Category Scholarly writing

Having the right style of numbers is just one of many small refinements we enjoy in professionally designed books. But what's the difference?

Few things are as annoying as not being able to find something, especially when it was within sight only moments ago. But at least in most cases you know what you’re looking for—keys, dog, car—and you’re pretty sure it exists.…

Although I have complained about the misuse of citation software, it’s not as though I believe the quaint and perhaps dying method of hand-composing citations to be a cure-all. At least the software mangles the format consistently, which allows a copy editor to put certain gaffes right by means of global searches. In contrast, when homemade notes fail to follow a system, they fail in myriad ways.

Although I may have a reputation for breaking the rules, when I set out to copy-edit a manuscript, my default tactic is to follow the stylebook until I have a reason not to.

If you have recently published with an academic press, or if your book is in press now, you might have been disappointed to learn that your work won’t be available on your e-reader anytime soon. While novelists take for granted…

If your book or journal article has scanned illustrations—whether photographs, charts, or drawings—your publisher is going to require that they meet a certain standard. Something writers don’t always realize is that art that works perfectly well as an e-mail attachment…

Backing up computer files is like flossing—we know we should do it every day, but even though it’s fast and easy, we procrastinate. It’s easy to skip it “just once.”

In what seems to be an obsession with consistency taken to extreme, writers and editors continue to ask the CMOS Q&A whether it’s OK to edit quotations from published works “for consistency” with Chicago (or MLA or AP) style.
Let me try to understand why someone would want to do that.

Last week I wrote about what writers can expect when their manuscripts are edited on screen with the changes tracked electronically. This week I’ll explain what a copy editor can expect from writers in return. (Read more.)

More and more often, the editing stage of a book or journal article headed for publication is entirely paperless. Copy editors work on screen with the use of the tracked-changes feature of their word processor, and writers receive the edited version either as an e-mail attachment or as a link to a site where they can download it. Depending on the amount of editing and the word-processing skills of the copy editor, the results will be more or less easy to read and respond to. In this post, I’ll discuss how to look at redlining and what you can reasonably expect from a copy editor who works in this fashion.