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To those who dare to stand!

I haven’t really said anything online concerning how I feel about students protesting over fees being too high and stuff. It’s not that what I think they did wasn’t brave or really admirable, it’s that I wish I had maybe had the “apples” to have done something that amazing when I was in varsity. I recall scrapping registration fees together from relatives to get into a University to study something, anything I just wanted an education.

I couldn’t afford to step foot into a varsity and I know it (so does my bank balance) but…what they did was very brave and I take my bra off to them. I do this as the highest form of respect for real.
To stand up for a cause takes a lot of “apples” and I wish I had those “apples” in every area of my life.
I am a coward of note and would never risk doing anything that would land me even a stone throw away from a holding cell, let alone an actual jail. There are numerous reasons for this, number one, I fear having a criminal record because I heard even Shoprite won’t hire you as a packer if you have one of those and who would want to be rejected by Shoprite?
Number two, my aunt would kill me before I would get the chance to explain why I was there. My fear for her is too great to fight any system regardless of what it is, I am sorry dear comrades. Number three, I don’t wanna know what teargas smells like, I cannot run to save my life, I’d probably be more of a liability than a comrade during a protest. I am a giant coward and that is it!

It is with all these factors that I admire the students of 2015 who dared to stand up for what they believed in. So…power to those of you who know how to stand up for yourself at work with an unrealistic boss, in family matters with stubborn uncles, a government that buys luxury jets, or at school with ridiculously high fees. In all the fighting that you do, know that there is a coward out there that is me who is thinking and writing about you in her safe little corner admiring your courage.

Blessings
Pops

Education for Democracy

Young people of today are parents of tomorrow: young people of today are spinal cord of a country, young people of today are a spinal cord of a nation. Young people are a reflection of national image: young people are a symbol of elders, young people are fragile towards the pillow of influence. No force is greater than the youth, no force is stronger than the youth. To promise is the is the urge of giving: to promise and give nothing is pointless, to promise and give nothing is a vacuum for a python. Don’t blame the youth, don’t fool the youth, instead find a solution and change the strategy…

Yesterday my history, tomorrow my future: what defines my future is what I desire now, what determines my destiny is what I do today. Today is a dream, tomorrow is a reality: If today today is a desire then tomorrow is a destiny. When a leader speaks, action must emphasize because revolution begins in a empty stomach but ends up in action.

Every pain is difficult: to get a job you need experience, to get experience you need a job. Whom who fulfills it knows it, whom who knows it can tell a life time story. Every generation blames the next, not knowing that every generation is a citizen of society. When qualified graduates become hopeless and desperate for a job: when young people are told to wait for a long time, patience becomes a boiling point of anger. Anger is a short madness: A hungry youth is a angry youth, a angry youth is a symbol of vandalism: change the teacher but not the subject, change the picture but not the frame.

Share the wealth with the youth, share the riches with the young people of today. Don’t blame the youth, don’t fool the youth: find a solution, change the strategy but don’t blame the youth. silence is the golden generation for ignorant cowards, who never learnt to reason. When freedom for some is prison, reality must provide a answer to a numerous question marks. People have freedom but still are homeless: people have freedom freedom but people are still hopeless, people have freedom but still are learners.

Why are people homeless, if they have homelands, why do people  not have bread at their homes if there’s bread at the bakery. Each one teaches one, each one teaches all. Young people of today are our future leaders, give them respect to receive respect back to you, give them a iron fist to get a middle finger: when the bin falls the rubbish shall fall out too.

Don’t blame the youth, don’t fool the youth: when parenting is taken over by television, don’t blame the youth. When children become pregnant, don’t blame the youth: when bribery and corruption couples to fail society, don’t blame youth: when politics fail society don’t blame the youth, when leaders talk  to leaders to start to rule, don’t blame the youth. When leaders toast champagne in the name of corruption don’t blame the youth, don’t blame the youth for the enforcement of corporal punishment.

Art is longer, life is short. Whom am I to be long; young people cannot be young forever, young people cannot be fooled forever, young people cannot be cheated forever, young people cannot be promised forever: you told them things would be right, you told them things would be better, you told them things would be easier, you told them things would be cheaper, you told them education would be free, you told them textbooks would be given, you told them neighbor brokers would be broken…

Don’t underestimate the power of the youth.

Are the olden African ways really just modern ways?

