The Copyeditor as Word Detective: Using Lookalikes and Soundalikes to Crack Word Puzzles
During the course of their work, academic copyeditors often meet strange words. An online search with keywords drawn from the context of...
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sensitive editing + finishing touches = clear expression
Journal of an Academic Copyeditor
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Feb 20, 2023
Journal Title Abbreviations in Zotero and a ChatGPT Story
Everyone, it seems, has a ChatGPT story. Here's mine. In my last post, I detailed how Zotero revolutionized my approach to reference...
Dec 26, 2022
How I Automated Reference Editing with Google Scholar, Zotero, and Citation Style Language
Reference Lists and Me: From Zero to Hero Until very recently, I used to hate editing references. I know some copyeditors enjoy it (did...
Oct 16, 2022
Copying Text with Tracked Changes in MS Word
I had to deal with this problem when I copied and pasted a chapter from a book into a new document, only to discover that the tracked...
Oct 13, 2022
The Case of the Line That Would Not Go
A misplaced horizontal line in an MS Word document I was editing had to go. The problem was that it stubbornly dug its heels in and...
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...
Mar 8, 2022
Copyediting Is Problem Solving
The sentence (suitably disguised for confidentiality) stopped me in my tracks: "The absence of pregnancy and lactation may explain the...
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...
Mar 5, 2022
Creative Titles in Scientific Papers
In my post Researcher Name Coincidence, I quoted from the book Academia Obscura by Glen Wright: As part of a long-running bet, five...
Mar 4, 2022
The Difference between "Sum" and "Summation" in Mathematical Writing
The difference between summation and sum should be clear enough: summation is the process of adding, whereas a sum is the result of the...
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 18, 2021
Spelling Errors in Titles and Headings
Last year I was editing a report for a major international consulting organization. There were several co-authors, and the review...
Dec 11, 2021
When Automatic Footnote Renumbering Fails in Word
This should not happen, because Word automatically renumbers the remaining footnotes if a footnote is deleted. I have experienced this...
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...
Dec 9, 2021
The Serendipitous Pleasures of Work-Related Googling
I spend a lot of time Googling while editing; it's an integral part of working with scientific material. To speed up the search, I use...
Sep 16, 2021
The Case of the Sticky Figure
It seemed simple enough. The style called for figure captions to be placed above figures (in fact, they were even called figure titles),...
Aug 24, 2021
No Carelessness Until There Is a Cure
This is a terribly worded public health message that seems to be spreading like a virus: it is now appended to routine SMSs from public...
Aug 5, 2021
A Period Never Follows an Exclamation Mark: An Exception to the Rule
Double punctuation is ugly, but unavoidable sometimes. For example, it appears in dialogue: He said, "I try to avoid double punctuation."...
Jul 26, 2021
The Case of the Jumping Cursor
I edit PDF documents using Acrobat Reader DC, a free tool. It generally works flawlessly, but which complex piece of software is bug...
Jul 4, 2021
The Case of the Jumping Table
The deadline was near, and I had to copy a table the author had sent into the main document. A routine task—except that the table would...
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