BWA

If a writer publishes a book that purports to educate others in the ways of deconstructing argument, you’d expect that writer to be very careful and clever about the arguments they hang up in the public domain. It all goes to credibility, don’t you think?

Yet, in a thinly veiled attack on The British Writers’ Award, one such writer recently made judgements based on comments 'read elsewhere' and jumped to big conclusions from these unverified comments. When some of the comments transpired to have little or no foundation in fact, this writer did not make appropriate apology or address the error. Instead this writer snipped and sniped at other perceived failings in the BWA.

This writer has some experience in the publishing industry, tells you so you know, and then makes bold declarations about what is possible and what impossible in publishing, but no satisfactory argument is given to persuade us of the truth of some of these pronouncements. Apparently a book cannot be edited adequately in the space of a month, it just cannot – I think it would be like a roomful of monkeys typing the complete works of Shakespeare in a morning.

This writer jumps from suspicions held to damning judgements. This writer performs all sorts of statistical manipulations of data that are crazy at best and at worst just fabulously wrong – mostly the manipulated data is wrong! The BWA states that they made little or no profit from last year’s awards competition, that what they did make from the entry fees collected funded the financial prize to the winner. This bold writer has them pocketing nearly a quarter of a million pounds.

I do not doubt this writer’s stated credentials, but I do question the writer’s arguments, we all should, and I do not accept that this writer is the absolute font of all wisdom on the subject of publishing. This writer is someone who has published a book which purports to be a handbook on how to construct intellectual argument, and how to punch holes in the arguments of others; I am a little surprised therefore at the weaknesses in the arguments of this writer.