One of the finest classical news stories ever written was crafted 50 years ago on the killing of President Kennedy. Every writer of any genre can learn from it. Tom Wicker was a White House reporter for the New York Times. Nobody, apart from Oswald, knew this would happen. But Wicker was able to craft
Month: November 2013
A force of reality…
Last night I was lucky enough to see the new film Gravity. At the London iMax, on Britain’s largest cinema screen. In digital 3D. With 12,000 watts of sound… As you can imagine, I’m still recovering, in an exhilarated and post-traumatic kind of way. Today, I wanted to recall the experience, and of course pen
Say it once
Good writing gets to the point – not like this sign that I saw recently. The speech bubble gets the message across. The text below is repetitive. And even worse it uses bizarrely formal language that is more likely to leave the reader scratching their head than anything else. What exactly is ‘a period of