Home / Blog
British vs. American spelling
Ensuring consistency in spelling is one of the housekeeping kind of editing tasks for a copy editor. Even though Microsoft Word provides a large array of English options, the global publishing world is divided between – or should I say, united by – two variations of...
Obsequies and Obsequious
John McIntyre, the night content production manager at Baltimore Sun, presents In a Word, a word of the week column in his blog You Don't Say, Every week McIntyre chooses from a range of endangered words and discusses it, so as to breathe new life into these words....
Perspectives
One of the important characteristics of a copy editor is eye for details. I would say that perspective is yet another. As copy editors edit as if they were an author – trying to present the author's intentions clearly – and read like a reader, it becomes...
Today’s crash blossoms
Today's crash blossoms is from The Hindu.TV shows jailed IPS officer visiting homeYou might be tempted to believe that an IPS officer was jailed by a TV show. Our mind parses "TV shows" together as the subject of the sentence and the verb as "jailed". This is because...
“Such as” parenthetical phrases
Commas are most probably the tiniest creature that can cause heartbreaks to any copy editor. The simple reason is that they are not solely governed by rules. Arguably, using commas have as many exceptions as there are rules. Consider such as for example. The such as...
Humorous CMS
After a hiatus, this post could be a good one to resume blogging. I was reading the Chicago Style Q&A and liked two questions in this issue. The first one: Q. Should she or it be used as a pronoun for a country? A. Never use she to refer to a country. You’ll sound...
The serial semicolons
If you are a copyeditor, I'm sure you know serial commas, aka Oxford comma. That's the comma that precedes the last element in series as in He loves reading, editing, teaching, and leading the team. Yes, that one that follows "teaching". You as well know that serial...
however vs. though
I just tried to clarify the usage of "however" and "though".
Test yourself – Saller’s copyediting quiz
Glad to meet you again. I would like to take you to Carol Fisher Saller's copyediting quiz. That is a small list of nine sentences. Try them out and see for yourself your copyediting skills. In her next post, First Do No Harm, she discussed the answers, too. But wait....