It is often argued that culture plays an important role in defining who and what we are, and so many still resort to the old ways of their ancestors, but are the ways we resort to really the ways of our first ancestors? If not, then why do we need to stick to these way?

 

While it is important to not forget the past and not forget where we come from, it should also be remembered that today, even the most traditional and deep rooted Africans, may not know where exactly they come from. From a historians point of view, there is no concrete evidence of the customs of the cultures of old which still play a role in today’s African society. All that is known and all that is done is based on one of the most unreliable sources there is: word of mouth.

 

Most of that which we know about the various cultures in South Africa is what has been passed down from generation to generation verbally. The knowledge of that which is supposedly the old ways is basically the echo of someone who comes from a previous and older generation, and that is the way it has been for over two hundred years. Who is to say that over the years, cultural knowledge hasn’t changed and being altered to suit the generation currently holding the knowledge. One way to display the unreliability of  verbal accounts is through a game of broken telephone. The message uttered at the beginning of the game is seldom the exact same as what is spoken at the end of the game. The conclusion we get from the example of the broken telephone, is that there is a chance that as modern Africans, what we call our old and cultural ways may not necessarily be our old and cultural ways, but rather a more modernised version, or possibly even the complete opposite.

 

Once again referring to the game of broken telephone, the conclusion we can arrive at is that basically, as modern Africans, we live our lives according to the final message spoken, which has changed and differs from the original, but for some reason, we as people blind ourselves and are convinced that it is the original.

 

A newer generation always seems to have different ideas from that of the previous. Let us just pretend that the verbal history and stories, cultural rites and beliefs passed down are accurate, the fact is no two generations are the same. A younger one will have new ideas and probably a “less closed-minded” ideology, certain cultural beliefs would contradict that of certain members of the generation, and thus they would probably not be passed down, so is this part of that cultures history not dead if less and less people pass it down.

 

Culture is an ever changing thing, yet many refuse to see that. From a personal point of view, there are a number of things I as an individual will not be passing down to my kids, simply because I don’t believe them. Would it not be hypocritical to want future generations to know and believe something that I am against.

 

Can it not be said that perhaps, our culture and where we come from is forgotten. This does not necessarily mean that our culture is dead however. Culture is something that we create and live out. Whether it be a system of morals and beliefs, we as a generation need to open our minds. The fact is, there is no point in resorting to the old to appease ancestors or to stay true to your culture, because we don’t know the old ways.

ROYAL COURT – Call for playwrights – Zimbabwe

The Royal Court runs long-term play development projects in many different countries, helping to stimulate new writing and bringing many of these writers and plays to London for further work and sometimes productions. At any one time, the International Department will be working with dozens of playwrights through specific projects. Long-term play development relationships now exist through projects and exchanges with writers from Columbia, Brazil, Cuba, France, Germany, India, Mexico, Uganda, Nigeria, Syria and many more. The British Council has been a key collaborator and supporter of many of the Royal Court International programmes and is delighted to be in a position to extend this work to playwrights from South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Phase One – Elyse Dodgson, Head of International Department, Royal Court will travel to South Africa where the workshop will take place, accompanied by two workshop leaders to conduct a 7 day workshop for a total of 12 Zimbabwean participants. The aim of the workshop is to support each individual participant in writing a new contemporary play. The workshop will be designed for the needs of each writer, explore individual interests, and in the end each writer will be asked to propose an outline of a new idea for a contemporary and original play. The first draft of this play will be submitted three months after the end of the first workshop. The workshop will consist of group and individual sessions and there will also be time for writing.

Phase Two – Once these plays are received, they are read (in their original language by one of our readers/translators if appropriate), who will then make recommendations on how or whether to proceed with each play. The team, predominantly the same (but we try to include a director if possible), travel out to work on the plays individually with the writers and do more group work exploring some common problems. Sometimes at this stage actors are used and workshops and readings done of the plays. This again will last about a week. At the end of this phase, the writers are asked to work on a next draft.

Phase Three – The new drafts are again read, assessed and translated before the team returns for the final phase of development work. This can sometimes involve public rehearsed readings in the countries, either of extracts or of whole plays as well as individual meetings with each writer. Sometimes at this phase we attach the writers to local directors who will help to facilitate the development of the plays. The first three phases usually last between 18 months and two years.

WHAT WE WILL PROVIDE

THE SPACE & ACCOMODATION & CATERING

The workshop will take place at Mokoya Lodge www.mokoya.co.za South Africa. Accommodation, food and workshop spaces will be provided.

