littleworkpage

We are creatures of PAP's social engineering.  I used to think that we have become cowards in being afraid to question authority.  The last general elections in 2011 successfully lifted the fear out of the hearts of many Singaporeans.  It has been gratifying to witness the transformation of Singaporeans from a once fearful population into a group of people that question the rationale of government policies.  But, I have to admit I was stumped when I read the reaction of many Singaporeans (online and offline) to the strike by the SMRT bus drivers.  Many Singaporeans were calling for tough action.  Some were ridiculing the media (and the mainstream media deserves the ridicule) for failing to identify the action of the bus drivers as a strike.  Much of this ridicule of the failure to use the word 'strike' was with the subtext of how foreigners were getting away with the breaking of our laws.  Many were calling for these foreigners to b...

These are notes for running a workshop This evening I hope to illustrate that there's more to sentences than might first appear. Like stories, they can have tension and resolution, pacing and surprise. Getting a sentence right can take a long time but it's worth it - if an editor sees a bad sentence in the first paragraph, your script is likely to go straight in the SAE. We're going to look at words first, then try to calibrate our sensibilities by looking at good and bad sentences, then we'll try to assess some sentences before trying to write our own. At the end we might get as far as writing little stories. As we'll see later, people disagree about the goodness of sentences. I'm going to focus more on form than content; I'm not going to highlight sentences for their wisdom. Words However complex the sentences, they're always made up of words, so we'll start by sensitizing ourselves to the building blocks though we're not going to focus on indi...

With the retirement of Chief Justice Chan Sek Keong, another era in Singapore's judicial history ends.  Every CJ has left some indelible mark in our legal history and it has to be acknowledged that the outgoing CJ definitely left his.  The accolade from the new Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon is as follows: "We know him as a lawyer with a peerless love and devotion to the law. If law is the foundation of society and judges are its servants, then we know that the Chief is among its most ardent and loyal servants, passionately committed to doing justice in accordance with the law and seeking, like Dworkin's Hercules, to always get it right. I know that history will vindicate these assessments; but more than that, with the benefit of time, I believe history will judge the Chief as the greatest jurist this country has ever produced. And in time, we will each fully realise just how privileged we have been to have shared at least some part of that ride with him." CJ Chan was ...