Part of my story takes place at a campground in Mt. Rainier. I've never been to Mt. Rainier National Park or indeed know anything about the park at all. So of course I began by doing research. Getting things wrong distracts the reader. And a distracted reader is a...
Hi, everyone. It's November! And I'm participating in NaNoWriMo---National Novel Writing Month. Every November, people strive to write a novel of at least 50,000 words. The object of the game is to just write. I know several other people who are participating in this...
A common task for editors is to make sure that the manuscript in front of them conforms to the rules of English spelling, grammar, usage, and punctuation. For instance, when I encounter the confusion of you and I and you and me, I fix it. (You and I are going to the...
I recently proposed that there be a universal certification requirement for editors. As I said in May, this certification should consist of, at minimum, a test. Right now, anyone who needs an editor could pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to someone who thinks...
Recently, a colleague of mine stumbled upon a Facebook page on which the owners had uploaded an entire book. The whole thing. The book was a parody of another book, which mattered to the owners of the Facebook page, but is irrelevant for purposes of uploading an...
We editors should consider a universal certification requirement. Specifically, editors should have to take and pass a certification test before we are allowed to call ourselves editors. This furthers the credibility of the profession and provides consumer protection for the client.
Recently I read something that, at one point, used four different abbreviations[1] repeatedly on a single page. I was taken aback until I read further and saw that there were seven. In fact, the more I read, the more abbreviations I found. Every time the author used a...
One throat to choke. No. Yikes! Let's go for the ask. No. Open the kimono. By all that's holy, no. That's just creepy, especially in light of #MeToo. Human capital . . . No. No. No. Learnings. Instantiate. Please don't use business jargon. It's often uninformative,...