Steven Pinker’s an American experimental psychologist who writes about language, mind and human nature. In The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, he neatly sums up one of the main differences between spoken and written English: Speaking and writing involve very different kinds of human relationship and only […]
Review of Get It Done: From Procrastination to Creative Genius in 15 Minutes a Day by Sam Bennett
There are 3 things that make Get it Done: From Procrastination to Creative Genius in 15 Minutes a Day, different from other productivity books. Firstly, unlike classics like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity, it’s not about setting up systems that it’ll take a while to get […]
How To Have Ideas: Six Steps To Your Personal ‘Eureka’ Moment
The question of how to have ideas isn’t just for people working in explicitly creative roles: if you’ve got a job, any job, sooner or later someone will expect you to think stuff up. When I was at school doing my ‘A’ levels, I worked as a hospital cleaner. My manager was always asking me […]
Writing Tools (that will help make your life so much easier)
Writing’s hard. And, unfortunately, nothing’s ever going to take the place of putting your bum in your chair, your fingers to your keyboard (or pen to paper), and getting the hell on with it. But there are writing tools out there that can take the weight off, and help you produce more polished prose. Here […]
Why Read Science Fiction?
Why read science fiction? Perhaps surprisingly, it’s not about science. Given that so many of us have been reading science fiction for years, you’d think the answer to this question would be obvious, wouldn’t you? Especially as my new year resolution for 2017 is to read more contemporary sci-fi. It’d seem strange if I didn’t […]