A petite mother of 4 from Eastern Europe prompted me to write this article. I have been meaning, for some time, to write about the benefits to be derived from reading books. I am a voracious reader and always have at least two books on the go-one on my Kindle and one audiobook on my […]
Author Archives: Terry Gorry
Words Meaning More Than Their Ordinary Meaning
I was watching the championship hurling match between Kilkenny and Cork a few weeks ago and the true meaning of words and language hit me. The game was on RTE and, if my memory is accurate, the hurling pundits were Henry Shefflin, Anthony Daly, and Ken McGrath from Waterford. McGrath was a great hurler, one […]
How Do You Reconcile the Writing Style of Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway?
I discovered Ernest Hemingway a few years ago. That was mainly thanks to my study of ‘copywriting’ and trying to write well for web visitors to my various websites/blogs. The advice was straightforward, and easy to follow provided you followed some simple rules. The rules focused on using short words, short sentences, short paragraphs and […]
Thinking About Starting a Podcast
I am considering starting a podcast. Turning over in my mind the pros and cons. I don’t want to start one that I would not be happy to put my name to, that I could not have some pride in and want to say, with some justified satisfaction, ‘I made this’. The starting point in […]
Digital Panhandling Is Not a Marketing Strategy
If you are running your own small business and it is heavily dependent on spamming your friends on the various social media platforms to buy your stuff you probably don’t have a real business. You almost certainly need to reconsider your marketing strategy, assuming one was generous enough to consider such unwanted, uninvited interruptions online […]
Writing As Art
I have been labouring under the misapprehension all my life that a sentence must have a verb. Master McDyer told us this in the national school in Enfield when I was in 5th class. ‘Hogs grunt’, he would say, ‘that’s a sentence’. I have just finished a book called ‘The Elements of Eloquence: How To […]
How to Speak Like a Leader
How to convince and persuade by the use of words is something that fascinates me. Regardless of whether the words are written or spoken the power to move other people with your choice of words and formulation of what you wish to say has been evident from time immemorial. From Aristotle’s ‘Rhetoric’ (also known as […]
Why I Rarely Answer the Phone
I rarely answer my phone. The reason is because I find it inefficient and wasteful of the scarce and decreasing resource of my time. It is interruptive, too, of course, and I can be caught off guard and I run the risk of responding or reacting to what the caller has to say without considering […]
This Might Not Work
Travelling east towards Dublin in the old N4 at Moyvalley you will see a piece of waste ground just off the main road. It is in front of what used to be ‘McGovern’s’ pub and just before you see ‘Fureys’ pub on the left. It is an area of approximately a half acre, I would […]
Besmirching the Tricolour
Something I’ve noticed lately on certain social media sites, such as Twitter and YouTube, is the use of the Irish tricolour in the profiles of certain individuals who hold views ranging from xenophobia to racism. These keyboard warriors, most of whom hide behind a fake name, feel free to spout hateful bile about the State, […]