It may be galling to many people hacked off at news of journalists playing fast-and-loose with personal mobile phone data, but the recent news of the police playing fast-and-loose with the freedom of the press in Britain should be no comfort either. If it will help provide a sense of perspective, try for a moment…
I was fortunate enough to learn my trade in a time and place where that trade was a mysterious black art. Getting a job was easy. Getting my own way was easier still. Imagine my alarm when it transpired everyone had become a writer, and that I was no longer special at all. All those…
If you spend any time trawling freelance job sites like People Per Hour or Elance as a seller or a buyer, you appreciate how shocking is the divide in communication skills between the haves and have-nots. Just this morning I clicked the ‘learn more’ link on a job abstract, only to see the message that…
We’re reminded today by David Aaronovitch in the Times of why care with English usage and knowing the rules is more than simple pedantry or being ‘cute’. And it echoes what I’ve been saying for years – some might say ad nauseam, that in allowing the governing clerical classes to get away with bad English…
With no small degree of alarm, I noted that I had failed to write on my blog since 2nd January. Having been told by social media experts that it’s vital to blog often (daily if you can) I’ve nurtured a nagging fear for a few weeks now that my brand will have suffered… my online…
Good Writers Will Lead Their Clients to Embrace Change We need to examine the state of the writing industry, so I’m looking for input from people who both commission freelance writing / content writing / proofreading / copywriting projects, as well as from writers of all disciplines, experience levels (newbies to heavyweights), industry sectors and…
Gonzo Animal Welfare I subscribe to a number of spoof websites (No…! Surely not!) and I honestly thought I had opened the wrong URL instead of the BBC address I use as my wake-up home page. This was due to a story I encountered filed by a Beeb reporter Animal Welfare: Germany Moves to Ban…
Anatomy of unedifying reporting The scary experience of Lord McAlpine (convicted via Trial by Twitter of child rape some 20-odd years ago) will have shocked all reasonable people and has also rightly prompted columnists among the better papers to cast a beady eye over the business of citizen journalism. But a sense of perspective is…
This is a new term to me… one I heard on BBC Radio 4 earlier in the week, and it’s indicative of our times. For the life of me, I can’t recall who spoke the term, as it was largely in the background, but the passive/intrusive nature of radio embedded the term in my brain…