Being an amateur writer is no excuse for writing amateurishly…

Wading through all the elderly dross in the Guardian website’s food and drink section (overdue for an update guys – Christmas is so last year), I came across this article.

Then, in the comments, spotted a bunch of people, quite rightly taking the Guardian to task for spelling sumptuous as sumptious. Quite rightly, because as I’ve pointed out here more times than I care to remember, standards at the Guardian, at least in its online version, are going to hell.

Then up pops one Felicity Cloake, author of the article and, possibly

Want to be a writer? It helps to learn the trade…

Writing , at its best, is an art. Writing for money is a trade that needs to be learned. The two are not mutually exclusive, but only one is essential.

I read recently, that anybody reading an ebook and bitching about plot holes and typos is a pedant. Hell, I am a pedant, I don’t have a problem with that, but I have huge problems with people who think sloppy writing, especially if they expect to be paid, is acceptable. If you’re going to write for money – especially if it’s my money – then you’d better damn well learn how to do it properly before holding out your hand, or expect pedantry, big-time!

There is nothing wrong with being a pedant, by the way, if that means you actually get things right.

Let’s start with typos, because that’s something pretty much anyone who uses a keyboard is prone to from time to time, and for a variety of reasons, I’m probably more prone than many.

For example, I have a nasty habit of

Developing your blog writing style…

This started life as a comment on the Teck Line blog, about developing one’s own writing style when blogging, but it got out of hand and, like Topsy, just growed, so I copied it over to Word, just using what’s now the sixth para as my comment, as it relates to something another commenter said, so that I could carry on writing. Essentially, it’s a few tips on developing a writing style, about which I know bugger all, as my own style just went off on its own. Yours will, too – just don’t try to hard. I mean that – if you have to work at having a style, as well as work at writing, they whole thing just gets too tedious – you need to let your natural style emerge, then maybe tweak it just a little if it’s rough around the edges.

Blogging technique…

“What have you got against James May?” said a voice down the phone. Nothing, said I. “Why have you blogged about him then?” Which made me wonder