I asked Claude to convert a pdf flyer into an HTML format I could insert into a Markdown block in Squarespace. Here’s the result:
<! data-preserve-html-node="true"-- Paste this into a Squarespace CODE block (not Markdown block).
Set Type = HTML. Works on 7.0 and 7.1. -->
Write Like You
Mean It
Creative writing courses by Terry Freedman — City Lit, London 2026
Three Courses · All Levels · Write from the Very First Session
<div class="tf-course">
<div class="tf-course-head">
<span class="tf-num">01</span>
<span class="tf-ctitle">Writing Using Constraints</span>
</div>
<p class="tf-meta">[ One-day workshop ]</p>
<div class="tf-tags">
<span class="tf-tag">Oulipo</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Lipograms</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Queneau</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Experimental writing</span>
</div>
<p class="tf-blurb">Rules that set you free. An intensive day exploring the Oulipo — the literary movement that turned constraints into creative rocket fuel. Lipograms, univocalics, style rewrites, and more.</p>
<a class="tf-link" rel="NOFOLLOW" class="fbz_link" href="https://p.feedblitz.com/t3/48551/0/30150601_/~tinyurl.com/tfoulipo" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tinyurl.com/tfoulipo</a>
</div>
<div class="tf-course">
<div class="tf-course-head">
<span class="tf-num">02</span>
<span class="tf-ctitle">The 60-Minute Writer</span>
</div>
<p class="tf-meta">[ 11 weekly sessions ]</p>
<div class="tf-tags">
<span class="tf-tag">Voice</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Dialogue</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Memoir</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Experimental forms</span>
</div>
<p class="tf-blurb">Every session, you write. No long lectures. No waiting. Just words on the page from the very first lesson — and a growing sense of what you can do.</p>
<a class="tf-link" rel="NOFOLLOW" class="fbz_link" href="https://p.feedblitz.com/t3/48551/0/30150601_/~tinyurl.com/tf60min" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tinyurl.com/tf60min</a>
</div>
<div class="tf-course">
<div class="tf-course-head">
<span class="tf-num">03</span>
<span class="tf-ctitle">Writing for Blogs</span>
</div>
<p class="tf-meta">[ One full day · Jul or Nov 2026 ]</p>
<div class="tf-tags">
<span class="tf-tag">Platform</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Audience</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Ideas</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Promotion</span>
</div>
<p class="tf-blurb">Find your voice, find your audience, get started. From blank page to blog plan — you leave with ideas, a reader profile, and the confidence to publish.</p>
<a class="tf-link" rel="NOFOLLOW" class="fbz_link" href="https://p.feedblitz.com/t3/48551/0/30150601_/~tinyurl.com/tfwfblogs" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tinyurl.com/tfwfblogs</a>
</div>
What You’ll Cover
Writing Using Constraints
What is the Oulipo?
Lipograms & univocalics
Queneau’s style rewrites
N+7 & snowball poems
Transformations
Design your own rules
The 60-Minute Writer
Point of view & voice
Memoir & subversion
Vibrant verbs
Magic metaphors
Dynamic dialogue
Erasure & story machines
Writing for Blogs
Why blog & where
Audience & personas
Generating ideas
Structure & format
Images & illustration
Promotion tactics
“Oulipians are rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.”
Raymond Queneau — basis of the Writing Using Constraints course
Terry Freedman
Terry Freedman is a writer, educator, and the person behind writersknowhow.org. He has been teaching creative writing at City Lit for years, running courses that are rigorous, surprising, and genuinely fun. His writing and teaching draw on experimental literature, constraint-based methods, and a conviction that everyone has a voice worth developing.
How to Book // All courses at City Lit, Keeley Street, London WC2B 4BA.
Book at citylit.ac.uk
· Small groups · All levels welcome · No experience needed
Well, I didn’t like that much, so I neserted it into a Code block instead — which is what it said to do in the first place! Here’s the result:
Write Like You
Mean It
Creative writing courses by Terry Freedman — City Lit, London 2026
Three Courses · All Levels · Write from the Very First Session
01Writing Using Constraints
[ One-day workshop ]
OulipoLipogramsQueneauExperimental writing
Rules that set you free. An intensive day exploring the Oulipo — the literary movement that turned constraints into creative rocket fuel. Lipograms, univocalics, style rewrites, and more.
Find your voice, find your audience, get started. From blank page to blog plan — you leave with ideas, a reader profile, and the confidence to publish.
“Oulipians are rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.”
