blog.rightreading.com

Believe it or not, this comes up all the time, and after all these years I have yet to decide what’s right.
For example, I e-mailed a print rep earlier today to ask, “Would the 60# Natural Smooth paper be cheaper than the one I had speced?”
Should it be specked? speced? specced? spec’d? or something else?
And [...]

I wrote yesterday about a word that was misspelled by thirteen out of fourteen experienced editors. Here are two words from the test that were each missed by ten of the editors. The second one is a little surprising; at least, I consider it a basic word that any editor should know.
Pick the spelling preferred [...]

It means “to dry; to preserve by drying.”
I’m hiring a temporary replacement editor for a colleague who will be out several months on a medical leave. I got a lot of very qualified applicants. To whittle them down I produced a test of 85 objective questions. I tested the top 14 candidates, all with sterling [...]

Some pretty porous copy on this text panel about porous paving at the National Botanical Gardens near the capitol building in Washington, DC. (Official, nonpartisan, federal government-approved typos.)
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Fake memoirs are in the news again, with the usual hand wringing. No need to go into the details, which have been thoroughly reported. Instead, let’s think about what might make book editors so gullible.
Book editors are a peculiar mixture of optimism and cynicism. They begin as idealistic literature enthusiasts — they probably start with [...]

WORDSMITHING: The process of going through a document and making sure the best possible word is used in all circumstances. — ww.lewiswritingservices.com/glossary.htm

If there is one word I would like to ban permanently it’s wordsmithing. In my day job there is someone who likes to say “Give it to Tom for wordsmithing.” The implication, to [...]

Recently there has been an uptick in talk about semicolons. Witness:

Hooray for the ;
I say! A subterranean semicolon!
FANBOYS and the Semicolon
Colbert on punctuation
How to Use Punctuation Correctly
Punctuation lives
The Elements of Spam
Semicolonoscopy

What does this signify? I’m not sure. Could it be another sign of the trend to the literate class becoming a cultural elite, eager to [...]

When it comes to copy editing, I’m not particularly strict — let the author have some personal style. We all use words a little differently.
But one thing that has been annoying me lately is what I regard as the misuse of the word refute. Newspaper journalists and others consistently use refute when they mean rebut. [...]

Web 2.0 experiments with open content are showing the value of moderated forums. Democracy is great, but chaos isn’t necessarily so hot.
Once upon a time tech types used to track stories on Digg.com. When a post got promoted to Digg’s front page it would bring your site a huge amount of traffic. The web [...]

Since a big deal is being made about supposedly disappearing hyphens, let’s apply a little perspective to the discussion.
The first thing to realize is that the furor is the result of a promotional campaign for a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary; the sixth edition has omitted 16,000 hyphens that were included in [...]

By MARK SHERMAN | Associated Press Writer: “[Supreme Court chief justice] Roberts walked out the hospital’s ambulance door wearing a blue sport coast, a blue shirt with no tie and slacks”

via India Ink

It must be the desk that ups the price.

This “writhing desk” recalls Harry Potter, or maybe Lewis Carroll:”The regular course was Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with; and then the different branches of Arithmetic — Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”

No, despite the title this is not another post about the Bush administration. It’s a link to an interesting video demonstrating how editing can manipulate viewers’ impressions of reality — the basis of “reality” television shows.

Via Swiss Miss via Random Culture

For an anthology I’ve been working on the publisher chose to copyedit some classic texts. It made me wonder how they would handle Shakespeare.

BBC NEWS | The Editors |
That’s the question the BBC is asking (link above). “What is there left when voices rise in debate without chairman or standing orders? You have babble, not Google,” they argue (an argument that is itself, of course, an editorial decision.) I don’t much care for the “chairman” analogy — I’m [...]