School Closure

School will not be open until Monday the 13 Sept. See you all then.

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Attention, Agility and Poetic Effects

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The idea of cognition being a process where an "executive function" determines how attention will be deployed isn't new. Here are two descriptions "Bialystok (1990, 1994), in her classic discussion of cognitive development describes learning in terms of two cognitive processing components - analysis and control. Analysis changes the way knowledge is represented in the mind of the learner. Through the process of analysis, language knowledge changes from implicit knowledge organised at the level of meanings, to explicit knowledge organised at the level of formal or symbolic knowledge. Control involves a development in the learner's ability to selectively focus on relevant and appropriate information. Control, in this sense, means the process of allocating attention to specific representations of knowledge and the ability to move between representations (or particular aspects of these representations) in a manner which allows the fluent completion of the task" ...
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Breaking into print

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Contents What's the point? Inhibitions and how to overcome them Planning Sending off - Where and How (and electronic submission ) Keeping records Rejection Acceptance Marketing No Reply Shortcuts Conclusions References So, you have some poems, or short stories or maybe even a novel. You all know about the Writers and Artists Yearbook, you've all seen stories and articles that you could have written yourselves, so why don't you send things off? Today we'll try to identify what's holding you back. I'll talk first about general issues, then deal with the details about sending off, then what to do after. I'm not going to deal with blockbusters - I'm going to assume you're happy to start at the shallow end. If it all sounds like too much work, don't worry - I'll offer some shortcuts at the end. What's the point? I suppose firstly we should look at the incentives to sending things away. Money - Unless you regularly write articles, you won...
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Child narrators in adult fiction

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with Elizabeth Baines and Charles Lambert Introduction Writing from a child's point-of-view isn't easy. Done well though, it can be effective and affecting, so it's worth a try. Most stories of this type use a third-person-priviledged point-of-view, though a first-person treatment is possible. Some people (me included) rarely produce child-centred stories, which is odd - after all, we were all children once. Two story collections I've read in the last year or so have a fair proportion of child-centred stories, so I thought I'd bring the authors' views into the discussion. Some writers raid their own pasts "The key, I think is memory: quite simply, remembering, never forgetting what it was like to be a child - ... when I was in my early twenties I made a conscious vow ... never to forget what it was like to be a child ... But I do also happen to have a very good memory: ... 'Leaf Memory' is based on a real-life memory of my own, aged two years and t...
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