by Ragini Werner | 21 October 2024 | Writing
One of my favorite advertising slogans is The Economist’s “Great minds like a think.” I like it not only because it’s clever wordplay, but also because the familiar phrase it plays with applies to a great bunch of likeminded writers. We call ourselves the Writers...
by Ragini Werner | 14 October 2024 | Writing
Back when I was editor of eSense, a magazine-style newsletter published by SENSE, the society for English-language professionals based in the Netherlands, one of my colleagues posted a question on the SENSE forum. “I need to crowdsource a copywriting term,” she wrote....
by Ragini Werner | 7 October 2024 | Real life
One capital pleasure of my real life is the license my day job—English language editor for Dutch academics—gives me to goof off on Google. Or, to put it in terms the taxman will accept: the time I spend online looking up terminology is justified. For sad nerdlings...
by Ragini Werner | 29 September 2024 | Editing, Sapphic
Lara Zielinsky has been a journalist, technical writer, educator, and fiction editor for more than 30 years. A member of the LGBTQ+ community, Lara is also an award-winning author of five sapphic novels. When I chanced upon her business site, LZ Edits, I knew her...
by Ragini Werner | 23 September 2024 | News, Review
Please join me this week in giving a warm welcome to a couple of newcomers to the Rogues’ Gallery of Janice Readers. First up is Ineke Sterringa. Her snapshot shows her relaxing in her garden in the far north of the Netherlands with a somewhat caustic companion,...
by Ragini Werner | 16 September 2024 | Real life, Review, Writing
Lisa Day loves books—owning them, reading them, writing about them and talking about them. She carries at least one, maybe two or three books with her at all times and when she isn’t reading, she is writing about them. Based in Toronto, Ontario, Lisa is a former...
by Ragini Werner | 9 September 2024 | News, Writing
How important is plain language in fiction? Here two frontrunners in promoting the new Plain Language Standard discuss the pros and cons blah balh My dear old Dad loved language. Besides Dutch, he was fluent in 15 other tongues, from Hindi to Hungarian. But his...
by Ragini Werner | 2 September 2024 | Marketing
Wouldn’t you love to get a blurb for your book as nice as the one Groucho Marx bestowed on Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge, by his fellow humorist S.J. Perelman? Short, sweet, and killer conclusion. Groucho was famous for adding unexpected, often funny endings to his...
by Ragini Werner | 26 August 2024 | Real life
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opening this post with a clever cartoon just because I love the artwork. Nor is it because I’m bratly comparing my sapphic tales (say hi to Philippa and Janice) to a feminist classic. Nope, it’s what the famous writer is yelling—nay,...
by Ragini Werner | 19 August 2024 | Writing
Can you remember when you discovered the word “chronicles”? For me it was when I was about ten (I think) and a weekly visitor to the Dunedin Public Library in New Zealand. There I came across Clive Staples Lewis’s classic series, The Chronicles of Narnia. An...