A writer friend and I were discussing how we squeeze writing into our busy lives. She has recently learnt to do 20 minute short bursts of writing and although she was dubious of this method at first, it is working really well for her. I told her that I’m more of a 30 minute writer as this (quite by … Continue reading
If someone asked me to think of a long word, I’d probably say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious; however, I’ve only heard it used in a song in the Mary Poppins film so I don’t know if that counts. I think it’s about time I learnt another one. Time for some research… Wikipedia say that the longest word in most English … Continue reading
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 5,500 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people. Click here to … Continue reading
Even if you love writing, there may be days when you are feeling a bit under the weather and cannot face logging on to your computer. When you find yourself feeling like this and you are up against a writing deadline, wouldn’t it be lovely if you had something prepared that you could just tidy up and … Continue reading
On my commute to work, I sometimes take my laptop to do some writing. The other day I was sitting next to a man who just kept glancing over at the screen. It wasn’t that I was hiding anything in particular, in fact I was just typing a blog post, but it was a little annoying. I decided … Continue reading
A.k.a. is an abbreviation meaning “also known as” and for a writer or author, it might appear before their pen name. According to Wikipedia, it is also used to introduce pseudonyms, aliases, nicknames, working names, legalized names, maiden names and so on. It appears that it can be capitalised and/or punctuated and the variations I have … Continue reading
According to the Collins English Dictionary, the word epistemology is the “study of the source, nature and limitations of knowledge”. Wikipedia say that it comes from the “Greek words epistēmē, meaning ‘knowledge, science’, and logos, meaning ‘study of’”. A Scottish philosopher called James Frederick Ferrier introduced the term in the 19th century. Answers.com defines epistemology … Continue reading
I see a lot of articles come through my inbox from sites I subscribe to. Whenever I see a ‘how to’ article I feel compelled to click on it, possibly because it might teach me something (and I love learning). The most recent one was from Write it Sideways by Suzannah. She always writes good articles so opening a ‘how … Continue reading
As it’s a leap year this year, my writing challenge will finish with note 366 on 30 April 2012. Today I will start the 100 day countdown. I thought I would use today’s post to reflect on the past 266 days and think about the skills that I have gained or improved on. The ability to focus – I’ve always been … Continue reading
This week I have been looking at commonly misspelled words, and ‘proof’, ‘prove’ and ‘proving’ fall into this category. Although I know that proof has two ‘o’s and prove hasn’t, I tend to pause when writing ‘prove’ or ‘proving’ as it sounds like they should have a second ‘o’ (as in ‘proove’ or ‘prooving’). An article on … Continue reading