(The Subversive Copy Editor)
(The Subversive Copy Editor)
Short answer: Yes. Now and then, a writer or editor asks our online Q&A whether mentioning a brand name in a work of fiction requires permission or the addition of the trademark (™) or registered (®) symbol. Fortunately, in works…
Recently I read through a book to make notes for a professional voice actor who would be reading it for an audiobook production. Luckily, she turned out to be a genius at reading my mind and dodging most of the…
A few months ago in a conference session, a group of novelists digressed into good-natured complaints about being copyedited. One writer drew a lot of laughs saying, “I mean, I got A’s in English! I know where the freaking commas go!”* Others nodded in recognition and comradery. I bit my tongue.
“Hazel and I’s Puppy. The. Cutest. Ever.” In editing formal prose, we fix nonstandard English without hesitation. But in editing creative works, we often need to throw out the stylebook so a narrator or character in a novel or play…
In novels and stories and other creative works, words spoken by a character are normally set off from the narrative with quotation marks, and the speaker is identified in the run of text by tags like “she said.” This is…
Although I officially retired from my work at the Chicago Manual in December, I couldn’t say no to an opportunity to continue hanging around the CMOS Online Shop Talk blog when Russell Harper—the new editor—invited me to share a new…
I’m watching the clock today: in exactly one hour, seven minutes, and twenty-three seconds, I’ll be retired from my job at the University of Chicago Press. As you know by now, my longtime colleague Russell Harper will become editor of…
I love Microsoft Word shortcuts, and I post them from time to time when I stumble across a new one. But how’s a body supposed to discover all the features of this gigantic application when so many of them aren’t even visible on the…
Do you ever find at the end of workday that even though you know darned well you weren’t slacking for even ten minutes, somehow you didn’t make any progress in editing your manuscript? Or do you ever try to explain…
This morning I was looking at a writer’s website and once again wondered about an anomaly I see all the time in author bios. You know what I mean: those short blurbs that appear on book jackets, at online bookstores…