Word is everywhere, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s any good. These are a few things that give me The Rage about it: the help function’s useless unless you speak fluent Microsoft Office. bullets, numbering and autocorrect are enigmas wrapped in conundrums it hasn’t moved on in years. We’ve just got used to it, and figured out a bunch of workarounds new versions […]
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 […]
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 […]
How to Write an Introduction: Your Three-Step Guide to Doing It Better, and Doing It Faster
Whatever you’re working on, you too can write excellent introductions by rethinking your writing process, and by taking a tip from journalism. 1. Write Your Introduction Last Seriously. That’s because I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen writers stuck at the first sentence because they’re trying to write the introduction first. But […]
Word of the Week: Macaronic
No, it’s not about your (or my) favourite pasta dish. Macaronic is a term referring to mixed language. You hear a lot of it around diaspora peoples and their descendants, who have a habit of peppering one language with terms and idioms in another. Here’s the definition from my Chambers dictionary app: Now, without further […]
