Broadcasters and publishers receive a deluge of complaints about grammar and usage. Anna Maria Tremonti, host of CBC Radio’s The Current, dubs these complainers “the grammaratti.” And I’m sure they’ll be expressing displeasure after the grammar discussion on The Current today. Tremonti spoke with Ammon Shea, author of Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation.… Continue Reading
Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, Men Explain Things to Me, is a collection of essays that explores the condescending manner in which some men speak to—not with—women. If you’re female, you know exactly what “mansplaining” is, and I’ll bet you’ve experienced it more than once. Solnit coined the term mansplaining in a blog post in which… Continue Reading
Today, I saw this editor’s oath on the website of Copyediting. The oath is a list—similar to my ten commandments of copy editing—of 10 things every copy editor should do—or not do. Number 9 caught my eye: “Don’t ignore errors; triage them.” When time is tight, editorial triage is important because a text should present… Continue Reading
Single subjects take singular verbs, and plural subjects take plural verbs. But sometimes, the distinction isn’t so obvious, as I’ve discussed before. Here’s a passage from Einsohn’s Copyeditor’s Handbook that had me wondering about subject-verb agreement: In my professional experience I have found that two readings of galleys and two of page proofs will catch… Continue Reading
Amy Einsohn, who passed away recently, is the author of The Copyeditor’s Handbook, a tome beloved by copy editors everywhere (note that we Canadians spell the profession using two words, not one). She had me hooked from the very beginning of the book: in the preface, she discusses coming across the word folderize and attempting… Continue Reading
I’m currently editing a manual titled “Toolkit.” The title hasn’t appeared anywhere in the manual itself, so I hadn’t thought about it much. But a little voice in the back of my head said, “Ya better look that word up.” Sure, toolkit looks correct, but maybe it’s really two words. Any bets? According to the… Continue Reading
A local ad company recently posted a job opening for a proofreader. The ad ended like this: Spot any errors in this posting? No? Good. Let’s keep it that way. Needless to say, I found a few errors: inconsistent use of the serial comma incorrect use—twice!—of apostrophes with plural nouns incorrect use of a hyphen… Continue Reading
GOOP and that guy who can’t sing (sorry, but I’ve never been a fan of Chris Martin), may have made conscious uncoupling all the rage, but I’ve been consciously copy editing for awhile now, and the blurb on the jacket of a recently published novel raised my consciousness to a new level. Here’s the blurb,… Continue Reading
This is my first post at copyeditcat.com. I guess you could say that I’ve graduated from WordPress.com to WordPress.org. As you can see, though, my site needs some design work. My theme is by Headway, but, unfortunately, I’m not making much headway with Headway. Not to worry: with the power of both time and YouTube,… Continue Reading
Freelancers are always looking for new markets to conquer, and today I discovered a new one: online dating profiles. If you’re familiar with online dating, then you’ve come to expect a little embellishment here and a little downplaying there. That drool-worthy photo of Mr. Right? You know it was probably taken 5 years and 20… Continue Reading