Andy Unedited
Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
Hear are a few, brief, miscellaneous items of interest. (See the last piece regarding this string of adjectives.) Click on the Headline Some of you who subscribe to Andy Unedited have mentioned that the font size is small in the email alert you receive. If you just click on the headline of the blog found …
We all read the Bible from our own viewpoint, from within our own culture and background. Our circumstances make us ask certain questions we wouldn’t ask otherwise. We could consider this a disadvantage. How could we know what the Bible really said when we are inevitably limited? But what if this were a blessing? What …
Martin Schleske is a lifelong luthier (violinmaker) whose art has interwoven with his faith such that the two are one. His recent volume, The Sound of Life’s Unspeakable Beauty, is his meditation on both. When a friend gave me his book, one of the most beautiful and profound works I’ve read, he wisely suggested I …
Do I get letters? Yes. I get letters. Dear Mr. Editor Person: Often I read words or phrases that make my grammatical hair stand on end, my syntactical stomach churn, and my semantical head bow in grief. Someone uses “impact” as if it were a verb or “ask” as if it were a noun, and …
Should authors blog through the books they are writing? This does not have a one-size-fits-all answer. I wish I could have said a bit more about it in Write Better where careful readers may have thought they spotted a contradiction. In the preface I say, “Some of what is found in this book was originally …
Building an author platform continues to be a key challenge for people who want to get their work out to a wider audience. One piece in the ongoing task of becoming better known is an author website. Ken wrote this to me in response to a recent post on Andy Unedited: One thing that is …
We’ve all seen it at work, at church, in families, or in other groups. Conflict, gossip, territoriality, defensiveness, and withdrawal. Patterns of dysfunctionality like these persist often because we just don’t have the skills to deal with them or we are afraid that confrontation will just make it worse. The Drama-Free Office considers four common …
I have a one-question survey that will reveal with near perfect accuracy whether or not you are an individualist. Set? Here it is: Would you readily consider allowing your parents to arrange a marriage for you? Those of us from a Western culture would never give this the slightest bit of serious consideration. But in …
The problem with talking to strangers is that most of us think we know how to “read” people. Gestures, tone of voice, facial expressions seem self-evident. As Malcolm Gladwell reveals in his book Talking to Strangers, they are not. Both Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax met Hitler multiple times and thought him trustworthy. Why? Dozens, …
Coauthors have a problem. How do you speak about yourselves in a book or article? Who is the “I” in your piece? Do you always use “we”? But what if you are telling a story of one author but not the other? Do you always say “I (Andy) once . . .”? But that can …