(The Subversive Copy Editor)
(The Subversive Copy Editor)
I must admit I was taken aback by David Marsh’s blog post last week at Mind Your Language. In “‘The British Style’? ‘The American Way?’ They Are Not So Different,” he explains that British style for punctuating quotations is not as “logical” as popularly thought.
Last week, I asked how you would locate quotations within quotations in a Word document in order to style the inner quotes with single quotation marks. Your answers ranged from nonstarting to overthought to brilliant! Some of the answers worked…
Looking over the work of a proofreader the other day, I saw that she had marked a place where the quotation marks for a quotation within a quotation were incorrect. Single quotation marks were needed for the inner quote, but double quotation marks appeared. This was my fault;
[Note: If this post looks familiar to some readers, it’s because it accidentally posted itself for an hour or so on March 30 at 4:35 a.m. CDT. I had written it ahead of time because I’m on the road this week. (And no, the irony of writing ahead of time about procrastination is not lost on me.) If you feel cheated, here’s an older post you might have missed.]
Professional book indexers are among the smartest people I know. You might picture indexers as nice, middle-aged women who like to talk about embroidery—and you would be partly right—until you see them in a conference session debating syndetic structure. Or…
Over at the Q&A, we get a lot of questions from writers and editors who have searched through the style manual and can’t find exactly the same phrase/citation/rule that they’re agonizing over. They’ve found the section that treats ABC and…
Last week the Big Snow forced millions of us to break from routine. For some, it was a frigid nightmare of inconvenience or worse; for others (not saying who), it was an unexpected opportunity to
If you’re expecting me to scold writers for not reading cover letters carefully, I’m going to have to disappoint you. I could do it—standing on my head—but it would be hypocritical, because when it comes to not following directions, I’m…
“Please tell the copyeditor to leave my prose alone.” That’s an actual author request I encountered in a newly arrived manuscript. I looked at the first few pages. The content was complex, phrasing idiosyncratic, punctuation random. A more mature and…
Do you ever go downtown to a gallery on a Friday night, an unglamorous one you’ve been to several times, only to find that on this night it happens to be hosting the hottest opening in town and you’re the only one there in snow boots lugging a backpack?