(The Subversive Copy Editor)
(The Subversive Copy Editor)
In a previous post I compared formal English to artificial speech generated by computers in the way it tends to remove personality from the text. But I’m sure you’ve noticed that nowadays many of the robots we talk to on…
Recently commenters in this space scolded me for writing the phrase “smarter than me,” saying, in one case, “There is no reason to dumb down the language for conversation. When we speak correctly, we reinforce the proper use of the…
The logic behind many punctuation rules is difficult to discern—for the excellent reason that there isn’t any.
Q. Which formation is more correct, “The information requested” or “The requested information”? Questions like this to the online Q&A at the Chicago Manual of Style used to get me riled.
Years ago, I was nearly driven mad by a writer who repeated the same wonky sentence structure relentlessly. It went something like this: The subject has A, B, and its C is D. Or The subject is similar to A,…
Writing and editing coaches love to hammer on using short words.
Last year I had a problem with ants in my kitchen, but at the hardware store there were several different kinds of poison and each package said, “Will kill this kind of ant, but not that kind.” So I went back home to figure out what kind I had.
If you’re new to copyediting, consider these snippets of advice.
Copyeditors have a reputation. We’re conscientious and task-oriented. We like our little routines. We like things tidy. That’s what’s good about us—it’s why we’re useful. We are valued for our tolerance for tedium and our willingness to plug away till…
Two popular types of bad copyediting are (1) editing that didn’t need doing in the first place, and (2) needed editing that didn’t get done. Both types can be accomplished with or without the aid of a computer, but there…