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Style manuals, house styles, and style sheets: How are they related?
We copy editors are always on the lookout for information. Not as aggressive as Google, which accesses and stores every bit of information that comes its way (quite literally), copy editors look out for information that they need. It could be the spelling or usage of...
Thank you, Team Journalist
Since I started writing this blog I've been using the Journalist theme. Till this morning, that is. Somehow, I have had this feeling of moving on to a different theme, and was looking for one that would meet my expectations. A simple theme, without much of...
Mr Venn, tell me more
The last post explained how restrictive (or defining) relative clauses create a proper subset of a set. In other words, these clauses classify the noun into two: one that is governed by the relative clause definition; the other that is not. But an important...
Mr Venn, what are relative clauses?
All right, now I got your question – rather, questions. Who's Mr Venn? Why would he come to teach English? What is he teaching now? Before you inundate me with all those questions, let me tell you about him. John Venn, FRS, FSA (4 August 1834 – 4 April 1923) was...
Endashes reach out to hyphens…
I confess – I learnt endashes and em dashes only after I became a copy editor. In my previous post, "I have wondered what difference will it make when a reader sees an en dash." For very long, I doubted if there is any reader – OK, when I say any, I meant any reader...
A nerd and some hyphens
I have wondered what difference it will make when a reader sees an en dash. Will he think that it was some wrongly elongated hyphen, or will she make some educated guess? When I began as a copy editor, I hardly imagined that hyphens and en dashes are making the lives...
Try this exercise on “however” and “though”
One of my blog posts that bring in several new visitors is "however vs. though". So I thought I should share some example sentences with you all. You may try to find out whether the sentences are correct and punctuate accordingly. More precisely, use "however", not...
Adjectives: Beware of suffixes -ical and -ic
One of the ways to form an adjective is to add the suffix ~ic or ~ical. There is no clear rule about when to use which. As a rule of thumb, many of the older nouns have the ~ical adjective, while most of the newer ones have ~ic suffix. The suffix ~ic or ~ical means...
Is this good?
Teacher: Children, what do you observe from the picture? Students: Two kids, Teacher. One with a gadget, one with a bird. Teacher: Good. What do you see below? Student: As is the custom in FB, any picture that is shared should accompany a moral. This picture is also...