News & views
Unless you’re so poor at spelling or English in general that a spell-checker wouldn’t do you much good anyway, there isn’t really any excuse for this sort of thing
I wonder if the management/business model of levels of competence applies to writers? The basic premise is that as you travel on the journey from novice to expert, you pass through four stages of competence. These are
Here are my reflections on some of the reasons that I think writers should maintain a blog. They are by no means mutually exclusive.
In no particular order…
OK, it’s official: I am completely insane. The last time I posted anything on this website was back in July (sound of wrist being slapped), but I’d like to get going again. So what better way than to register for Digital Writing Month?
Amanda Katz asks: Will Your Children Inherit Your E-Books?
It’s a fascinating article. Is rummaging through the contents of a Kindle that belonged to your grandmother the same as rummaging through boxes of books that belonged to her, assuming that you can even access them?
The term “automatic writing” is usually associated with a particular psychic phenomenon. However, software now exists that can take data, such as sports results, and generate reports from it.
I came across an interesting post by Jeff Thomas, in which he refers to an Infographic by Newsweek, which compares printed books with electronic or e-books. (An infographic, by the way, is a graphical or otherwise succinct way of presenting a lot of information quickly. Newsweek’s books vs e-books graphic is one of the few easily readable ones I’ve come across, but that’s neither here nor there.)
I feel a bit like the first person in Khalil Gibran’s story of The Gravedigger. It’s taken me years and years, but I am finally getting rid of boxes and boxes of my clippings, ie the articles I’ve had published.
This is not out of necessity, even though they do take up a fair bit of room in our loft. It’s just that I’ve decided I don’t need them any more, which made me think: why does anyone need to keep their clippings?
I think there are three main reasons.
This afternoon I found myself in an emotionally challenging superfluous text situation. In other words, I became somewhat “wound up” by having to waste my time reading a long-winded sentence that was clearly designed to demonstrate the erudition of the writer rather than facilitate the understanding of the reader.
I attended a very interesting Westminster Media Forum seminar recently on the subject of journalism and public relations (PR). I thought I’d write about these issues in relation to integrity in blogging. It's an article that has been developing in my mind for some weeks now, and the seminar has helped me to put a few of my thoughts in order.
If there’s one thing that really annoys me it’s chapter headings and article headlines where you can’t tell what the subject matter is until you read it. Who needs a situation in which you don’t know if you want to read something until you have read it? The way I look at it is that if the author can’t even be bothered being clear when he’s trying to entice you to read his stuff, why should you be bothered to oblige him by reading it?
It's important to be published by a traditional publisher
Image by Terry Freedman via Flickr
In this day and age, in which anyone can publish and distribute their books electronically, or self-publish them by going down several routes (none of which need include the traditional vanity publisher), why should anyone bother approaching a traditional publisher? After all, very few of the thousands of manuscripts that publishers receive find their way into book form, and of those that do, very few hit the big time. There are, in fact, at least 4 reasons to try to get published by the age-old process of going to publishers.