Lately, I’ve been working hard and playing hard. Life’s too short to do otherwise. And even though I’m hounded by deadlines, I feel calm. I have a sense of eternal time: I’m living in tandem with all other living things. Can you tell I’ve been reading Richard Rohr again? Well, time may very well be… Continue Reading
How did we arrive at the middle of January already? Are you still on track with your New Year’s resolutions? Me, I’ve never made resolutions in January. Rather, I set goals whenever the time seems right. And, thanks to the zeitgeist, I’ve learned to reach goals by establishing daily habits. There’s no shortage of books… Continue Reading
If you’re looking for the perfect gift for the grammar nerd in your life, check out James Harbeck’s Songs of Love and Grammar. This little gem was published in 2012, but I just discovered it today. Here’s a sample: I met a buxom grammatician and said I’d like her out to take; back she came… Continue Reading
I recently read The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, who claims to work—you guessed it—four hours a week. The book forced me to admit that I could be a lot more productive. As we all know, time wasters abound, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of focusing on seemingly urgent but unimportant things.… Continue Reading
There’s a trend toward open punctuation, which means using fewer commas. For example, short introductory phrases usually read fine without a comma. At noon let’s eat. I recently became aware that I was using commas to set off too, and I couldn’t cite a rule for doing so. It was simply a (bad?) habit I… Continue Reading
My favourite piece of writing this past year (although it was published in 2010) is from a little known blogger. On my bulletin board, I posted a copy of this piece about ACL recovery, and I referred to it every once in a while to see if I was ready to claim my own invincibility… Continue Reading
Recently, award-winning journalist and author Holly Robinson gave a shout-out to copy editors in an article for the online version of The Huffington Post. (Remember the lesson on italics from my last post? Robinson’s article was featured on the “Books” page.) Robinson’s praise focuses on the errors in consistency that copy editors identify and clean… Continue Reading
Blogs, blog entries, websites, and web pages—which ones have titles that get the special treatment of italics? Like a book and its chapters, a blog title is italicized, and blog entries are put in quotation marks. The titles of general websites are not italicized, but a website’s web pages are put in quotation marks. Martha… Continue Reading
I don’t often use social media abbreviations—BTW, ICYMI, IIRC, TTYL, LOL. They just aren’t me. Call me old school, but other than the occasional FYI, my most commonly used abbreviation is OK. What editor can deny the trenchancy of good old OK? In fact, I recently learned that editors are credited with creating the abbreviation.… Continue Reading
Editors are familiar with the usual suspects when it comes to usage: apt/likely, pore/pour, bring/take, comprise/compose, and so on. These pairs of words are often confused and misused, and editors keep an eye out for them. Well, this editor has a confession to make. There’s a pair of suspects that trips me up: a while… Continue Reading