HiQ

It probably looks like I haven't got the hang of this instant posting thing. However I carry the baggage of many old-school journalism lessons. Even in this new webworld I cannot "publish" anything without being reasonably confident of the spelling and the grammar and also the general "sound" of the piece.

As I think the finest English writer since George Orwell said in the preface to his latest book, in writing as well as in speech, sentences should still resonate to "the music of language". Whether you read it out to yourself in your mind or get your gorgeous wife to read the draft to you, that flow is still important. Experts in English literature (I am not one) would probably refer to iambic pentameter and suchlike. I don't know about that, but I can still sense a rhythm.

And looking back (again pretending to be the literature student that I am not), perhaps my last note did follow some kind of extended haiku structure - three or four little paragraphs each starting with a different slant but ending on the same theme, with each getting more and more pithy, ending in a single wrap-up line. Perhaps that is the ideal structure for a blog post?

But that's all style bullshit - what really matters is content ;)