OK, back to this social media thing. I’m wracked with guilt! I haven’t posted to my site now for a few weeks – for a number of reasons, the usual old “pressure of work” being the prime one. But it’s interesting to me what emotions are engendered when one starts with the social media thing. For instance, when Daisy from Dakota starts to follow me on Twitter, I feel that I owe her something and must produce, immediately, or I’m letting her down. I know just how ridiculous that is, but simply can’t get rid of this deepseated sense of responsibility. Which no doubt stems from an era when if homework wasn’t done you went to detention, no questions asked, and if it happened more than once it was the headmaster’s office for you and a letter to your parents.
I grew up with the work ethic that “it has to be done, or else”, but more than that, it has to be done to the best of my ability. And so I lie in bed, sleepless with worry over poor Daisy, who might be waiting and wondering – and in my case, not only for an updated blog, but also for photographs. Never mind, on a trip coming up in the near future there’ll be news and images to keep me going for months – watch this space.
And I won’t even have time to feel guilty …

Over the years I’ve been party to many discussions regarding differences between editors and writers; the publishing and editorial consensus being that writers should be able to knock up a 1 000 word piece in about 30 minutes. Two thousand words might take a little longer, say 45 minutes, and that’s that for the day, time for a kafeeklatz with the neighbor, and maybe a movie this afternoon. Therefore a writer is privileged to be published at all, that work is simply a paying hobby, and he or she should be grateful (what they eat while being grateful, I’m not too sure).

Imagine my delight as a writer of sorts when, while reading Anne Thwaite’s biography of AA Milne, I came across a 1929 letter from Milne to the BBC regarding that institution’s attitude to writers and writing. The general opinion then seems not to have changed one iota. Milne tells the BBC:

Authors have never been taken very seriously by their fellow men. “A singer is a singer … a painter is a painter … but dash it all, a writer only writes, which is a thing we all do every day of our lives, and the only difference between ourselves and Thomas Hardy is that Hardy doesn’t do anything else, whereas we are busy men with a job of real work to do.

… you who read this would not think of asking a wine merchant … for a free dozen of champagne … but you would not hesitate to ask an author … for a free article for some ephemeral publication in which … you were interested or for permission to perform his play without the usual payment of royalty.

Milne goes on:

To the BBC, all authors are the same author. There is a “regular fee” for the author … the fee is what advertisers call “nominal” … “If you will let us do it for nothing we will announce to our thousand million book-buying listeners where your work is to be bought”. And if you don’t like it, you can leave it, because there are plenty of other authors about; and, if it came to the worst, we could write the things ourselves quite easily.

And this was more than 80 years ago! The more things change, the more they stay exactly the same!

I was thinking the other day about the media and how the various arms leech onto the backs of celebrity lives and feast off the blood of others. What brought this to mind was the coverage of the death of Albertina Sisulu and the weeks-long reiteration of the same “news”, tributes, accolades that we heard over and over.

Before I get shot down in flames, let me state here that I admired Mama Sisulu immensely. She was a wonderful woman, strong, steadfast and worthy of every accolade that was paid to her. But surely then she and her family deserved more than to have hordes of sensation-hungry journalists surrounding her home for days just in case someone noteworthy arrived/left? My mother died a couple of years ago, and although she had also reached a great age, it was very hard to deal with. I cannot imagine what it would have been like to have a microphone thrust into my face each time I entered or left the family home, requiring me to answer the same questions ad infinitum.

Of course we had to pay tribute to this icon. Of course she deserved everything that was said about her. But have some respect, guys; allow a family to mourn in peace once you’ve had your original sound bite?

It's an interesting exercise taking up a new hobby that becomes an addiction, especially when you know that time and budget constraints will never allow you to achieve what you see can be done (unless you win the Lotto, of course). I've always loved photography - my first sophisticated camera came with me on a trip overseas at the age of 19, and a friend gave me a light meter - wow! The height of professionalism.

