Home / Blog
Blog
Welcome to our new home
Welcome to Editor's Essentials. Today, on this Teachers Day in India, the diminutive Editor's Essentials blog is stepping into its own home. Welcome to www.editorsessentials.com. Subscribe, if you have not already, and show your love and support by sharing this...
Editors’ Conclave 2018 – Sessions that stayed: Part 2 of the keynote address by Dr. Selvin
Is editing really dead? No, not yet. Will editing be dead and forgotten? Maybe, maybe not. It's more of an answer based on your belief system. What Dr. Selvin delivered in his keynote address may not be the elixir for editing life, but is a prescription for how...
Editors’ Conclave 2018 – Sessions that stayed: Part 1 of the keynote address by Dr. Selvin
Nothing has caught the imagination of humankind than death. Different people approached death at different levels of understanding: denying it, defying it, delaying it, designing it…. While each of us believes that we are not going to die tomorrow, we know that there...
Editors’ Conclave 2018 – Sessions that stayed with me: An editor’s journey
The Editors’ Conclave at Chennai was the perfect place to connect with people we only knew through the Indian Copyeditors’ Forum (ICF) on Facebook. As a member of ICF and as the one who follows the posts of the veterans in this field, I was excited to sign up for this...
Editors’ Conclave 2018 – Sessions that stayed with me: Financial planning for editors
As many of you know, the first-ever editors' conclave was recently organized (in Feb 2018). My good friend Venkatesh and Chandra, whom I met and befriended during the conclave, wrote detailed notes on how it happened and how it felt. (I would love to link Chandra's...
Comma, the Commander
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.
misplaced nodifier
A WhatsApp conversation. U: "What is the English translation of பà¯à®°à¯à®à¯à®à®¾à®² à® à®à®¿à®ªà¯à®ªà®à¯?" S: "War footing" U: "Thanks, S. Is this a noun?" S: "Welcome" U: "Adjective?" S: "Yes" "On a war footing" "Adverb" "Action taken on a war footing"...
More thoughts on since vs. because. Or, Since you read my previous post…
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...
Since when since has been replaced by because? Or, to sin(ce) or not to sin(ce)?
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 making of a copy editor – III
Now, we are at the end of a series of posts. A quick recap: in my last post, The making of a copy editor – II, I discussed a good understanding of English grammar and the flair for reading as two of the four traits of a copy editor. While the two are self-explanatory,...
The making of a copy editor – II
Hello there. Hope you had a cup of strong coffee, thinking over what would be the four traits of a copy editor. Or if you missed my previous post, Making of a copy editor - I, you may go back to the post, read it and come back here. You would lose nothing if you go...
The making of a copy editor – I
When our professor stopped his class to read out a circular about a campus selection programme, I didn’t realize that it was going to change the contours of my life. There were two reasons for my friends and me to choose to attend the written test: we wanted...
An approach to “approach to”
Not necessarily is “to” always an infinitive marker; it can be a preposition too.
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 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...
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...
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".