About the journal

Bovaird is a writing journal. It publishes short dated entries about the practical craft of putting sentences together: how a first draft is best used, what a working notebook is for, when to cut a passage that is doing no structural work, and how reading aloud finds faults that silent reading misses.

The entries are practical rather than inspirational. Where a piece recommends something, it tries to say what the mechanism is and where the limits are, because advice without a stated limit is difficult to act on and impossible to argue with.

How entries are organised

Every entry is dated and filed under one subject label. Drafting covers getting words down and the conditions that make a session productive. Revision covers everything done to a text that already exists. Notebooks covers the working papers that sit beside a project. Reading covers what can be learned from other people’s prose without turning reading into homework.

The archive lists everything by month, newest first. Each entry has its own permanent address, and the permalink line under an entry gives the posting date, the time and the subject it was filed under.

Cadence

Entries appear when there is something worth saying rather than on a fixed schedule, which in practice has meant one or two a month. Older entries are left as they were written; where a later entry disagrees with an earlier one, the later entry says so rather than the earlier one being quietly changed.