At a much more advanced age you buy what seems like the ultimate in cameras, with an 18-55 mm lens. Then, after having achieved Camera 101 after about six months, you simply must have a zoom lens, you can't do without a filter, and another polariser to bring out the sky in your shots, all of which you have learnt from (expensive) photography magazines.
Now you need a good photo editing programme, and someone to teach you how to use it. Oh, and you also need a zillion-gig external hard drive to hold all those shots that you just might be able to edit one day.
You join the local photography club, where submissions are reviewed each month by a panel of judges "so that you can learn". Which is great, and you learn a lot - but from folk who have lenses at the cost of a small house, the 4x4 to go with the lenses, and the time to spend weeks in the Kgalagadi Reserve in search of the perfect lion/cheetah/leopard/Bataleur/elephant shot. Which they get, every time.
So you come home feeling great because one of your three images received a gold in your (beginners) category, and desperate because you want more and more - experience, time and cash.
Ah well, I guess the most important thing is to have fun and love what you're doing while you learn to see things through your lens - and realise that Ansel Adams was one of a kind. And at the very least, you'll have a lot of screensavers that really give you pleasure!

PS: Forgot to mention the tripod!

I broke a front tooth a week ago. Not earthshattering, or not worth a tweet, I would have thought. But the broken tooth led to a trip to my dentist in the centre of Cape Town. The trip into the city led to a long wait for a lift home. The long wait led to my taking my camera in with me, and a morning wandering around the city photographing whatever took my fancy.



I had forgotten how I loved the early morning walk from the station to the office, Cape Town waking to its day, stalls being loaded, the shoe-shine man calling for customers while sipping a cup of coffee. This time, completely alone, I had four hours to do what I wanted, when and where I wanted, and I rediscovered the magic of the metropolis. I had recently edited an article on Senegal – so made a new friend in St George’s Mall when a smiling stall-keeper who came from Dakar and I could talk about his home town. Spent time with Jack from Malawi and his bright and lovely artworks, visited the flower sellers and was awed all over again by St George’s Cathedral, to say nothing of the other old and beautiful buildings that pepper this square kilometre of architecture.

St George’s café in the crypt makes the best cappuccino I’ve tasted in ages, very necessary after a couple of hours of looky-looking. No time for the Company Garden, I’m afraid, that will have to wait for next time, and next time will be very soon.

By lunch time my legs would not walk another step. But the feeling had come back to my mouth and to me – mine for this beautiful city that I call home.

I have just been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the age of social media. “I don’t have time!” I yell as someone tells me I must Facebook, Link, Twitter – all of the above. “I don’t know how,” I whimper as I hear that someone is following me, or wants to be my friend. “I don’t want 500 friends, I can’t deal with the five I have,” I moan as yet another invitation plops into my inbox.

And yet, and yet – there is a fascination to all this, and herein lies the problem. It’s so much more tempting to see who’s following you than to get stuck into an edit of an academic exercise on politics in Iceland. It’s so much easier to check your profile than to dredge up ideas for yet another article on sun damage to skin. If you’re a staller, like me, social media will give you any number of excuses why it’s so important just to take five minutes to tweet about your walk on the beach this morning. And so the day goes by and deadlines loom ominously.

I have been outnumbered! I give up – I cannot for the life of me think up and remember one more pin number or password that is alphanumeric and that by some obscure elaw must contain more than eight letters or numbers or signs that in the normal scheme of things no person in his right mind would use on a daily basis in an address or reference. I am tired of having to dream up a password that is different from the dozens that I'm already drowning in, to write it down and commit it to memory, then to chew up and swallow or burn the paper, never to divulge the password to another living soul! I’m tired of using the wrong password for the right egroup, or website, or bank account, or online order, only to have to request a new password from the authority concerned, which password sometimes takes up to a day to be granted.

I’m exhausted by the mere thought of a trip to the bank to re-password the in any event nearly empty account in my name, where I’m greeted by a sigh and a shrug from the person behind the counter – a kind of “What can you expect from a person over a certain age?”

