by Murugaraj | Mar 8, 2015 | Copyediting Capers
What can Valentine’s day teach a copyeditor?
~Perhaps about pronouns and antecedents!
by Murugaraj | Aug 27, 2013 | Punctuation, Uncanny Connections
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...
by Murugaraj | Jul 26, 2013 | Punctuation, Uncanny Connections
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...
by Murugaraj | Jul 18, 2013 | Grammar & Usage
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...
by Murugaraj | Jul 14, 2013 | Miscellaneous
This post is an outcome of asking so many whys. I never fancied that I’ll start writing on the evolution of English, let alone the history of England. However, the differences between the American and British English piqued my interest and I started doing a little...
by Murugaraj | Jul 5, 2013 | Grammar & Usage
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...
by Murugaraj | Jul 1, 2013 | Grammar & Usage
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...
by Murugaraj | Jul 1, 2013 | Copyediting Style
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...
by Murugaraj | Jun 30, 2013 | Copyediting Capers
A headline today in the Hindu: Police Recruits Learn Shooting Not lethal, though.
by Murugaraj | Jun 4, 2013 | Grammar & Usage
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...
