Blog
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Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt
People love to correct other people’s grammar, spelling, and usage. What better way to establish superiority or to discredit someone’s argument! And that’s what it’s about, isn’t it? Feeling superior. Or more educated. Or just better. Never mind that a person’s opinion on a matter isn’t more or less valid because that person used an […]
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‘Before’ and ‘Ago’ in Fiction
Does anyone distinguish between before and ago these days? Is anyone else bothered by the nearly ubiquitous use of ago in fiction?
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Define Subversive
To be clear, the book is not a grammar or usage guide. Rather, it contains Saller’s thoughts on her approach to copyediting—and a reasonable, even kind, approach it is. Take these thoughts on working toward the perfect document:
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Change Is Good (Sometimes)
Editors pore over text, moving from letter to letter, even looking for extra spaces and judging whether punctuation marks should be italic or roman.
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Rules of the Road
I received a traffic warning last week for rolling through a stop sign. (And thank you, Officer, for not giving me a ticket.) While we all hate to make mistakes, we also know that we never edit better than right after being smacked in the face with something we’ve missed.
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Trust (Vroom, Vroom)
The mechanic sat down next to me and presented the sheet detailing the work to be performed on my vehicle. Because I needed to authorize the repairs, and by extension the king’s ransom the work required, I pretended to examine this sheet.
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Physician, Heal Thyself
Editing your own work is a risky proposition for all the much-discussed reasons: You’re too close to the work. You see what you meant to write rather than what is actually there. Familiarity is not your friend. Everyone must edit his or her work to some extent, however, and self-editing is a skill that can […]
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Space, the Final Frontier
Thinkforamomentabouthowmarvelouslyusefulspacesbetweenwordsare. Or rather: Think for a moment about how marvelously useful spaces between words are. And cheers to that big triple-em-dash-looking thing on our keyboard: the space bar. Without spaces, sentences are all but unreadable, and so conditioned are we to using spaces that I could not write that first sentence without them. I tried, […]
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A Sweet Dessert Is My Just Desert
Desert and Dessert are words that should always trigger mental warnings. Dessert is the sugary treat you eat after dinner. As some say, the extra “s” is for “sweet.” Those with a sweet tooth might also be interested to know that while Merriam-Webster lists a dessert fork and a dessert knife as two words, it […]
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Your Own Private Library
“Every one of us is losing something precious to us,” he says after the phone stops ringing. “Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads—at least that’s where I imagine it—there’s a little room where we store those memories. […]