In this age of electronic mail and sms, we must sometimes ask ourselves why punctuation matters. What difference do the odd comma here and semi-colon there actually make?

The answer is – an enormous difference. Punctuation has been known as the glue that holds language together, but it’s more than that. Punctuation communicates meaning, gives life to the written word, and in fact can radically alter the meaning of a sentence.

Consider the following well-known example of a comma and an exclamation mark that completely change the meaning of what has gone before. An English professor wrote the words, "Woman without her man is nothing"on the blackboard and asked his students to punctuate it correctly.

The men wrote: "Woman, without her man, is nothing."

The women wrote: "Woman! Without her, man is nothing."

A badly-punctuated piece of writing, however brilliant the ideas behind it are, will not pass the commissioning editor’s first glance, so let’s have a look at how to produce concise and gripping language through well-chosen and well-placed punctuation.

As I was thinking about how to introduce this module my eye lit upon an article in the Cape Times of 11 May, which says it all for me.

How Want of a Comma Cooked a Jobseeker’s Goose

A survey of CV blunders has found that job applicants are blowing their chances with gaffes such as “cooking dogs”. Experts found 94% of job hunters risked missing out on vacancies through such CV blunders as poor presentation, spelling or grammar. Failure to use the comma led to embarrassing disclosures such as “My interests include cooking dogs and interesting people”.
In some cases, applicants’ attempts to impress potential employers failed through the odd missed word, with phrases such as “I was responsible for dissatisfied customers”. For others, the omission of a single letter consigned their CV to the dustbin: “I am a pubic relations officer”.
From a sample of 450 CVs, researchers found 81% were laden with spelling and grammatical errors, while nearly half were poorly laid out.A mere 6% were error-free, the study by career advisers Personal Career Management concluded.
Corinne Mills, managing director of PersonalCareer Management, said, “Many people are perfectly capable of doing the job.
“But why would anyone want to employ a lawyer or secretary who makes spelling errors? “If they can’t pay attention to their own CV, why would you trust them to work on any of your documents?” – ananova.com
Punctuation really does matter!
So have a look at full stops and commas, and how they are, or should be, used in writing today.

The full stop

A full stop, called a period in America for reasons unknown, is the punctuation mark used to indicate the end of a whole sentence, or a strong break or pause in writing. It therefore separates two sentences, thus:

James is a hard worker. He deserves promotion.

What, though, if the end of a sentence contains its own punctuation? Definitely no full stop required there, as the punctuation mark itself ends that particular sentence. Interestingly, both a question mark and an exclamation point have a full stop as part of their design, thus:

Where did you go last night?
I’m really irritable this morning!

We used to use full stops after abbreviations in the years before computers, now, though, they have fallen away in the following cases:

Titles, which are shortened forms of a word, such as Mr (mister), Dr (doctor), etc.
Abbreviations, such as eg (for example), ie (that is), viz (namely), inc (incorporated), Co (company), etc (etcetera) St (saint).
Acronyms, such as NEPAD, FICA, PRISA, MP, etc.

So where do we place a full stop when we’re dealing with direct speech, quotations or text in parentheses (brackets)?

In direct speech, the full stop is placed within the closing quotation mark, thus:

He said, “I have had a wonderful holiday.”

However, when the text is quoted, then the full stop is placed outside the quotation mark, thus:

He said that he had had “a wonderful holiday”.

See the difference?

It’s similar in the case of parentheses (curved brackets). When the text in the parentheses is part of the sentence as a whole, then the full stop goes outside the closing bracket.

They climbed the mountain (which is one of the highest in the world).

However, when the sentence inside the parentheses is a full sentence, then the full stop is enclosed by the closing bracket.

They climbed the Eiger mountain. (This mountain is one of the highest in the world.)

BUT (isn’t there always a but in everything we learn?) – always bear in mind that when you’re writing for a specific publication, the editor may want something difference from  what you consider to be correct. In that case, you have to adhere to the publication’s style guide, even though it might hurt!