Ask Copy Curmudgeon. How to Learn a Style Guide in 10 Days. Copyediting.com. Lingua Franca. In the greatest English theatrical comedy of the 19th century, a peculiar series of events involving an infant and a handbag are the subject of an 11th-hour confession by one of my favorite literary inventions, a governess named Miss Prism. There are many reasons to love Miss Prism, among them the fact that in her youth she wrote a three-volume novel. Like all of Oscar Wilde’s creations, she has more than a bit of the playwright in her (Miss Prism is given to saying things like “I speak hort… A new semester of classes started at German universities this week, which means I’ve spent the last few days asking fresh rounds of students about their language goals.
The greatest number in any class want, above all, to improve their speaking skills. But a significant group has also mentioned vocabulary expansion. Given that most of the students are on course to complete master’s degrees in the natural sciences, mathematics, or engineering, which at the Technical University of Munich means mos… Top 10 Edits to Academic Book Mss.
Photo: Martin Thomas Even after a well-written and well-prepared book has made it past an acquiring editor and through peer review, there is plenty for a manuscript editor to do. I’ve written perhaps too much already about the trials of editing footnotes and bibliographies, so this time I’ll set those parts of the manuscript aside. Here are the issues my colleagues and I spend the most time on in the main text, in reverse order of how much labor they require. 10. Spacing. Although unwanted spaces are surely the most pervasive blemish, I spend little time fixing them, because my cleanup macro does it for me. 9. 8. In actual hands-on editing: 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2. And finally, the most common copy-edit: 1. Return to Top. Language Log. Yagoda. EditorMom. An American Editor. Sesquiotica | Words, words, words. Subject + Verb. Subversive Copy Editor. (Some chores are more fun than others!)
How many times have you run into someone at a writers’ event who seems freaked out by the task of marketing a new book? It’s always the same: the writer is eager to arrange book signings and public readings and school visits. She knows she needs a website and that she has to do Twitter and Facebook, but she isn’t sure why. She’s a little confused about whether she needs to blog. Some of these tasks interest her and some sound like the worst kind of torment. She usually concludes with “And how am I supposed to find time to write?” What she might not take into account is that (a) some kinds of marketing are not as useful as others, (b) what’s best for your book is unique to your book, (c) nobody can know for sure what that is, and (d) even when a book is successful, it’s nearly impossible to know which—if any—of your promotion efforts had anything to do with it. Here are a few thoughts about the effectiveness of promotion efforts. Website Blogging. Reconsidering Résumés: Advice from a Manager.
There was a job opening in our department this summer, and I got to look at the résumés that came in: 415 résumés + 415 cover letters = 1,140 pages of stuff to at least glance at. (We’re obliged to evaluate every application; HR makes us document our decisions.) When a busy and (obviously) short-staffed manager hiring a copyeditor is wading through 1,140 pages of applications, you have to forgive her for dispensing quickly with applicants who waste her time.
You have to understand why she doesn’t linger over applications that include the following:* —A stated “objective.” Especially one that’s obvious (“to become an editorial assistant at the University of Chicago Press”), ridiculous (“to achieve greatness and joy in all my endeavors”), or, incredibly, left over from the job you really wanted (“I have made a career commitment to the financial industry”). To me, an objective suggests you shopped at Résumés ’R’ Us. —Outlandish displays of creative writing. —Trite and emotional appeals. Grammar Girl. Blogslot. Grammarphobia - Blog. Q: You’ve used the expression “old chestnut” on your blog, but you’ve never explained its origin. Where does it come from? A: There’s no definite answer here, but all the evidence points to an origin in 19th-century show business. Before going on, we should mention that the word “chestnut” was spelled “chesnut” for much of its life, but we’ll use the modern spelling except when quoting an early source.
Since the 1800s, the Oxford English Dictionary says, “chestnut” has been used figuratively to mean “a story that has been told before, a ‘venerable’ joke.” In extended use, the dictionary says, a “chestnut” means “anything trite, stale, or too often repeated.” The adjective “old” was added along the way for emphasis. But what’s the literal connection? The OED’s formal answer: “origin unknown.” The usage may have been inspired by an early 19th-century melodrama, William Dimond’s The Broken Sword, which includes a scene featuring a chestnut tree. Zavior: Let me see—aye!
“Mr. You Don't Say. Getting a grip on grammar. If you are a native speaker of English, you have English grammar in your head, and it has been there since you were a very small child. Unfortunately, the process of translating that grammar into terms for discussion of writing has not gone well. Traditional schoolroom grammar borrowed terms from Latin that were not always a good fit with English, and it codified English grammar into a rigid set of rules (some of them bogus) that oversimplified the language for pedagogical purposes.
Then, over the past couple of generations, many schools moved away from the formal teaching of grammar. The result is that college students bring to my editing class either half-remembered terms and rules or a lack of terminology altogether. Linguists, of course, have demonstrated the inadequacies of the traditional schoolroom grammar and established their own terminology. Useful as it is, it is not taught outside linguistics classes. An example of her approach might be helpful. Ms.