From the category archives:

Writing

I Got it, You Got it, We ALL Got it

I’ve got a bee in my bonnet and of late it has got more and more active. Someone’s got to help!
Now I pride myself on not being a pedant on subjects linguistic. Your pronunciation of pronunciation is no concern of mine. I’m as prone as the next person to completely overlook the odd split infinitive. If U [...]

Read the full article →

“Up in the Air” Cracks the Ice

“There’s a law of diminishing returns on preaching”. So said author Kate Grenville in a thought provoking lecture, ‘Writers in a Time of Change’, in 2009*. Yet everyday, in thousands of blog posts and columns all over the world, preaching is exactly what many very earnest writers do. I do it myself – often. There [...]

Read the full article →

Inspiration from a Deaf, Nutty Genius

A deaf bloke with dubious personal hygiene. A complete nutter who died nearly 200 years ago. And a modern day inspiration for artists and business people alike. All in the same person. Who’d have thunk it? But Beethoven was, and is, all of those things.
In Search of Beethoven is an engrossing new feature length documentary [...]

Read the full article →

Portrait of the Artist as a New Media Mogul

While working in a ‘real’ job and then later for myself, I had no idea how little society valued the arts. Now that I’m a writer, I’m learning fast – and the image I see is not very attractive.

Read the full article →

Hurry Up and … Slow Down

Over forty years is a long time to work on a single task. Yet that has been the lot of the four editors of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. The massive 3,952 page double volume will be released this month, the culmination of the editors’ entire careers. In our world of fast, [...]

Read the full article →

Why Everyone – even Blokes – should see ‘The September Issue’

To judge from the gender balance in the audience, there aren’t a lot of blokes lining up to see The September Issue, the new documentary feature that gives us a peek inside the walls of Vogue magazine in New York. Which is a pity, because the film has a lot to offer anyone – male [...]

Read the full article →

Our Life at Work Stripped Bare

Most of us spend a healthy slice of our lives working. We spend additional time thinking about work, but these thoughts are generally focused on the job at hand. We think through an upcoming meeting, worry about a deadline or scheme about our next job change. Much less often do we think about the wider connection of our work to our community. Rarely, if ever, do we think about the extent to which others’ work impacts on, and is essential to, our way of life. In ‘The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work’, Alain de Botton does this for us in a thoughtful and entertaining way.

Read the full article →

Obama’s Cairo Speech Dissected: The Power of Language

So Barack Obama has made another inspirational speech. This is hardly remarkable: we’ve known for some time that Obama makes George W. look like a performing seal, and an inarticulate one at that. Yet even in this context Obama’s speech in Cairo was remarkable. In less than 6000 words he was able to strip bare [...]

Read the full article →

Avoiding Murder on the Internet: Making Writing Worthwhile

Yep. Nup. Nothin’. No one. Sort of. Dunno. Nowhere. Good. That’s about the extent of it. Your average teenager’s vocabulary as captured cleverly by songwriter Peter Denahy in his song Sort of Dunno Nothin’.
Parents all over the world bemoan their offsprings’ metamorphosis from bubbly, verbose toddler to mumbly inarticulate teen. Yet it is a mistake [...]

Read the full article →