The DocEditor Blog

Displaying 1 - 6 of 7 articles.
Card saying 'Have no fear' laid across a numerical keypad
29 Feb 2024
Not everyone gets on with numbers, but they're part of most documents. Here are eight(ish) points on number editing.

Numbers have the reputation of being solid. Words, people sometimes say, can be slippery and subjective in their meaning, but at least you know where you are with numbers. For me, at least, this idea originated at school, from the idea of maths being either right or wrong, and there being no comparable certainty in the arts or humanities.

But as you grow up you realise that there are few absolutes, and things become less certain even…

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Shelves with a US flag box and a UK flag box
29 Feb 2024
Editing between British and US styles can be less straightforward than you'd think. Let's look at a few of the trickier aspects of switching between the two.

‘Never assume: it makes an ass out of u and me’ is a phrase from salaried working life that rattles around my head as a freelance editor. In the early noughties it was my boss’s waggish response when one of the team said ‘I assume that …’. But it’s gained new significance with editing experience. Nothing is set in stone. It might even be different to how I’d always imagined…

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A number 5
29 Feb 2024
Many copyeditors work with books, or book-like formats such as journal articles or reports. But what if you’re asked to work on something with quite another shape entirely, like a board game or a set of exhibition labels?

If you’re facing a situation like this, it’s a good idea to go back to basics. Copyeditors have been given a ready-made set of principles with which to tackle any job. The principles are brilliant in their versatility. They’re also brilliant because, like ‘copyediting’, they all begin with a C, so they’re easy to remember, even when you’…

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Mug with tea on a wooden table
07 Dec 2021

When I run courses with Publishing Scotland there are usually one or two people in each group who are starting out as freelancers. I know what that’s like: in 2014, when Margaret Aherne was the Publishing Scotland trainer, I was one of those people.

In courses that focus on the nuts and bolts of copyediting there’s little time to talk about the best way to start making your mark in the editing world. Anyone is welcome to grab me for a chat after a session, but usually, because time is limited…

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Arrow pointing right, carved into white stone
09 Mar 2020
Could we do without apostrophes?

The announcement before Christmas that the Apostrophe Protection Society (APS) had finally been defeated by, in the words of its founder John Richards, ‘the ignorance and laziness present in modern times’ prompted some discussion. Rob Drummond suggested that the apostrophe ‘is not actually necessary for…

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Lady practising rock climbing with helmet and harness
29 May 2019
‘More generally, your footnotes are far too long and, goodness me, you don’t know how to use a semicolon, do you?’ These almost throwaway words were addressed to me in the year 2000, during my PhD oral exam.

Reader, I did not use a semicolon again until 2014. As Denise Cowle so rightly says in her YouTube explainer ‘How to use a semicolon’ (which I could have done with 20 years ago), often people are either scared of semicolons so they avoid them altogether, or they scatter them…

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