The glass-half-full analogy shows the significance of perspectives in a situation. The difference between “few” and “a few” or “little” and “a little” can change a narrative, emphasizing the importance for editors to gauge the author’s perspective.
Just as a bamboo shoot endures years of underground preparation before bursting into light, the copy editor needs to build a sturdy foundation of knowledge, honed by relentless practice and fueled by an insatiable love for language.
Imagine this village, Grammarville, with three pairs of twins who’re like the grammar concept called appositives: the Siamese twins – super attached, just like how necessary appositives are for a sentence’s meaning; non-identical twins – not-so-tied, giving extra details like non-restrictive appositives; and mischievous identical twins ¬– context, like knowing which twin’s who, decides their use. Identifying twins needs attention – so is the case for editors!
Will artificial intelligence, most commonly identified with ChatGPT, take away the jobs of editors and writers? How much will a human being relevant in the creation of written work? Here is an illustration of what ChatGPT could do to writers.
Commas are tiny, versatile, omnipotent commanders of the punctuation weaponry, helping us mortal editors who wage an everyday Kurukshetra against the evil of loss-of-meaning, the Incomprehensibility.
In my previous post I talked about the use of since and because and how they are different or same. This piece is more a hangover due to the previous post. After having thought and talked about the grammar side of since vs. because, I still felt the previous...
The moment you started typing since, Google will suggest since vs because. Such is the power of this pair of words. The confusion stems from the fact that since and because are interchangeable, though not always. In fact, there is no confusion most of the times....
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...
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...
I confess – I learnt endashes and emdashes 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...
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...
I came across the abbreviation MEXT, which stands for the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. You expect the abbreviation to be MECSST. Someone was ingenious, thought MECSST was boring, and suggested MEXT - the way MECSST will be pronounced...