Anticipation, Antici-PAY-yay-shun …
In the art world they say a work is open for interpretation by each person who views it. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that. And so it is in the editorial world. If you give a manuscript...
View ArticleYou Can’t Make Me Like It, But—
I have spent a good bit of my life trying to learn how to write well. Writing well, I think, is one part practice (those 10,000 hours), one part reading other writers (good ones), and one part the...
View ArticleHow’s the Craic?
For the uninitiated, that word’s pronounced “crack.” In fact, that word is crack. Meaning it’s an English word (crack) borrowed into Irish (Gaelic) as craic; then that Irish spelling was reborrowed...
View ArticleNot All Dictionaries Are Created Equal
If you’ve been coming ’round here for awhile, you know I have a thing for the dictionary. There’s, like, so much information in such a small space! It’s so efficient! And it contains all the building...
View ArticleShort Saturday: America’s Second Revolution
For a pair of countries that share so much history (read David Hackett Fischer’s fascinating Albion’s Seed if you don’t believe me), England and the United States are curiously divided on words and how...
View ArticleYour Fifth-Grade Teacher Versus … Well, Me
When I was a kid, some of my best friends were teachers. What grade was I in when my teacher read aloud to us every day after lunch? The Story of Doctor Doolittle (by Hugh Lofting, published 1920)...
View ArticleMistakes Were Made: The First Draft vs. Your Best Effort
You’ve seen it in dozens of movies, so many it’s practically a cliché: on a desperate deadline, the writer frantically types the last words of the manuscript—closeup of the words The End—then rrrrips...
View ArticleShort Saturday: I Am Not Editing Our Conversation
No, really. I’m not. Not outwardly, not inwardly. Promise. The Old Editor Says … Edit to live, don’t live to edit.* It’s not your job to correct other people’s speech. It’s not your job to correct...
View ArticleOn the Same Page: You, Me, and the Style Guide
I really love the left-brain/right-brain duality of editing. It’s both prescriptivist and descriptivist. It’s a puzzle and yet has the same elements. Every project’s different … and every project’s the...
View ArticleThe Style Guide Is Your Friend
I was reading my Entertainment Weekly at lunch the other day (“12 Things You Never Knew About Harry Potter”) and was positively gobsmacked by number nine: The Half-Blood Prince 9. To try to ensure...
View ArticleProper English: Us Versus Them
A writer friend of mine posted a little meme* on Facebook the other day: Never make fun of someone if they mispronounce a word. It means they learned it by reading. I doubt there’s any data to support...
View ArticleWordplay: Neglected Positives, Inpeas, and Falsies
Prefixes like “in,” “non,” “un,” “dis,” and “im” make words negative, yes? There may be grammatical particulars I am not addressing here, but generally speaking. So you have a positive word like...
View ArticleIt Was Not an Historic Event
I’ve noticed a lot of people of a certain age tend to use the indefinite article an before the word historic (or historical): The radio announcer said, “It was an historic event.” This is actually...
View Article#WordUse Series: It’s Patrick’s Day. Paddy, Not Patty. Please.
The day the Irishman was born, his mother watched the St. Patrick’s Day parade from her room in the Rotunda Hospital overlooking O’Connell Street and the Parnell monument. I’d love to be in Dublin for...
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