Raymond Queneau — basis of the Writing Using Constraints course
Terry Freedman
Terry Freedman is a writer, educator, and the person behind writersknowhow.org. He has been teaching creative writing at City Lit for years, running courses that are rigorous, surprising, and genuinely fun. His writing and teaching draw on experimental literature, constraint-based methods, and a conviction that everyone has a voice worth developing.
How to Book // All courses at City Lit, Keeley Street, London WC2B 4BA.
Book at citylit.ac.uk
· Small groups · All levels welcome · No experience needed
It didn’t include the graphics I had inserted. These were a photograph and some speech balloons. I daresay I could have tweaked the code to make that happen, but you know, life’s too short!
If you would like to see the pdf flyer, click the button below. And if you’re reading this before 13 June 2026, there are still some places left on the course!
Click the pic to see this book on Amazon (affiliate link)
The FAST in the title stands for Focused Adaptable Structured Teaching. The book contains some interesting ideas. One of the things it doeasn’t agree with is when learning objectives are put on the screen at the start of the lesson, in the form “Students will be able to…” — though for different reasons from myself. The author writes:
“It is distracting to students when this information is presented at the beginning of the lesson. It does not add anything. Who do we think will be doing the work?”
— From Teach FAST
When I was observing a lesson once the teacher displayed:
“By the end of this lesson, some of you will have achieved X, Y and Z, some of you will achieve X and Y, and some of you will achieve X.”
As I said to the teacher afterwards, I don’t think that sort of formulation is helpful because some students, perhaps even most of them, will think they’re probably going to be in the least-achieved category, and that lack of self-confidence will probably end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Let’s put it this way. I am trying to lern how to play the saxophone at the moment, and I am pretty sure that if the teacher began the lesson by stating that some of us will be able to play the F#Major scale and some won’t, most of us will think we are going to be the failures!
This book is full of useful techniques, logically set out, but in my experience there needs to be a certain degree of flexibility. For example, telling students that for the next 5 minutes they must be absolutely silent while you explain or demonstrate something is an excellent idea — but what do you do when it doesn’t quite work out that way.
The author recommends chunking: breaking up concepts into smaller learning objectives. That sounds like common sense, but how does a new teacher know or work out how small the chunks should be? This is one of the objections I have to Cognitive Load Theory.
The author also distinguishes between declarative and procedural lessons. I had not come across these terms before. Apparently, the former focus on learning a new concept while the latter focus on learning a new skill. There is a table showing the differences between these in practial terms.
There are plenty of diagrams to help the reader understand the concepts introduced. There is also a lot of focus on the nitty gritty, even down to details such as how students should hold up their individual whiteboards.
There are many good ideas here, and it would be worth using this book as a means of adding to your teacher toolkit, so to speak.
I have just received an advance reading copy of Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings, subtitled (When) do leaders make a difference?
Click the pic to see this book on Amazon (affiliate link)
As the book arrived only today I haven’t had a chance to do much more than flick through it, but I always think it’s important to think about an issue before reading a book or an article about it. That way you can be a more engaged reader, more critical (in the intellectual sense), more active, rather than as a blank canvas on which to soak up someone else’s ideas.
I have somewhat dichotomous views of this question of whether leaders make a difference, or much of a difference. I think my views can be classified as macro and micro. Let me explain.
I have always been somewhat dubious of the so-called “great man” theory of history. For instance — and this is an example given in this book — if Hitler had been bumped off earlier in his life, would the Holocaust and a world war have been averted? It’s tempting to say, “Of course”, but as I pointed out in my review of Weimar, Germany was already a hot bed of virulent antisemitism and other far right views long before Hitler was even born. Hitler, in my view, was in the right place at the right time — and when I say “right”, I mean by his standards not mine.
That’s what I call a macro perspective, but turning to the micro one, leadership at a school level or even a departmental level can make an enormous amount of difference. For example, the technical suppoirt set-up was second to none in one school I worked with — until a new deputy head was appointed. He preferred his own ideas to the ones that actually worked, and the whole thing went down the pan in virtually no time at all.
Profits… looks at leadership in several different fields, including politics, sports, and religion, and I am very much looking forward to reading it. It will be published in September by Allen Lane, who very kindly sent me the ARC.
I’ve been experimenting with using artificial intelligence apps to help me format documents. Look, |I will freely admit it: my artistic design skills are notable for their absence. (I wrote about this in I miss the old website!.
