I wrote this review wearing my school teacher hat. However, it struck me that optimism is something all writers need a great deal of!

I wrote the review wearing my school teacher hat. However, it struck me that the “small habits” approach to writing is something useful to consider.

My review of this for Teach Secondary magazine has just come out. Here is the published version, followed by the copy I submitted, which is slightly longer because it has a little more detail. I wrote the review wearing my school teacher hat. However, it struck me that the “productive failure” approach to teaching is something I’ve done, to some extent, in my creative writing classes.

I’ve reviewed this book for Teach Secondary magazine. Although my review is written from the standpoint of the question, “how useful is AI in schools?”, I do thiink it has relevance here because many writers, and writers’ organisations, are also scrutinising AI.

To the extent that people distrust journalists, is it really surprising?

Some research looked at writers’ rituals. Hearing about that made me reflect on my own.

I love books, and I love reviewing them. However, I’ve decided that a one-size fits all approach to reviewing books (or anything else, come to that), just won’t do. So I’ve categorised my reviews into 6 types.

I love Substack, but…

I was faced with a conundrum: should I write a Preface to the 3rd Edition, a Foreword to the 3rd Edition, or just stuff it all into the Introduction and be done with it?

7 Features of Bad Writing suggests some common characteristics of poor prose. Any one of these 'sins' would serve as an indicator, especially if they occur more than once or twice.

I’ve been asked to write a book review by a magazine. Here’s the process I went through.

This collection of work by Gay Talese is utterly brilliant, and contains items that haven’t seen the light of day in a long time.

Reading each student’s work each week, at a rate of ten minutes each, took nearly two and a half hours. Thinking of suitable comments, adding them in to the appropriate place in Google Classroom, and updating my spreadsheet markbook took another hour and a half.

Something had to be done.