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paul@paulspages.co.uk
www.paulspages.co.uk

Although I can be as serious as the next IT journalist, I like the lighter side of things too. As a result I've developed my own end-pages speciality - computer soap operas in the form of fictional diaries. 

My diaries mix technical content with the classic soap opera ingredients - intrigue, betrayal and problems logging onto the server. Group Efforts, the diary of a workgroup manager, ran for over five years in PC Plus, and is still running on my website. Developer's Diary, featuring COM specialist Angie Baxter, is now two years old and appears in Developer Network Journal magazine. 

Click here for more details of both series. 

Mail me if you'd like a soap opera - diary or narrative format - in your magazine! 

I also use humour in my general copy (when appropriate, of course), especially in columns. 

One out-and-out example has been 'Old Paul's Almanac', which occupied my 1-page column in PC Plus in the Feb (on sale 1st Jan) issues from 1997 to 1999. Click 'Copy Sample' to see the original column copy for January 1997.

(Slightly) more subtly, I sometimes use a little in-line humour to make a point. Here's a paragraph from my PC Plus column in July 1999 (August issue, no 154). The subject is the sluggardly performance of BT and the cable companies in bringing broadband connectivity to the masses in the UK, and the suggestion that the Government should tell them to get on with it or hand over their licences to someone who'll do it more quickly. 

"If the government of the day doesn't do this (which seems fairly likely), it may well be left to Microsoft to effect the cabling of Britain by drawing successive $500 millions from petty cash, stuffing them into large boots and applying them to the nether regions of recalcitrant cable firms. Normally I'd recoil in horror at such a prospect, because it would mean that our washing machines really did end up running Windows, with implications for the wellbeing of the nation's laundry which are too horrible to contemplate. But if Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and their cronies really are the only people who can see how important it is to get affordable high-bandwidth connections into people's homes, and are willing to do something about it, then perhaps they deserve to end up controlling the digital nervous system of 21^st century Britain, and of most other countries too."

(C) Paul Stephens 1999. All rights reserved. 

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