User:Tony1
Patrick White (1912–90)
Michael Halliday (born 1925)
Alain de Botton (born 1969)
Self-help writing tutorials:
I'm a research consultant and professional editor. My doctoral dissertation was in the psychology of music reading, including the roles of working memory and eye movement. I work with researchers and academics in their preparation of grant applications for competitive research funding. Most of my clients are staff at Australian universities who are applying for funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council. This typically involves strategy and language in the areas of engineering, chemistry, physics, biology and IT, but sometimes extends to a broader range of fields.
My first career was in the complex European music of the 18th and 19th centuries, specialising in the compositional techniques that underlie style—how acoustics, culture and psychology intersect in harmony and voice leading—and the psychological and musculoskeletal patterns that support excellent performance, particularly on the keyboard. That career crashed and burned 13 years ago, but music is still a big part of my private identity. More recently I've been working on bringing the cognitive psychology of memory and prediction with temporal music theory into closer alignment.
I’m a keen advocate of systemic functional grammar (see Michael Halliday’s and Christian Matthiessen’s Introduction to functional grammar, 3rd ed., Hodder Arnold, London, 2004 ... but the second edition, 1995, is easier to understand). Traditional grammar sucks, in my view; while it might be helpful in the early stages of learning a foreign language, the parsing of written words into inflexible categories doesn’t help people to write better. What does help is a knowledge of the functional relationships between speakers/writers and their listeners/readers as embodied in the grammar. But it’s damned complicated: theme and rheme; the given and the new; hypotactic and paratactic clauses; mood; texture; cohesion; tone groups; and much more—it’s a whole science of how the language fits together on many levels. Although I’ve started writing short articles on aspects of functional grammar, such as thematic equative and nominal group, I can claim no more than amateur status.
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