Language Lessons from "The Kerala Story" and the Coronation of Charles
If you have not heard of the movie The Kerala Story, you are not an Indian. It was released recently and has sharply polarized public...
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sensitive editing + finishing touches = clear expression
Journal of an Academic Copyeditor
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Apr 29, 2023
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...
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:...
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...
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 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...
Oct 15, 2021
Negative Connotations
Twelve years ago, I emailed a friend, congratulating him on his impending marriage. A few days later, we spoke, and he questioned my use...
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."...
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...
May 7, 2021
The Atomic Typo
The typo is the bane of the copyeditor. However careful I am, I'll invariably find a handful during my final read. It could be an extra...
Apr 23, 2021
Too Much Innovation
For many years, we used 3M storage products for data backup in the company where I worked, and I always thought there was something wrong...
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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