The Colored Fountain: Racism in the United States, Casteism in India
(October 11, 2023 update: A new Indian edition of the book has just been published by Aleph under the title Three Countries, Three Lives:...
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sensitive editing + finishing touches = clear expression
Journal of an Academic Copyeditor
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Sep 22, 2022
The Academic Uses of Imprisonment
An inescapable part of editing academic material is Internet research, which can unexpectedly entertain and inform (see The Serendipitous...
May 24, 2022
Tables That Eat Grass and Crows That Fly Upside Down
In the book To Kill a Democracy: India's Passage to Despotism by Debashish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane, I came across this sentence...
Apr 20, 2022
Diseases Named after Patients
This passionately written book (The Invention of Surgery by David Schneider) describes the giant strides medicine has made since its...
Mar 6, 2022
The Mainstreaming of the Word "Shit" in Personal Transformation Parlance
The book I was editing was about personal transformation for corporate managers. The author was a well-known coach. The language was so...
Feb 28, 2022
Incident in an Editing Office
On a hot afternoon many years ago, a trainee editor walked in with furrowed brow and deposited the following offending sentence in my...
Dec 25, 2021
The Bookseller Who Cannot Read
This is a wonderful story from the People's Archive of Rural India about a bookseller who cannot read. Selling books is not just a trade...
Dec 9, 2021
The Book That Wrote Me a Letter
This email from Better World Books is the most creative letter I've ever received. I was smiling from ear to ear by the time I got to the...
Jun 8, 2021
Indian and British English: A Handbook of Usage and Pronunciation
In a previous post (on researcher name coincidences), I mentioned Indian and British English: A Handbook of Usage and Pronunciation by...
Mar 21, 2021
Researcher Name Coincidence
Humor and academia are an unlikely combination, and I didn't think they could coexist until I read Academia Obscura: The Hidden Silly...
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