OK, hands up - who applied for the BN job?

[Goz]

It's one of them you probably would have to work towards for years and not just apply off-the-cuff. I like the cheek of it though Goz.

Capt' is a proper journalist and he put the spade-work in, or so he says.

Absolutely but I didn't realise that back then.

At the time I figured I must be one of most boxing knowledgable youngsters out there, I certainly never met anyone who was a patch on me. And I could write a little when I put my mind to it so couldn't envisage a set of circumstances in which BN might not want me, especially as I would have come cheap being only 19 and all and happily made tea!

Then the Internet happened and I realised... I was not alone! There were 100s of you young boxing guru whippersnapper types out there whose knowledge put my own to shame.

Bit naive of me to assume I was more clued up than most but you live and learn....

[Wales]

Suzanne Nield?!?

Terry Dooley ?!?

Not me I'm afraid, despite my odd behaviour on here at times I've yet to make a site go tits-up or stitched anyone up

I've never seen you both in the same room, thats all im going to say.

[jamesmcdonnell]

Yep, totally agree, so much of it is about knowing how to read a fight and understanding what is happening, so much of it is psychology, and emotion.

I love it when you see a fight turning, almost imperceptibly at first, it can be one shot to the ribs that draws a wince from the fighter, and you see the first sign of someone chipping back into the fight.

The one area where I wish I knew so much more is technically, if I had more time, I would join a boxing gym, but there aren't any decent ones nearby, only boxercise ones, and I don't have the time to be travelling to east london.

[Goz]

It's very satisfying when you see the sudden shift in fortunes James and point it out when nobody else did, especially the commentary.

I just play the percentage game and shout out 'He's got him' every 5 or so seconds. Never watch a fight with me.

They've got some punchbags at my local gym in the studio and when it's not full of sweaty young women bobbing up and down to the most goddam awful music known to man then I can get in there, put some gloves on and let rip.

I've been thoroughly enjoying it over the last couple of months and the combinations are starting to come back and my Bruno like spear of a jab is looking quite fearsome once again 8)

However it does remind me how bloody hard it is. I can do about 90 intense seconds letting a lot of shots go and sort of flurrying for the last 20 seconds but my lungs are screaming at the end of it and I need 45 seconds before going again.

And that's all without anybody else trying to punch me in the face!

[Old bones Ian]

At least you lot can write well, i'm one of these that knows what i want to say, but find it differcult to put down on paper, or type on screen.

I read all the time, and can tell whats good and bad when reading it, but i'm knackered when it comes to me writing myself.

as i think i've just proven in the above:)

[T.M.K]

At the time I figured I must be one of most boxing knowledgable youngsters out there, I certainly never met anyone who was a patch on me. And I could write a little when I put my mind to it so couldn't envisage a set of circumstances in which BN might not want me, especially as I would have come cheap being only 19 and all and happily made tea!

Then the Internet happened and I realised... I was not alone! There were 100s of you young boxing guru whippersnapper types out there whose knowledge put my own to shame.

Bit naive of me to assume I was more clued up than most but you live and learn....

Brilliant mate. Word-for-bloody-word that could be the same about me....

Col

[ABA Boxing]

At least you lot can write well, i'm one of these that knows what i want to say, but find it differcult to put down on paper, or type on screen.

I read all the time, and can tell whats good and bad when reading it, but i'm knackered when it comes to me writing myself.

as i think i've just proven in the above:)

Im the same, i know what i want to say, but my grammar sucks, sometimes i have to change what i want to say because i dont know how to spell a word!.

Lucky for spell checker and CTRL C

[MightyWarrior]

Yep I used to dream about a job at BN, many years ago in my youth!
But you'd have to be REAL hard core to want a job like that: wages would be so so, and you'd end up traveling to the back of beyond on a rainy Monday night, and turning the lights out on your way out, having been one of three people who had to stay for the walkout bout. And score it. Then miss the last train home.

Travel to Las Vegas? Not unless Claude walks under a bus you aint

[pm]

Ok, I suffered the same troubles with get my thoughts across but I solved it through preparing a bit better.

It sounds ridiculous and you have to be able to suffer your own voice (which if you've never heard before is a truly bizarre experience) but I always found that either watching or reading something for inspiration and then just letting fly with everything you can think of on your subject into a tape recorder was a massive help.

Listening to it later and taking notes I was often amazed at some of the ideas I had come up with and how I had phrased them! I know if I had just sat down to write with no preparation then I would have struggled immensley.

It really helped separate the shite from the er, pish.

[jamesmcdonnell]

Yep, true, it ain't a job you're going to get rich from, and there's a lot of donkey work involved.

[rhino222]

PS Thanks Martin and Ian. A shame, would have been perfect for me, but I always knew it would be highly competitive and I'm glad the successful candidate was of such high quality. Wouldn't have been impressed if somebody like Spud Woolatt had beaten me to it!

more chance of lord lucan getting it !!