LOGISTICAL SUPPORT

The British Council office in Harare will book and pay your travel as well as pay for visas to get you out to South Africa for the workshop. Please be aware that you will be required to have a valid passport in order to attend the workshop. The British Council will not be in a position to help pay for any costs related to obtaining your passport.

THE TIMELINE

8 March 2013 – disseminate open call
19 April 2013 – application deadline
10 May 2013 – announce participants

26th June 2013 – Fly to Johannesburg, South Africa

27th June – 5th July 2013 – Workshops

6th July – departure from South Africa

There will also be further activities as described in the 3 phases above, by applying you are committing yourself to being involved in the project for up to two years.

 

http://eliotmoleba.com/2013/04/04/royal-court-call-for-playwrights-zimbabwe/

A writer’s process – third session

Everyone is requested to think about their writing process. How would you define that process? When you say that you are waiting for a ‘spark’ to ignite the creative juices, do you know what that spark is? How it looks like? Feel like? Taste like? What are you waiting to understand before you can unleash your ink on the page? Is it an imagine of a character? A specific setting? A line? A face?

Whatever it is, do you understand why it is so important to your writing? To your process? Do you want to understand it? Do you want to control it? Take charge? Or at least make an attempt? If yes, I’d like to you to think of a metaphor that would explain the process. How does the metaphor capture the different stages of your writing? How does it communicate that process to someone? Can you give a parallel analysis of how the metaphor not only mirrors but gives a detailed breakdown description of the process? This information should enable me to follow step-by-step instruction of how you work. Is this possible? How detailed can you be? How much can you unlock? I.e. Someone once told me that their writing process is like a kite (metaphor). When they begin a new writing they envision the process to be like building a kite. First you need material; plastic, sticks, string, pins, etc. These in their writing process mirrors research. For instance, you need your grounding data or evidence – sticks hold or provide the basic structure for a kite. So they will look for them first to build the skeleton of a kite. In their writing, this could mean key grounding literature. If you are writing a book about Zombies, what are the basic elements which you must adhere to or establish for your story to hold? Etc… One can go on to explain how the metaphor reveals how and where the writer places themselves in their writing and defines a sense of direction.

If you’ve never did this before, take the challenge and you will see it will start to show you, at the very least, how well you understand or have taken some things for granted in your writing. This process might be spontaneous and mysterious for many but within that there is great room for a writer to
understand the workings behind it. Try new things, learn how to stimulate yourself and your writing. We might not have figured out the secret to teach writing but we know how to enable the process. So take a chance. Write a metaphor you think would best explain your process and post it here. You might be amazed at something small you discover about your writing.

Is this important?
Well, you decide.

Date: 4 March 2013

Venue: The Wits Writing Centre

TheWritersClu

Text editing: a handbook for students and practitioners

By Kris Van de Poel, Wannie Carstens and John Linnegar (published by ASP Editions, Brussels)

What is a text editor? What does the process of editing texts involve? What level of intervention is required for practitioners to make a text communicate effectively?

Text editing: a handbook for students and practitioners is a first for South Africa and will have an international appeal. It sets out to answer these questions directly and in the amount of detail appropriate to a work that describes the text editor’s complex craft. As the basis for answering the questions, the authors have adopted – and adapted – renowned Dutch linguist Jan Renkema’s text-evaluation model for the text-editing process, the elements of which form a leitmotiv that runs through the 12 chapters of Text editing.

Text editing is a North–South collaboration between two academics in the field of applied linguistics – Professor Kris Van de Poel of the University of Antwerp in Belgium’s Research Unit for Applied Language Studies and Professor Wannie Carstens, professor of Afrikaans linguistics and current director of the School of Languages at North-West University (Potchefstroom campus) – and a professional trainer of text editors and proofreaders in South Africa for more than a decade, John Linnegar, himself a text editor of long standing.

At once thoroughly researched and firmly grounded in modern editing practice, this comprehensive, highly accessible handbook covers many aspects of the text editor’s craft:

For the student of language practice or publishing studies it will prove to be an invaluable source of information about the profile of a text editor

  1. the types and levels of text editing as a process
  2. the many different roles that the text editor can play as a language practitioner
  3. the issues with which the editor has to deal, including plagiarism, copyright, defamation/libel and the question of ethics in editing practice generally the complex and comprehensive process that text editing is.

