Author Archives: Tony Ballantyne

It’s interesting to see how the media reacts to a story.  When there’s a risk of infection, are they going to scaremonger or are they going to be sensible?  It seems that in the case of the horse meat story they’ve decided to be sensible.

For those of you not following the British media, it has been revealed that some meals labelled as containing beef actually contain a percentage of horse meat.    Some of that meat may have come from horses injected with phenylbutazone, or bute.  Bute can have harmful side effects if taken by humans, and so is not an approved drug for humans.

The media could have run with a story along the lines of  “Deadly Horse Burgers Infect our Children”, but instead they went for the far less reactionary “You’d have to eat 500 horse burgers to get a significant dose of bute.”

This is one way to quantify risk in way that people can easily understand.  I remember back in the 1980s when AIDS awareness was first being raised, it was asked if you could catch aids from saliva – could you catch AIDS from kissing?  Popular wisdom back then had it that you would have to drink a bucket of saliva in order to catch AIDS.

Now, I don’t know whether its true that you can be made ill from 500 horse burgers or a bucket of spit, I’m more interested in the way the risk is presented.

When the MMR scare was at its height a question frequently asked by the media was “Can you guarantee that the MMR jab is 100% safe?”  The answer, as they must have known, was no.  Nothing is 100% safe. So why ask the question?  Why not say that you would need 500 injections or a bucket full of the stuff to quantify the risk?

I can only suppose because they wanted to scare people.  This may well have been because they genuinely believed that MMR was dangerous and that people should be scared.  Or maybe that’s just a load of horse burgers.

I attended some training this week on teaching literacy to teenagers. I was told that the key to persuasive writing was to remember A FOREST: Alliteration, Facts, Opinions, Rhetorical Questions, Examples, Statistics, rule of Three.

Now, I don’t disagree with this. These are all effective techniques in my opinion. More than that, there is a circularity in education which means that if someone says A FOREST is the key to persuasive writing then the markscheme in some future exam will only judge a piece of writing to be persuasive if there is A FOREST there, and who doesn’t want to do well in an exam?

I dutifully wrote up my piece of persuasive writing and was given someone else’s to check.  As is always the case I was asked to suggest improvements. The piece was very good, the only remark I could make was it had used too much alliteration. I was asked what I meant, too much alliteration, and I pointed out how this technique had been used at the start, in the middle and at the end of the piece. A good 15% of the piece was alliteration, alliteration, alliteration…

And that’s when something occurred to me. The difference between teaching English and writing. Don’t think I’m having a go at teachers, I’ve been one for twenty years. The point is that a teacher will flag up all the clever stuff in a piece of writing. They will point out the techniques the writer has used and discuss them with the class. And this is the right thing to do as the pupils will learn by example.

But now look at this from the writer’s point of view. They writer will have done all of those things, but if they know their stuff they won’t make them too obvious. They’ll have buried those tricks in the flow of the text; they don’t want the reader tripping over them.

It’s good advice to any writer: don’t remind the reader they are reading. Keep it flowing, if they’re stopping to admire your wordplay they’re not immersed in the story.

…well, you probably knew that anyway.

I saw the film last weekend.  I like musicals, though this one is not a favourite – I think the music is rather uneven, magnificent in parts, almost trite in others. But this isn’t a film review or music blog even if I am going to write about Anne Hathaway singing I Dreamed a Dream.

Now, I don’t particularly like this song.  I’m not sure that I liked it originally, I’ve heard it too many times to register it now.

…until Anne Hathaway sang it.  I’d read what a great performance she gave, I wasn’t prepared for just how great.  It’s a little unfair that a song, merely by its own popularity can become a cliché (think Bohemian Rhapsody or Nessun Dorma)  but Hathaway made it sound as if it was being sung for the first time.  More, she made me feel the emotions the song was trying to evoke.  That made me think about writing…

It reminded me that one of the great things about literature is that sometimes it can take something commonplace and everyday and make the reader look at it with new eyes.  It can retell an old story and make the reader experience it as if it were fresh. This isn’t what SF does.  SF  extrapolates a premise into something new, it’s not there to reveal something you already know.

I’m not saying that you will never read SF that makes you look at the familiar with new eyes.  Of course you will.  Avoiding cliche is part and parcel of good writing, and there are some great writers writing SF.

You’ll find romance in some SF, but SF is not romance.  You’ll also find comedy, though that isn’t a necessary component.  A good SF tale will contain many strands, but not all of those strands are necessary to make it SF.

Update 13 Feb 2013

I notice that Anne Hathaway won a BAFTA for her performance this weekend. No doubt she intends to thank me for the part I played in getting her noticed. I’ve not heard anything yet.