[Rocky Balboa]

I applied for the job. I would have loved to be given the opportunity to get paid for expressing my views on a sport I truly love. I'm only 22, full of enthusiasm and can't get enough of boxing.

Claude Abrams knows his stuff through & through. I know for a fact he ckecked out applicants that he felt could become a success in the vacant position. With this in mind, you can't have nothing but resepct for Claude's choice to fill the vacancy.

Wilst I'm gutted I never got the nod, I hope Tris Dixon & his new employers have a productive, nice relationship.

[steve689]

I never dreamed of applying cause i wouldn't have been good enough I'll just stick to writing illetarate shite on Boxing Tribune when the mood takes me Long may Internet "journalism" rule, where everyone can get a space for something to say! (No disrespect to the excellent internet based writers out there, purely jesting)

[DavidPayne]

Respect for thos willing to admit they didn't get it.

I didn't apply, I wouldn't have got it. Too old and too well paid doing what I do.

But I realise pole dancing is not for ever.

[E]

Tris Dixon ain't bad...now they need to get rid of that doofus achary Levin.....

They should've brought Mark Butcher back, he was a good writer

[harrygreb]

great thread, excellent from terry d about understanding and facts and figs. goz made me smile too. i wasnt much in the ring but could always write. would i trade the pen for some deft combinations? let me think...no.

good luck to tris

[Coco]

Tris Dixon ain't bad...now they need to get rid of that doofus achary Levin.....

They should've brought Mark Butcher back, he was a good writer

Mark Butcher is good, but I think he gets paid far better working as a researcher for Sky.

This job isn't really about the money, much more about the love of the game.

If I got offered the job, which I would love, I probably couldn't afford to take it.

[Max Molyneux]

I applied but they refused to pay me In free Hatton T-shirts.

[dondada]

Read a lot. Write a bit. Read a lot more. Write a bit more.

As David would say, 'Just my take'.

[Carbo]

Read a lot. Write a bit. Read a lot more. Write a bit more.

As David would say, 'Just my take'.

Learn the rules of English grammar. You don't have to learn them off by heart, as a foreign speaker of English would, but familiarising yourself with them is a great help.

My generation of school kids was not really taught detailed English grammar, because, I believe I'm right in saying, the education authorities thought that once you knew the bare basics, you would pick the rest up intuitively as you read and wrote and learned. Anything more than the basics, they opined, was a waste of time.

I disagree. When I came to Russia, the job I had lined up went tits-up and the back up job I had did too. I decided to start teaching English and was amazed how little I knew about English grammar. How many of you, for instance, would know when to use the present coninuous and when to use present perfect? Do we all know what prepositions and particles are?

Most of the time, as a native speaker of a fair writing standard, you can 'feel' when it's right and when it's wrong. But it's better to know.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves is a nice starter for the basics, and beautifully written itself; Bill Bryson's troublesome words is a cracker, and in writing it he may have become the funniest lexicographer of all time. But beyond that, learning some rules would be a good start. My girlfriend speaks 3 languages completely fluently, another to a highly advanced level and yet another to lower intermediate level and she knocks me into a cocked hat when it comes to English grammar -- even though it's not her native tongue.

My own articles weren't exactly to the standard of some posters on here, like James and David, but if I was to advice anything, it'd be that.

[el_grande_mauro_mina]

Read a lot. Write a bit. Read a lot more. Write a bit more.

As David would say, 'Just my take'.

Learn the rules of English grammar. You don't have to learn them off by heart, as a foreign speaker of English would, but familiarising yourself with them is a great help.

My generation of school kids was not really taught detailed English grammar, because, I believe I'm right in saying, the education authorities thought that once you knew the bare basics, you would pick the rest up intuitively as you read and wrote and learned. Anything more than the basics, they opined, was a waste of time.

I disagree. When I came to Russia, the job I had lined up went tits-up and the back up job I had did too. I decided to start teaching English and was amazed how little I knew about English grammar. How many of you, for instance, would know when to use the present coninuous and when to use present perfect? Do we all know what prepositions and particles are?

Most of the time, as a native speaker of a fair writing standard, you can 'feel' when it's right and when it's wrong. But it's better to know.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves is a nice starter for the basics, and beautifully written itself; Bill Bryson's troublesome words is a cracker, and in writing it he may have become the funniest lexicographer of all time. But beyond that, learning some rules would be a good start. My girlfriend speaks 3 languages completely fluently, another to a highly advanced level and yet another to lower intermediate level and she knocks me into a cocked hat when it comes to English grammar -- even though it's not her native tongue.

My own articles weren't exactly to the standard of some posters on here, like James and David, but if I was to advice anything, it'd be that.

