Blog
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The Crossing: Jumping from an In-Office Job to Full-Time Freelancing
Escaping office politics is one reason editors might want to embrace freelancing. Editors are often introverts who shy away from socializing, so freelancing would seem to allow them the freedom to do their work with less social interaction.
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Hyphens, Hauntings, and the Architecture of Sentences
I’d never heard the term hyphen refer to part of a structure, but of course it made complete sense. The hyphens I work with are connectors as well, connecting syllables and words, prefixes and suffixes to roots, fragments ripped unceremoniously apart by end-of-line breaks.
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Sorry, Darlings: Depression, Rejection, Revision and Publication
When I was seventeen, my mother and sister were killed in a car accident. I’ve said this, almost word for word, to many people over the years, and saying it has always been more than a statement of events. It’s always been a self-aware explanation (at least in part) of who I am.
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Gerunds at the Airport
Last night, after dropping my girlfriend off at the airport, I sent her a text that included this sentence: “Don’t worry about me driving home” (her plane had been delayed, the hour had grown late, and she was afraid that I might be too tired to make the hour-and-a-half drive home).
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Editing Is A Lot Like Shaving…
An editor can’t edit without the proper tools, and these days that means a decent computer, a monitor (or two or three), a high-speed internet connection, software (Word, PerfectIt, etc.), dictionaries, and style manuals, for starters.
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If the Story Is Good Enough, No One Will Care About a Few Typos, Right?
You’ve just put the finishing touches on your masterpiece and cannot wait to share it with the world. There’s no reason to wait another second, right?
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Talk About Bleary Eyes
While attending the George Washington University, I picked up extra scratch by proofreading patents for a law firm. Back in the early nineties, twelve dollars an hour seemed like a lot of money (though, being a college student, the firm might as well have sent my checks directly to the M Street bars).
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Mind the Gap
I’ve noticed that the more professional the design, whether that means typesetting of the text or pictorial or illustrative elements surrounding the text, the more likely the editor is to have a false sense that everything is okay.
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A Big Nerd
While waiting for the event to begin, I took the opportunity to explain the singular they and its increasing acceptance. As any fourteen-year-old might, she then hit me with the abovementioned assessment of my coolness.
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Grief and the Present Tense
Most of us learned about perfect tenses in elementary school, and the past tense learned is probably appropriate here. The learning we’re talking about likely occurred in the past without subsequent, continued thought on the matter.