(The Subversive Copy Editor)
(The Subversive Copy Editor)
For years, it seems, it’s been impossible to find a language-related post or article online without a stickler making trouble in the comments section. Even on political, social, and retail sites, outraged commenters love to point out a misplaced apostrophe…
Shortcuts in editing may be frowned upon, but when it comes to word processing, editing shortcuts are not only allowed, they’re essential. If you’re still fumbling around in the pull-down menus, fighting with features that won’t leave you alone, and…
Q. Is it “happy medium” or “happy median”? My author writes: “We would all be much better served as stewards of finite public funds if we could find that happy median where trust reigns supreme.” But Can I Start a Sentence with “But”? is a new book from the folks who bring you The Chicago Manual of Style: a collection from our monthly online style Q&A.
Anyone who has something to sell faces a dilemma when it comes to deciding on a price: ask too much and no one will buy; ask too little and you won’t earn enough money. In freelance editing, the second option…
In my view, the most regrettable copyediting disasters come in the form of errors introduced by the editor. Letting a writer’s original mistake survive is certainly cause for regret, but nothing’s worse than knowing that the work was correct until…
The most mind-numbing job I ever had was in an insurance company filing papers—carts full of policies to put in numerical order, hour after hour, 1064952, 2586027, 1943902, 1064951. The only thing that kept me awake was the occasional paper cut.…
Merriam-Webster.com defines “work-to-rule” as “the practice by workers of refusing to do any work that is not strictly required as a part of their jobs in order to protest something (such as unfair working conditions).” Well, that’s too harsh for…
Those of you who use social media are used to seeing comments from sticklers who object to any deviation from the grammar rules they learned. The following sentences would not likely pass their inspection. Can you tell why?
Sentence 1. At the donut shop she had trouble getting her order out.
Sentence 2. Hopefully, none of the donuts are gone.
Sentence 3. But etiquette forced me to share the donuts.
In writing and editing, consistency is assumed to be a good thing. A publication looks unprofessional when a name is spelled more than one way, a number is only sometimes spelled out, or a subheading doesn’t reflect its level of importance. Good editors spend a great deal of their time keeping track of such details in order to impose consistency. But at some level, consistency should cease to be a goal. First . . .
You might think you can learn to copyedit by taking a class, but I promise, even if your class does a great job of exposing you to a style manual and the general practices of editing, it can only scratch the surface. To learn well, you must . . .