Zen and the Art of Editing
Editing is not always about spelling and punctuation. Sometimes an editor has to get inside a writer’s mind, wade into a sentence or paragraph whose true meaning is cleverly hidden within phrases and structures that make absolutely no sense. The editor enters the murky world of creative spelling, misplaced modifiers, horrifying accidents of punctuation. Trust [...]
A Little Bit of Comma Love
I love commas. They’re such tiny things, but their power is immense. Okay, “immense” is probably an overstatement. Let’s start by agreeing that commas are important and move on from there. My love of the humble comma extends to the serial (or series, or Oxford) comma. For those of you so-called “normal” people who don’t [...]
The Humble, Queasy Editor
Nobody’s perfect. Editors generally like things to be perfect, and some of us experience a certain queasy feeling when we realize an error (even a tiny one) has slipped by, but at some point we all have to admit that we make mistakes. Humility is a beautiful thing. So, in the spirit of humility, today [...]
The End of Language As We Know It?
“Kids today can’t spell and don’t know how to write a simple sentence. It’s because of all that texting they’re doing—all those newfangled abbreviations, no punctuation. They’ll all end up with rotten brains and broken thumbs, and the language catastrophe will culminate in 2012, when (according to the Mayan calendar) the world will end because [...]
Losing My Favorite Job
It’s been a sad week for me. It’s also been a little less busy than usual, and it’s all because I lost my favorite freelance job late last week. For a little over a year, I’d been writing a comedy blog based on a fictional dog character for a nonprofit dog-rescue group. The work was [...]
Taking Things Literally
Sometimes editors (and others) can be unimaginative, boring old coots. I was reminded of this uncomfortable fact just moments ago as I was leafing through Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins (by Theodore M. Bernstein). My little eye fell upon the entry for “land on water,” an innocent and useful phrase that has apparently induced apoplectic fits in [...]
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