials to write about it or report about it for a larger audience.

Evan Leibovitch, who writes a weekly commentary for online publication, considers writing an important sideline to his main career as a Linux consultant. "Being in the industry means that I follow what's going on as a living," says Leibovitch, who has been working with Unix and Linux for more than a dozen years. His experience with clients, user groups and professional groups gives him unique knowledge that is worth conveying to others. "In the role I play as commentator and closet advocate, it's great."

The main goal of a grant proposal is to secure funding for a project. Grant proposals cover a variety of fields today, including the arts, and scientific and other research. Funding can come from a range of sources such as the government, corporations, private foundations or community interest groups. As a grant writer you might write proposals to large corporations or private foundations asking for funding for a performing arts organization, or you might seek federal funding for local educational initiatives or corporate funding for graduate level research work.

There is a specific style to grant writing. A proposal must include a forceful argument about why the project deserves funding, and also a clear description of the project that can be understood by everyone who reads it. To achieve the desired effect, the writer must weave these two messages into one neat package -- a difficult combination.

This broad category includes fiction, poetry, short stories, children's books, and personal experience such as travel, screenwriting, how-to books, greeting cards, songwriting and more. The wide variety of creative writing forms is flavored by an equally wide variety of writing styles. What most of the creative writing forms have in common is that they draw from personal experience or from a personal interest in a subject area.

All the types of writing discussed here have been changed by the advent of the Internet. Writing projects in any of these categories will almost definitely have some online element. Public relations materials will appear on the company's Web site, as will elements of a company's business communications. Technical writing may appear on the Web as part of an electronic training manual or as online instructions. Various types of creative writing may appear on ezines (electronic magazines) or special interest Web sites. News articles, press releases and other articles are reproduced online as a matter of course today. Grant proposals might be made public as part of the selection process.

In other words, if you are a writer today, you have to consider the Web. Depending on the type of document you are writing, you might choose to do two versions: one for print and one for online. If you are writing strictly for the Web, you'll want to consider the unique requirement of writing for online readership and how you should change your writing to fit those needs. People scan Web pages as opposed to actually reading every word. So concise writing, lists, highlighting important words or phrases, and low word count are just some of the ways to make your online content more exciting.

Writers Write (check out the Specialty Sections down the left sidebar)

http://writerswrite.com

About.com's Freelance Writers section

http://freelancewrite.about.com/careers/freelancewrite/mbody.htm

FreelanceWriting.com (information, news, job bank and more)

http://www.freelancewriting.com

Inscriptions Magazine (online publication for professional writers, has articles, job listings and more)

http://www.inscriptionsmagazine.com/

National Writers Union (information, legislative developments. Costs money to join, but lots of information and news is free.)

http://www.nwu.org/

Editorial Freelancers Association (Costs money. Benefits include group insurance rate, job listings, reduced tuition and more.)

http://www.the-efa.org/