Archive for 2007

On a recent Sunday, members of the Amsterdam LIG drove down to Ede, in the charming Dutch province of Gelderland. There we tucked in to a long lunch with a group of editors, writers, and translators. The talk was lively and ranged over the health of the Dutch authoring industry, linguistics, grammar, and the special challenges presented when producing work in a non-native-speaking environment where many of our Dutch colleagues are confident that their knowledge of English grammar and phrasing is better than ours. It was decided that the industry seems lately to be thriving, and that some of the best ways of looking at English from a fresh angle come when a non-native speaker insists on a point of grammar or phrase that we might not agree with. It is a valuable skill to be able to defend your authoring choices based on research rather than hearsay, and to prove the professional worth of the professional author, technical or otherwise. After lunch we took a long walk in the Veluwe forest despite the usual persistent rain. All in all, it was a wonderful opportunity for the Amsterdam LIG to expand contacts and talk shop, even though we all got a bit soggy.

News from the Amsterdam LIG - get lit!

Several of us here in the Noord-Holland region of The Netherlands got together 15-20 May 2007 at the Amsterdam Literary Festival. We met writers working in various fields and talked about the art and business of writing. Now in its third year, the festival has become an annual event by and for writers in northern Europe. Several major language groups and cultural points-of-view were represented this year with events in American English, British English, Indian English, Dutch, Flemish (which is Belgian Dutch) and German. It was refreshing to meet with and discuss writing with people on the front lines of other parts of the writing industry: journalists, playwrights, novelists, broadcasters, conceptual literary artists working in multimedia, and poets. We were exhilarated by the cross-industry contact. Zesty!