(The Subversive Copy Editor)
(The Subversive Copy Editor)
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.
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 key to using any reference book well is to learn how to find what you need in it. True, the “Big Orange” can be a bit of a challenge to get around in—at over a thousand pages, why wouldn’t it?…
When my office hires at the entry level, there’s a proofreading and copyediting test, and for various reasons we give the test in person and on paper: It levels the playing field by eliminating access to e-mail and online sources. It shows us how a person will mark up copy on the job (a frequent chore for the new kid). It isolates proofing and editing skills from word-processing skills. Results vary.
Public sticklers have annoyed me forever, and I’ve been meaning to write about that, but recently, in a post titled “Editors, Would You Do Me This Tiny Favour?” Katy McDevitt at PublishEd Adelaide did a great job of it herself. McDevitt gets to the meat of it in point 3:
Yesterday I learned that my new blog home at Lingua Franca* does not use Chicago style. My first response was nonchalance; I know that not everyone uses CMOS. But overnight it hit me the way a sniffle on Wednesday is a cold by Thursday, and now I’m in full-bore whining mode.
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.
Here at the Chicago Manual of Style, I’ve been dismayed by recent talk online about discord between the major style manuals: tweets from the ACES conference calling for an “AP vs. Chicago smackdown”; a new blog called “AP vs. Chicago.”…
Deputized by The Chicago Manual of Style, the Subversive Copy Editor spoke on Tuesday with an executive at the Associated Press (on condition of anonymity) about the recent changes to the AP Stylebook. What follows is a transcript of our…
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…