How to get things done
In August 2021, I used the Women’s Day weekend to declutter and tidy our house. Then, over the course of a year, piles of invisible objects gathered again.
(In our house, the phrase “invisible objects” means things that have been lying around for so long that they are no longer seen).
So I spent this year’s Women’s Day weekend covered in dust and filled with feelings of self-satisfaction.
Continue reading
I’m on record as saying that I think the most important thing to do in writing is structuring your text – and that grammar is something that people can worry about once they have organised their thoughts.
I am aware, though, that that is an easy thing to say when you are writing in your mother tongue. In that environment, we all have an innate understanding of how our language works, and what feels wrong and what feels right.
But for people who need to write in a second or third language (as so many people are in our English-dominated world), fear of getting things wrong can be confidence-sapping and inhibiting.
Continue reading
One of the many jobs of an editor is to be on the lookout for plagiarism. I don’t have a magic formula for spotting it, but I do have some tips that might help.
The dictionary definition goes like this:
“The practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.”
From an editing point of view, it most often means that a text, or a piece of text, has been copied verbatim from someone else: in other words, they were not written by the person who claims to have written them.
Creative Commons licences are supposedly a simple way to share your creative works, or use those created by others. But the whole thing has become Byzantine in its complexity.
The Creative Commons website says the aim of project is this:
Use Creative Commons tools to help share your work. Our free, easy-to-use copyright licenses provide a simple, standardized way to give your permission to share and use your creative work— on conditions of your choice.
Note those words: “simple, standardized”. Yeah right. Continue reading
Google has been with us for decades now (yes, really – it was founded in 1998, according to Wikipedia) and it is now so much part of the fabric of our lives that it has become almost invisible.
As a company if is of course far from invisible – it is the one of the big five tech companies globally, and is in the news all the time for all sorts of reasons, both good and controversial. Continue reading
I do love a list – so it’s no surprise that I love Twitter lists.
The fundamental problem with Twitter is that there is too much of it – and it can be toxic. Lists are a way to cut through the clutter and the awfulness.
Essentially, a Twitter list enables you to make a group of Twitter accounts and then see all the tweets from those accounts – without having to follow them and therefore create an increasingly unwieldy timeline. And the list will be people you chose to see – meaning you can create little bubbles that are personally useful to you, free of generalised nastiness.
Continue reading
A short post today about my latest WordPress discovery: the Unsplash plugin.
I have written before of the challenge facing all content creators: the need for pictures to illustrate that content.
