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

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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