Recommended holiday reading
Shortly before she died, a writer friend gave me a copy of R L Trask’s Mind the Gaffe: The Penguin Guide to Common Errors in English. ‘I think that you and Larry will get on very well,’ my friend said. … Continue reading
Shortly before she died, a writer friend gave me a copy of R L Trask’s Mind the Gaffe: The Penguin Guide to Common Errors in English. ‘I think that you and Larry will get on very well,’ my friend said. … Continue reading
I have spent my working life in the communication business. I have written for print media. I have written for radio. I have written for film and TV. And, for a good part of the past 20 years, I have … Continue reading
I was doing a bit of ‘housekeeping’ recently and I came across a draft of a document that a client had sent us to tidy up. It was Grade A gobbledygook. But its author, a senior manager in a technology … Continue reading
A few years ago, we had a chap on our team who was rightly acknowledged to be ‘Educated’. That’s Educated with a capital E. Malcolm held degrees from three of the world’s top ten universities. He was fluent in Latin … Continue reading
Recently, I overheard a captain of industry complaining that a high proportion of the calls to his overworked call centre should not have been necessary. ‘If customers just read the stuff we send them, they’d already know what they need … Continue reading
Kurt Vonnegut Jr used to tell his Creative Writing students: Use words that I will recognise. (Actually, as an American, he probably spelled it ‘recognize’; but you know what I mean.) There was a professor on the radio this morning … Continue reading
‘Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.’ – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Many, many years ago, I managed to convince the powers that be at my secondary school that, rather than studying French or Latin in my fifth form year, I should be allowed to study art. As I recall, this encompassed … Continue reading
It was early November – just before or just after Guy Fawkes Night. I can’t remember which. I was five years old; soon to be six. Our teacher began the day by reading us a story, and then called for … Continue reading
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: good writing can be hard work. Good writing requires effort and it requires commitment. Good writers think about each and every word that they write. They think about whether or not … Continue reading