Greetings English Learners.
It’s not always easy to find good examples of English writing to show you. Actually, ‘good’ is not good enough! I want ‘brilliant’ examples, and you shall have them!
Of course, there are numerous excellent authors around the globe. However, for short reads in newspapers, magazines, and on the Internet, there is little that I am inclined to promote. Poor grammar, spelling mistakes, and clumsy expression abound!
Don’t despair! Today, I am presenting more of Nick Cave, an Australian singer, songwriter, author, and screenwriter. Few people have such a rich vocabulary and can express opinions as articulately as Nick Cave. He has a website, The Red Hand Files, on which he answers random questions. For those of you wishing to improve your writing, I recommend that you put him on your list of writers to emulate and learn from. You don’t have to agree with his opinions to appreciate that he has a brilliant command of the English language. Please read on …
The Red Hand Files Issue #197
ISSUE #197 / JUNE 2022
What are your thoughts on free speech? Do you think it is a right?
LORRAINE, BERLIN, GERMANY
For **** sake, enough of the God and Jesus bull****!
JASON, LONDON, UK
Dear Lorraine and Jason,
We humans are subtle and chaotic creatures, full of ambiguities and contradictions, and it is this that makes up our distinctiveness. We are fully and necessarily different from each other, and even though we have the entirely human tendency to reduce each other to generalisations based on arbitrary categorisations of identity, such as race or religion or gender, we must resist as best we can, for it is uncharitable at best to deny any human their rightful individual sovereignty, their specialness. It is our distinctiveness that is the very thing that should be prized.
Each of us is an amalgam of all we have loved and lost and learned, our personal successes and failures, our particular regrets, and our singular joys – and part of that uniqueness is that we think in different ways. Not all of our thinking is right or fully formed, far from it, but … continue reading …
