De-blog

I read an interesting post about sensitivity readers over the weekend, and by interesting, I mean more than a bit offensive and - accidentally, I'm quite certain - an excellent demonstration of why sensitivity readers are important if an author/editor/publisher wants to avoid a public trouncing. (I'll come back to why I have phrased it this way.) For those reading this post who don't know already, a sensitivity reader is someone a publisher/author asks to read a manuscript to check for potentially offensive/problematic content. This includes the deployment of discriminatory/offensive language, events that may act as psychological triggers and anything else that may be considered a 'sensitive subject' for some readers. Sensitivity readers have specific expertise, either through professional affiliation and experience (e.g. a nurse in palliative care fact-checking a book dealing with the treatment of terminal illness) or because they are part of the political mi...

One surefire shortcut to understanding the poverty of language is to become a writer or an editor. Better still, become an editor of people who write in your native language even though it is not their first language, because no matter how gifted the linguist, they will, sooner or later, come up short. This particular issue recently arose when I was editing a story by an author whose grasp of English is superior to some of the students I have had the dubious pleasure of teaching during the past seventeen years, and I'm not necessarily referring to those for whom, like this author, English is a second or additional language. Fluency is not the same as competence, not even for a native English speaker, and competence is sorely overrated. I consider myself very competent in both my understanding and use of English. I would even go as far as to say I have a gift with words, inasmuch as I'm able to successfully bend them to my will, and in so doing create stories narrated in t...

So, I'm home, I've had some sleep, and damn, it was good! I hadn't slept properly for at least a week (probably months), and my brain, not entirely convinced it was exhausted, had to give it one last hurrah at bedtime. I snuggled under the duvet, light off, Kindle in hand - I managed to read about four lines before I somehow fumbled my Kindle onto the bedside table and zzzz. Seven hours later... It's a glorious spring morning in North-West England. Blue sky, leaf buds, a crisp frost glistening in the pale yet radiant sun. My mission for today: to keep my thoughts clutter-free. See, I've been having some problems with that. Since Christmas, I've been writing on various instalments of Hiding Behind The Couch , alongside my other work of teaching social science, editing and publishing. There's nothing new there; I operate in a state of constant mental activity, bordering on hypomanic, and I'm happy that way. If I ever watch TV or movies, they need...