The DocEditor Blog

Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 articles.
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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Glasses placed on the table.
29 May 2019
One of my favourite lines from a movie is in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, where our protagonist turns to his casino table companion and says: ‘Allow myself to introduce... myself.’

In addition to the words, I love his visible effort in working out what to say after ‘introduce’. Of course there’s no other way forward for Austin than to repeat himself with ‘myself’.

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