Mark Tredinnick - The Little Red Writing Book-University of New South Wales Press (2006)

duty as important as any of the others. Whenever you use the
language you contribute to its health and growth; you renew it
and conserve what is essential to it, or you diminish it.Take your
pick. It’s because so many people around us who should know
better use language so carelessly or narrowly, so manipulatively
or defensively, that we learn the bad habits we do. We grow
inured to bad language, George Orwell wrote once. It is every
writer’s responsibility to remember the genius of the tongue
and to do what it takes to perpetuate it. Model what is best, not
what is worst. And take every opportunity—this email, this
school report, this letter to the editor, this brochure—to
practise. Language is a gift. Be grateful, and honour it.
TRY THIS
1 Whatever you have to write today—make it all this week
—turn it into an opportunity to improve your writing, to
contribute to the health of the language.
2 Ask yourself whom your writing serves. Make a list. Keep
those people (and causes) in mind as you write. Ask
yourself how your sentences—in the way they sing or fall
apart—hobble or advance the causes they serve.
The thinking happens
so fast, and the writing
happens so slow
I was working the other day up in my study, in the loft of this terrace
house we live in now. All afternoon I could hear my two young boys
talking, two floors down, to their grandparents. Speaking all the
time, as though naming things were as important as drawing breath.
Lore 31