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Culture

Hot off the press: our thoughts on what's happening in the world of brand language and business writing. Warning: may contain the occasional rant.

Culture

National Libraries Week: day #4

From about the ages of seven to ten, I used to get a book called The Emma Dilemma out of the library at least once a month, purely because I liked the title.

Culture

National Libraries Week: day #3 (children'day)

A little owl called Plop confronts his fear, the dark, in a series of encounters with night-lovers. They convince him it’s exciting, kind, fun, necessary, fascinating, wonderful and beautiful.

Culture

National Libraries Week: day #2

If you like plots that are interrupted by Houellebecq's rants about sex, love and social liberalism – that are actually disguised as the weird animal stories the protagonist writes – then you'll love this.

Culture

National Libraries Week: day #1

To celebrate National Libraries Day this Saturday, we popped down to our own locals and took out the most interesting books we saw.

Culture

Slogan-tastic

Creative Review has just published the results of a reader poll on the best advertising slogans... ever.

Brand & marketing

Culture

Satisfactory? It’s just not good enough

Ofsted wants to change schools’ ‘satisfactory’ rating to ‘requires improvement’. According to Cameron, it’s no longer enough for a school to be ‘just good enough’.

Culture

Don’t let your bookshelf go hungry this Christmas

This time of year’s all about starting new books while you sit in your favourite armchair in front of the fire (okay, maybe a bit twee). So to help you find a good one, we’ve done a book round-up of the reads we think teach us something about writing.

Culture

The Writer’s Fine Print Awards 2011

Yes indeed. To counterbalance the naming and shaming of plain English day, we thought we’d round up some of the year’s best examples of writing at work. So here we give you The Writer’s inaugural Fine Print Awards, for people who’ve aspired to something greater than merely ‘plain’.

Brand & marketing

Culture

Throw Away Lines

Our John, Charli, Roshni, Jo, Bee and Nick have been burning the midnight oil to create some short stories – all inspired by handwritten notes found on the streets of London.

Culture

In praise of the pushbike

At the moment, I’m working from home after an unfortunate coming together of me, my bike, and the Elephant & Castle roundabout.

Culture

Wenlock and Mandeville: what great – if strangely gloomy – names'

So, the weird blank-faced Olympic mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville, are ‘in shops this week’.

Culture

Methinks he doth protest too much

Queen Victoria and Lewis Carroll did it, too. People have been messing about with language for years.

Writing

Culture

The taming of the new

Over the last ten years our language has had to evolve more quickly than it’s ever had to before. As fast as people can invent those increasingly shiny and clever things everyone wants, we have to invent ever more bizarre words to describe them.

Writing

Culture

The Writer in the USA

Anya and I have been over in New York for the last few weeks, running a kind of pop-up Writer.

Culture

We're poets and our awareness of this is marked

On Friday we held our monthly creative team meeting at The Scoop, an ampitheatre next to City Hall in London.

Culture

Warren Buffett has got this writing thing down

He’s written an opinion piece in the NY Times which starts with the words:

Culture

The pen is mightier than the hordes

People in riot-affected Peckham have been writing messages about why they love their community on post-it notes, then sticking them on a boarded-up shop.

Culture

Euston, you have a problem

I was there on Saturday. It was hot, sweaty, cramped and crowded. And my train was delayed, indefinitely. I wasn’t livid, but it was the next station stop.

Culture

Too many Americanisms? So shoot us.

People love getting into a lather about language. If you needed proof, the BBC published an article last week about the supposed tidal wave of Americanisms overwhelming British English. And got a deluge of people’s personal peeves.

Culture

Blogden Nash

I like a good rhyme. Even better, I like a good rhyme that shouldn’t actually be a rhyme but the writer has decided to shoehorn one in anyway.