For the seasoned practitioner

  1. the systematic approach offered by Renkema’s model should prove to be as illuminating as the chapter on resources – with its lists of print and online references regarded as essential aids to the professional – and the extensive bibliography
  2. the new text on producing ebooks and digital media and on English as a lingua franca should open up new vistas to the more progressive or tech-savvy editor.

From the theoretical initial chapters through the nitty-gritty of intervening to improve the content, structure, wording, and presentation of various documents to the pièce de résistance that is the final chapter (where a group of text editors prove their mettle at critiquing and improving a selection of texts), this volume covers the whole gamut of the text editing process.

An English edition of this nature will attract an international readership and the authors have borne in mind the needs of two particular groups: English native-speakers who are likely to have to edit texts written by non-native speakers of English as a second or third language; and text editors who themselves are not native-speaking users of English. These are common phenomena with which text editors in South Africa have to deal regularly.
For the latter group the detailed treatment of the grammatical, syntactic, morphological, spelling and punctuation facets of the editor’s armoury should be particularly helpful.

In addition, the appendices of five brief exposés on a variety of Englishes and the pitfalls and challenges they present to text editors worldwide will be particularly helpful for those editing texts drafted by English non-native speakers.

The result is an expansive text that gives full recognition to the role of the text editor not only as such but also as proofreader, project manager, freelance, and in a wide range of other guises and situations. Editing for digital media and onscreen editing are also given appropriate consideration.
Subtitled A handbook for students and practitioners the editors believe it to be not only an important and useful point of entry into the profession of text editing but also an essential guide to practising editors who perhaps have not had any formal training in their craft. For both groups, the many lists, checklists, tabulated matter and diagrams will prove to be particularly supportive, making this an essential addition to the practitioner’s reference library.

Editor’s notes

Kris Van de Poel of the University of Antwerp (Belgium) Research Unit for Applied Language Studies is an applied linguist in the real sense of the word, always looking for challenges in the area of language in use. During her sojourns in Denmark and Scotland she ran a successful text-editing business called editek which aimed to make intercultural texts say what they were meant to say. Back in Belgium, she has guided translators and linguists along the slippery slopes of effective and professional communication, trying to raise their communicative awareness. Moreover, she has devoted much research time to text editing in academic and professional contexts, training materials for teaching, learning and self-evaluation.

Wannie Carstens, professor of Afrikaans linguistics and current director of the School of Languages at North-West University (Potchefstroom campus) in South Africa, has carried out some pioneering work on normative grammar and text linguistics. In the Text editing team he is the analytical reader and he has the most comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the theoretical and world literature on the topic. He has the unique capacity to absorb, digest and re-digest the literature on the topic in such a way that even the most intricate findings become accessible to an interested audience. His drive in teaching generations of students has ensured a place for qualitative text editing in the minds and professional lives of many of his graduates.

John Linnegar of McGillivray Linnegar Associates based in Cape Town is firmly rooted in the language practice within the publishing industry. Being a sought-after professional trainer of text editors, subeditors, proofreaders, project managers and indexers, John brings his hands-on experience in publishing and his abiding passion for language to Text editing. A strong advocate of professionalisation for practitioners in the field, he is immediate past chairman of the national Professional Editors’ Group and an associate of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders in the United Kingdom. A former schoolteacher, and also an inhouse copy editor/proofreader, subeditor, project manager for books and magazines, and a published author himself, he brings 30 years of experience to his role as co-author of the present volume.

What binds the three authors together is their passionate belief in the need for text editing to have solid foundations, at the same time acknowledging that theory is firmly rooted in practice and that in turn practice can be perfected through teaching and training.

Text editing chapter by chapter:
• Chapter 1 From language practice to model building: the foundations of text editing.
• Chapter 2 Text as a domain of text editing – an applied model.
• Chapter 3 The profile of a text editor.
• Chapter 4 Process and procedure: doing text editing.
• Chapter 5 The text editor and editorial project management.
• Chapters 6 to 10 Text editing in practice: content, structure, wording and presentation.
• Chapter 11 Resources.
• Chapter 12 Text editing in practice: the editors’ voice – a comparative analysis of texts.
• Extensive bibliography.

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Welcome to WritingWorks, a joint venture between the Wits Writing Centre and MistryWorks. This portal aims to encourage, support and promote writers and poets in South Africa.