Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

Quote of the day – cold comfort for journalists

Via Bill Bennett: The life of the journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style. Stella Gibbons,Cold Comfort Farm So very, very true.

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Writing style: advice to journalism students

We’re coming up to about halfway on several student journalism units I’m teaching – and already the prospect of student assessments is looming threateningly over the class. So – a few words of advice to J-students faced with writing assessment deadlines. Relax One strange phenomenon I’ve noticed about student writing is that it’s much better […]

Monday, August 17th, 2009

Call yourself a writer? Meme response

It’s meme day on Freelance Unbound – mainly because it’s August and I think we all deserve to enjoy the Silly Season. (Though in the era of 24-hour rolling news, does that even exist any more?) Here’s an interesting meme started by Linda Jones. (Well, she hopes it will become a meme, and I’m calling it […]

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Summer reading suggestions for journalism students #2

Yesterday I suggested journalism students should read Jeffrey Goldberg’s financial feature “Why I fired my broker” from the May issue of The Atlantic magazine. But I’m well aware that most student journalists aren’t that keen to write insightful business articles.  Instead, I’m sure a lot of you want to write witty and amusing columns of your clever […]

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

Handy guide to better writing

Bill Bennett’s Knowledge Workers blog is running an ongoing series of posts on better writing. Today’s offering suggests why short sentences are only best up to a point, and why you need variation in your writing to help it develop an engaging rhythm. It follows others that cover journalistic staples such as the inverted pyramid, […]

Sunday, May 24th, 2009

Why journalism students should read Raymond Chandler

Good writers read. They read a lot. And they read widely.  If you’re a journalism student, the best advice I could give you would be exactly that – to read, and read widely. Most importantly, it would be to read not just journalism. I imagine that’s probably difficult when you’re doing a journalism course – […]