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...
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...
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,...
How many of us have read a science paper and wondered what disembodied hand was at work? Literally. Scientists perform surgical procedures on animals and then kill them. Then they analyze the results and report them. They divide people into groups and administer...
I spoke to a family member today who has a PhD in clinical psychology and decades of clinical experience. She was telling me about a course module she was writing for a publisher. The initial material she created for them was based on current research in the relevant...
Yesterday (at the time of this writing), John McIntyre, one of the titans of the editing profession, posted the following on his Facebook page, courtesy of The Poke:* The Poke’s caption was, "The kind of headline a journalist waits their whole life to write…."...
“This just needs a light proofread.” “Can you look this over? I know it doesn’t need much.” Regardless of what kind of writing it is, you have probably been working on it even when you aren’t sitting at the computer with it. You’re imagining what to write next while...