Having a style guide is essential for a professional-looking website or publication. I’ve contributed to bespoke style guides, mostly for big clients, but having one specially written is probably beyond the means of small and medium-sized businesses. For the rest of us, the best thing to do is to borrow someone else’s. I recently came […]
On National Poetry Day, a poet appeared on BBC Radio 4 this morning to criticise what he called the daily abuse of language by politicians. Michael Horovitz said every politician should learn a poem and say it back before making any public pronouncement. That should keep quite a lot of people quiet, but we might […]
Quite a few people turned up at Lord’s cricket ground today hoping to see the early rounds of the Olympic archery competition. The event had been described as “unticketed” and they assumed that meant they didn’t need a ticket to get in. Apparently not. There were no tickets for the event because there were to […]
After two days at the Hay Festival of Literature, I found myself thinking about the difference in quality of the interviewers of the authors. The format is for each author to be interviewed by another writer, who then invites questions from the audience and chairs the discussion. One interviewer I thought very good and another […]
Do you think of yourself as a bad writer? When I was at school I certainly thought I would never earn my living by writing. But here’s some encouragement from a writing coach whose newsletters I enjoy, Daphne Gray-Grant. In a recent blog post, Daphne points out that writing involves many skills, not just one. […]