Blog

The Things You Don't See

6th October

Most people think writing is about putting words on a page. Sit down. Type. Job done. But the truth? The finished piece is only the tip of the iceberg. What you don’t see is everything beneath the surface: the false starts, ...

Don't Mind The Gap

29th September

We don’t talk enough about white space. Not the white space of empty rooms or clean canvases. But the white space on the page. The gaps. The pauses. The room to breathe. You may have noticed this in these blogs. It’s becom ...

We (Shouldn't) Have To Talk About Content

22nd September

Once upon a time, writers wrote books, artists created art, and broadcasters broadcast. Simple. Clear. Noble, even. Now? We all just ‘produce content’. Yes, congratulations are in order-whether you’ve just spent a decade sl ...

Why I Believe In The Long Read

15th September

We now live in a world where ‘BREAKING NEWS!’ flashes across screens every few minutes, where punchy one-liners and bite-sized ‘content’ are served up to be skimmed and scrolled past before the kettle’s boiled. I don’t deny the ...

A Proof Readers Nightmare

8th September

If punctuation marks had personalities, the apostrophe would be the fussy old uncle at a family gathering: always around, often misunderstood, and the subject of many heated debates and the collective rolling of eyes. Because o ...

The Not So Humble Bracket: A History

1st September

Brackets. Parentheses. Call them what you will, those two little curved lines that quietly usher themselves into our sentences, pulling along an afterthought, an explanation, or sometimes just a muttered aside we weren’t brave ...

The Ampersands Tale

25th August

Some punctuation marks quietly do their job and never ask for attention. Then there’s the ampersand, that ancient squiggle with Roman roots, a brief career as the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet, and a modern life as the ...

Their, There, They're...Homophones

18th August

If you were to ask any linguist or polyglot what the most difficult language is to learn, the chances are that they would say it was Mandarin Chinese. Why? Well, it’s a tonal system for one-the meaning of a word changes depend ...

The Oxford Comma. What's That All About Then?

11th August

It’s the grammar quirk that everyone’s heard of, but fewer people can actually define, that tiny little mark of punctuation that’s caused more arguments over dinner than the bill ever did. The Oxford comma. A name that sounds ...

Why Traditional Publishing Is Losing Its Grip

4th August

Once upon a time, if you wanted to be a published writer, you had to play the game. You wrote the manuscript. You sent the letter. You waited. You got rejected. You tried again. And again. And again. You weren’t just tryi ...