So when I decided that I would like to create a flyer for my forthcoming creative writing courses, and that I would like it to have the look of a zine, it made sense to me to enlist the services of artificial intelligence.. In case you are not familiar with zines, they were publications created by fans of one thing or another — hence “fanzines” or fan magazines. Back in the eighties they were, to an extent, the social media of their day. They had a hand-crafted look and feel, probably because they were largely hand-crafted. Here is a photo I took of a collage of football zines on display at the British Library:
zines, by Terry Freedman
So what I did was, I uploaded three flyers about the next three courses I’m running, and instructed Claude to create a flyer out of them with a zine vibe to them.
It very quickly produced a nearly-decent flyer in both HTML and pdf formats. This is what it looked like:
Claude flyer #1, by Terry Freedman
OK, not a bad colour scheme, but not the down and dirty look I wanted either. Also, the course descriptions have a page break in the middle, and there is a lot of white space.
I instructed Claude to give the thing a monochrome look, and it came up with this:
Claude flyer #2 by Terry Freedman
OK, so this is much better, but there is a glaring error, as you can see: the word “WHO” is upside-down.
Claude tried to get around this by including an illustration, but for some reason nothing it tried would show up. The next iteration, in a Word version, looked like this:
Claude flyer #3 by Terry Freedman
By this time I had played a more active role, by doing the following:
Increased the size of the font in the small print section. In one of them it was a size 9 and in the other it was a size 7. These are ridiculous sizes, especially considering that the font, Couirier New, is monotype. That means that the space taken up by each letter is the same as that taken up by every other letter, which makes it harder to read.
Added some colour.
Added a photograph of myself.
Created shorthand URLs and tur5ned them into live links.
Changed the quotation.
Changed some of the text. One of the course descripters read “No lectures. No waiting. Write from the first minute.” I changed that because I am going to be introducing each technique and activity with a short talk of perhaps five minutes. So that could be construed as a lecture by some people! Also, there is no way that people can start writing from the very first minute — unless I were to cheat by asking them to write down their names! So those bits were changed to: “No long lectures. No waiting. Just words on the page from the very first lesson”.
The next iteration looked like this:
Claude flyer #4 by Terry Freedman
Claude flyer #4b by Terry Freedman
As you can see, I’ve added a few comic book-type touches, such as speech balloons. I’m not convinced that this enhances the flyer from a professional look point of view, but it does give it more of a handmade feel I think.
There are several interesting things to come from this exercise I think:
Firstly, the designs Claude came up with were much better than anything I would have thought of. As I say, I’m a wordsmith, I’m no graphic designer.
Secondly, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to include a quotation. I loved the idea. In the end, I didn’t use the one that Claude had provided, but the principle is sound, obviously.
Thirdly, Claude came up with a few interesting ideas unprompted. For instance, it did a pretty good job on my bio, and it came up with succinct — and still accurate — descriptions of what the courses cover.
Fourthly, this siort of thing works much better if you treat Claude (or whichever AI app you choose to use) as a partner rather than a boss.
If you would like to see what the final iteration looks like in its entirety, click the button below in orde to download the PDF.
Making Good Progress?: The future of Assessment for Learning
Click the pic to see this book on Amazon (affiliate link)
If only assessment were as easy as just setting a quick end-of-term test! The author, Daisy Christodoulou, carefully picks apart the pitfalls of various kinds of assessment, drawing on different subject areas to do so. Many of the points she makes are extremely valid, such as the existence of Goodhart’s Law, which is that “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
We can see this by noting that many school pupils are in effect drilled for success in the end-of-year or key stage measure rather than being educated as such. Indeed, as Christodoulou points out:
“Excessive exam preparation is not the same as teaching a based curriculum; in fact, it is almost the opposite. Exams complex skills and tasks, but these complex skills depend body of knowledge. Focussing solely on exam tasks means this hidden knowledge stays hidden, and pupils can only ever develop skills in a superficial and limited way.”
— Daisy Christodoulou
There is also an interesting section on descriptive assessment criteria. I remember, when I worked in the Quaklifications and Curriculum Authority, having interesting discussions with colleagues and other professionals about what the criteria in the ICT Programme of Study actually meant, and how to distinguish between them. Ultimately it depended on a probablistic approach based on evidence. That is to say, if a student demonstrates an ability to do or understand X, Y and Z, she is probably a Level 5. I, along with my colleagues, tried to be as robust as possible with our guidance, but you couldn’t apply that sort opf approach in other areas. (Imagine discovering that the person you’ve contracted to rewire your house is probably adequately qualified!)
I like the end-of-chapter summary diagrams. I’m not sure what the point of the photographs is, except maybe to make the book look pretty. There are good reference sections too, and a sound basis in research.
A good and easy-to-read introduction to assessment.
