Best of the ACW Archives - Book Review: Pieces of Eternity by Michael Jensen

By Anne Hamilton

It’s often hard to convince successful speakers that what works in front of a microphone doesn’t work in print. As an editor I often struggle to convince preachers and teachers that the rhythms and sentence structures that deliver a great punchline to a live audience simply fall flat on the page.

It’s vitally important we choose our words thoughtfully for the medium we’re using. I make this point to make a confession: I have read some of the pieces in Michael Jensen’s Pieces of Eternity when they were originally published in the Eternity newspaper and I was bored witless by them. The majority were too long and intense to hold my interest and, before long, I was glancing at the length on the page and deciding not to even read the first sentence.

Now I read long and intense (and even boring) books all the time, so I wondered why these articles failed to appeal to me. There’s a lot of research been done as to how the internet and blogs, in particular, have changed the way we read. Having looked at that research, I now understand why one quick glance was enough to cause me to ignore the articles.

Read more at the following link:

http://australasianchristianwriters.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/book-review-pieces-of-eternity-by.html