The DocEditor Blog

In some areas of editing and proofreading several tricky issues converge. You have two options with these: try wherever possible to avoid them, or tackle them head-on. Other brave, sparky, go-ahead souls will do the latter without question. I invariably start with the former and then slide into the latter when I’m well and truly cornered and I have to write a column or something.

I find capitalising titles and…

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…

‘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…

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’…

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…

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…