sensitive editing + finishing touches = clear expression

During the course of their work, academic copyeditors often meet strange words. An online search with keywords drawn from the context of...

Everyone, it seems, has a ChatGPT story. Here's mine. In my last post, I detailed how Zotero revolutionized my approach to reference...

Reference Lists and Me: From Zero to Hero Until very recently, I used to hate editing references. I know some copyeditors enjoy it (did...

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...

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...

An inescapable part of editing academic material is Internet research, which can unexpectedly entertain and inform (see The Serendipitous...

The sentence (suitably disguised for confidentiality) stopped me in my tracks: "The absence of pregnancy and lactation may explain the...

The book I was editing was about personal transformation for corporate managers. The author was a well-known coach. The language was so...

In my post Researcher Name Coincidence, I quoted from the book Academia Obscura by Glen Wright: As part of a long-running bet, five...

The difference between summation and sum should be clear enough: summation is the process of adding, whereas a sum is the result of the...

On a hot afternoon many years ago, a trainee editor walked in with furrowed brow and deposited the following offending sentence in my...

Last year I was editing a report for a major international consulting organization. There were several co-authors, and the review...

This should not happen, because Word automatically renumbers the remaining footnotes if a footnote is deleted. I have experienced this...

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...

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...

It seemed simple enough. The style called for figure captions to be placed above figures (in fact, they were even called figure titles),...

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...

Double punctuation is ugly, but unavoidable sometimes. For example, it appears in dialogue: He said, "I try to avoid double punctuation."...

I edit PDF documents using Acrobat Reader DC, a free tool. It generally works flawlessly, but which complex piece of software is bug...

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...