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Do you think straight ahead, from side to side or from one corner to the opposite corner?

Well, you can now find out, care of a new online self-assessment made available by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA).

The point is, an ideal candidate for the creative, communication industries should have - as opposed to just logical linear thinking or solely creative lateral thinking - what’s known as diagonal thinking, a winning blend of the two.

The Guardian’s weekend feature on the concept included our own group’s Tim Lindsay, president of TBWA\UK & Ireland who, according to the IPA’s test results so far, is the ”most diagonal thinker in the world”, though he modestly claims to be not much good at thinking either linearly or laterally. 

All you can do is take the test and be prepared to re-think your geometry.

Budding journalists and people writing for journalists (that’s you, PR people) could do worse than read the Guardian’s writing guide to journalism out today.

The introduction by columnist and former Times editor, Simon Jenkins, is a must-read for anyone tasked with communicating news via the written word.

He recalls a “ferocious sub editor” at The Times who would - after a reading a draft report - pose the million dollar question: “What is it you are really trying to tell me?”. Exactly what PR people should be thinking before they lay a hand on a keyboard.

Great tips for crafting a great story include:

- make every paragraph a single idea.

- Make nouns and verbs the workhorses of each sentence.

- Delete all adjectives and adverbs unless absolutely essential.

- Never use sloppy words, such as “interesting”.

- Begin every story with who, what, when and where.

But excellent writing - a skill which Jenkins sees as deplorably absent in today’s society - is the lesser part of the journalist’s armoury; the signs of the natural reporter are curiosity, the desire to communicate experiences, cunning and the gift to narrate. As he says, there is “no substitute for the person who saw it happen”, which opens the door for what we now know as citizen journalists.

When I hear colleagues talking about “the press release” or even truncated to “the release”, I shudder. A press release is merely a tool, a medium for the really important element: the story - that is what journalists are looking for.

Maybe that’s pedantic. Maybe I should’ve been a sub editor.

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What an interesting autumn of politics lies ahead. Here, the Labour party conference kicks off in a week while ministers re-run the Mutiny on the Bounty and, in the States, the final reckoning for Obama and McCain.

BBC4’s series about American politics last night featured the 1972 Robert Redford film, The Candidate, which looks incredibly prescient about the way politics has evolved in the UK. In it, a fundamentally good bloke with honest convictions gets absorbed into the business of winning elections, complete with the “style over content” manipulation of voters that Gordon Brown probably wishes he’d picked up from Tony Blair. Telling indeed is the final scene when, on realising he’s won, Redford’s character turns to his campaign manager, pleading: “What do we do now?” So much for the manifesto, then.

Meanwhile, in the US presidential race, a clear distinction has emerged between the candidates’ strategies. Michael Tomasky’s blog in The Guardian explains how McCain’s campaign is focused on winning the “news cycle”, in other words, attacking Obama through adverts and generating stories in the mainstream media. Obama, conversely, is concentrating on grass roots politics by having a greater number of local offices than his opponent in every state, registering voters and building support in advance of November 4.

These contrasting approaches seem to illustrate some of the tensions between old and new media tactics; whether it’s better to have the traditional media on your side or get through to people directly, as in the social media world.

Question is, will it work? As one of the campaign managers in The Candidate says to a bemused Redford: “We know this is all bullshit, but at least they’re believing it.”

Now, unless you’ve been living on Mars or with that recently discovered tribe of rainforest indians, it can’t have escaped your notice that the economy’s in trouble.

So how can Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling’s comments in the Guardian be blamed directly for a fall in the pound and the FTSE?

Commentators have been banging on for months about the likely longevity of this financial crisis, so how do the Chancellor’s words have such a direct influence on the markets?

Well, maybe they do; maybe they don’t. But, the point is, the confluence of these two events is too tempting not to connect in the eyes of the media. That might be exposing my somewhat rudimentary grasp of international finance, but it goes to show that loose talk - if not costing lives in this instance - may not help Mr Darling come Cabinet reshuffle time.

Reading about sex in the tabloids is, well, unavoidable. But in the Guardian, it makes me feel slightly soiled. Still, the story about the “outing” of a Brit blogger, ChinaBounder, in China is instructive about the blogosphere generally.

ChinaBounder’s, ahem, enthusiastic online entries about his liaisons with Chinese women caused a storm with an influential Chinese blogger, whose denunciation of the bounder caused a flurry of visits to the offending blog. Now the guy’s got a book deal!

If you are an empassioned expert in your field and are willing to share your passion with the world, you are likely to spark debate, attract an increasing audience and plain get noticed.  Hopefully, unlike ChineseBounder, you won’t have to leave the country.

First, a declaration of interest - I am a fan of The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade. That aside, his comments on the uneasy relationship between journalists and bloggers articulate exactly the dilemma of journalists pre-internet: writing for an invisible body of readers whose views on what you’re writing remain largely unknown. Not so now. With bloggers and, well, anyone with broadband, able to interact with the news and pass comment, the monopoly on the message no longer lies with the “fourth estate”. With the abundance of online channels and social media to participate in, the conversation is gaining currency.