Interesting Carbo, funnily enough my degree is linguistics and TEFL and what we were taught during the 4 years at Swansea university is that the reason most English speaking people have no idea about grammar principles and sentence structure is because most English spaking people do no learn a second languge to any advanced level.

A German or a Norweigian or a Russian has to learn grammar principles of English the same as we would if we had to learn say Urdu to an advanced level. Because English speakers have an L1 and are generically too bone idle to learn another language, we don't get to grips with the niceties of grammar.

No-one, unless they learn it it at a later date knows anything about the grammar principles of their first language. First language accqusition is
dependent on the enviroment around you, your parents or carers and your peers as you get older and develop a lexis. First language accqusition is evolutionary and organic. Second languge accqusition is not and is dependent on the teaching of grammatical structures, word order and rules.

Who do you work for Carbo? BKC? Moscow is ace man! I'll be there next year! 8)

[Carbo]

Read a lot. Write a bit. Read a lot more. Write a bit more.

As David would say, 'Just my take'.

Learn the rules of English grammar. You don't have to learn them off by heart, as a foreign speaker of English would, but familiarising yourself with them is a great help.

My generation of school kids was not really taught detailed English grammar, because, I believe I'm right in saying, the education authorities thought that once you knew the bare basics, you would pick the rest up intuitively as you read and wrote and learned. Anything more than the basics, they opined, was a waste of time.

I disagree. When I came to Russia, the job I had lined up went tits-up and the back up job I had did too. I decided to start teaching English and was amazed how little I knew about English grammar. How many of you, for instance, would know when to use the present coninuous and when to use present perfect? Do we all know what prepositions and particles are?

Most of the time, as a native speaker of a fair writing standard, you can 'feel' when it's right and when it's wrong. But it's better to know.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves is a nice starter for the basics, and beautifully written itself; Bill Bryson's troublesome words is a cracker, and in writing it he may have become the funniest lexicographer of all time. But beyond that, learning some rules would be a good start. My girlfriend speaks 3 languages completely fluently, another to a highly advanced level and yet another to lower intermediate level and she knocks me into a cocked hat when it comes to English grammar -- even though it's not her native tongue.

My own articles weren't exactly to the standard of some posters on here, like James and David, but if I was to advice anything, it'd be that.

Interesting Carbo, funnily enough my degree is linguistics and TEFL and what we were taught during the 4 years at Swansea university is that the reason most English speaking people have no idea about grammar principles and sentence structure is because most English spaking people do no learn a second languge to any advanced level.

A German or a Norweigian or a Russian has to learn grammar principles of English the same as we would if we had to learn say Urdu to an advanced level. Because English speakers have an L1 and are generically too bone idle to learn another language, we don't get to grips with the niceties of grammar.

No-one, unless they learn it it at a later date knows anything about the grammar principles of their first language. First language accqusition is
dependent on the enviroment around you, your parents or carers and your peers as you get older and develop a lexis. First language accqusition is evolutionary and organic. Second languge accqusition is not and is dependent on the teaching of grammatical structures, word order and rules.

Who do you work for Carbo? BKC? Moscow is ace man! I'll be there next year! 8)

Actually, I was working for a lady who ran a private English tuition business for children who needed to speak English. As I didn't speak any Russian, it forced the to practice their conversational English. Since then, though, I got a full time job, so I'v knocked it all on the head.

I hear what you're saying about learning language, and it's all true, but if a few more of us learned the rules of English, it would help our writing.

After having started learning Russian, I know what my girlfriend means about English being the easiest language to learn to a decent level. She says, in fact, that having English as your native tongue probably makes you lazy, because it's so easy.

Russian, for instance, has no word order, and instead the relationship between the words in a sentence are shown by the declension of nouns etc according to 6 cases. We just don't have cases at all, and it's tough to learn. Same with spanish where each verb has a different form for every single tense. For English, it's just go, gone, went, but in Spanish, according to the missus, there are 16 versions of the verb.

Yes, we're crap at languages in this country, and I've learnt I'm even crap at mine.

[harrygreb]

good post carbo and wigan but i think the english language - being the ridiculously elastic entity it is - will almost certainly prove you, me and most of us wrong eventually.
rules of usage are being broken down daily somewhere or other and what is spoken is what the language is.

ian is right, read, read, read then write a little read more.

[lowersmiths]

Fair play to Tris Dixon, I've always enjoyed his articles and hopefully we will see a lot more of his writing in there now.

He didn't just go for the obvious interviews either, which was particularly refreshing.

[T.M.K]

Read a lot. Write a bit. Read a lot more. Write a bit more.

As David would say, 'Just my take'.

But as a (very good) writer for an international boxing magazine, your words should be taken on board as they have not done you any harm my friend.

Keep up the good work btw.

Best wishes

"T.M.K"