Wave of the future!

2 Steps Forward

A Year of Action

Welcome to 2012. Now what? It's already the fourth of January and I've done nothing! I'm so pissed off with myself. Luckily a friend of mine put up a very useful list to remind me of the important things. What have I taken away from this article (apart from the fact that I ripped it off to use in my blog)? There are two things that struck me in the head at point blank like a frozen fish (gratuitous Monty Python reference). Firstly, voice. Your voice is your voice. My voice is my voice. I often write in another voice as practice but when I write a piece I want to use I write in my voice and I was surprised to find that this is not the way everyone writes. So the moral is to write as you because you're the only one with your voice. In a larger way the several sections covering procrastination won me over. This article makes me remember something very important - if you want to be a writer then write. It's so simple but so often forgotten as we avoid a snag in a plot or an unsatisfactory character and don't end up writing a damned thing. So, I said to myself, if you want to call yourself a writer then your writeriness will now be measured in words, not procrastination. I think tonight will be a writing night!

1 Word Back


20twelve

Numbers. If you spell it with a '3' you get a cool tv show that died too soon. Otherwise, in their normal guise, numbers are the forgotten characters of our writing. So what are the rules with numbers? Well, mostly numbers are left to stylistic choice. All of the following: 04/01/2012 (Aussie), 01/04/2012 (USA), January 4th 2012, 4th of January 2012 are acceptable. There are also variations on these that are fine - the important thing is to make sure that all numbers of the same type (ie. dates, times, general numerals) are consistent. There are, however, some guidelines for general numerals in Australia which can be found in the Style Manual. Amongst these are the suggestion that numbers under three digits be spelled out in letters, while those three digits or larger can be written in numerals. Once a number gets larger that hundreds of thousands they can be abbreviated to both letters and numbers (ie. 1.5 million, 2 billion). Of course there are also rules for the phrasing of money and currency and mathematical sums but these are for another time. In the meantime make sure you're following the same rules all the way through and you should be okay.