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sensitive editing + finishing touches = clear expression
Journal of an Academic Copyeditor
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Apr 15, 2023
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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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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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