The stories in Great Adventurers are designed to help the reader believe that they can do it too, backed up by much more substantial evidence than vague and vacuous pronouncements like "You're wonderful, you can do anything."
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Review: The Art of Mindful Reading
Can reading help you achieve mindfulness? And can mindfulness enhance your reading pleasure?
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Image from Thomas Hardy's work, copyright-free from British Library
Reflections on a course: Victorian Visions
in Reviews
The focus of this course is on the prose and poetry of the Victorian era (1837-1901), against the backdrop of the changes taking place in both society and academia. What’s my verdict?
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Book Review: The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Victorian Age
This book not only contains a huge sampling of both prose and poetry, but places them into an historical context.
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The cover of The Greek Myths, Folio Edition, by Terry Freedman
The Greek Myths, by Robert Graves: A short review
in Bad writing, Reviews
The best thing I can say about this book is that it’s great to use as a work of reference.
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Review of the Oulipo Compendium
Review of The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem
If you are a teacher of English or creative writing, you will find this book to be a rich source of material to discuss and analyse with your students. And if you are a writer, this book will I’m sure prove to be a good investment in extending your craft.
Read MoreReview of the Penguin Book of Oulipo
The word Oulipo is an acronym of a French group, Ouvroir de littérature potentielle. This is usually translated as Workshop of Potential Literature, although given its association with the sharing and critique of work on creative writing courses, the word ‘workshop’ might be ditched in favour of ‘work room’.
Read MoreRevoke of the Penny Borough of Ourselves
One of the techniques employed by the Oulipo is known as N+7. This is where you take each noun, and replace it with a word that is seven words on in the dictionary. Of course, results vary according to what dictionary you use. The following article is an N+7 version of my review of the Penguin Book of Oulipo. Enjoy!
Read MoreGood reading for would-be good writers
I’ve spent the last term on a course called Great European Short Stories. Here are my views on the course, the tutor, and the other courses of his that I’ve attended.
Read MoreReview: Short-Form Creative Writing
Short-form writing is neither quick nor easy, but the effort is, in my opinion, worth it. This book explores the form with useful information, challenging exercises, and interesting examples.
Read MoreShort story adventures
My first foray into the world of Oulipo.
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Should writers aim for unmindfulness?
in Bookshelf, Moments, Reviews, Quick looks
Perhaps a useful aim of writers is to lead the reader to put the book or article down, and disappear in a flight of imagination. After all, surely one measure of success is that what you’ve written led someone to think of something, or to make connections, that had not occurred to them before?
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Book review: The Online Journalism Handbook
in Bookshelf, Journalism, Reviews
This is a very useful reference book for anyone who is serious about online journalism.
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Review: The Story of Paintings
With children as the target audience, this book is a fair-paced romp through the history of paintings from cave paintings to the present day. All that in less than 100 pages!
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Listening to a podcast, by Terry Freedman
What I've been listening with: Lindy BNX-60 Bluetooth headphones
in Reviews
Recently, I’ve been writing about my experiences of listening to documents on the Kindle Fire. The headphones I’ve been using for this purpose is the Lindy BNX-60 pair. Here’s what I think of them.
Read MoreListening to documents on the Kindle Fire UPDATED
in Reviews, Technology, Research
The Kindle Fire has a text-to-speech facility. I’ve been using it to listen to a book in the form of a pdf document. Here’s my evaluation of it.
Read MoreReview of Grammarly -- Updated version
in News & views, Reference, Reviews
Read about a great proofreading tool.
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Dreyer’s English: click the pic to be taken to the book on Amazon (affiliate link).
What I've been reading: Dreyer's English
A no-nonsense style guide that manages to be both humorous and readable too.
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Writing: making your mark, screenshot by Terry Freedman
Review of Writing: Making Your Mark (Exhibition)
If you’re in London, you might be interested in this exhibition on the history of writing, at the British Library. Here are my views on it.
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