Twitter

In the first part of this tweet-taming article, we looked at how to filter Twitter in general and your stream in particular. Now to the good stuff—organizing all of that glorious information. 

Lists

We’ve given you the basics, we’ve talked about participating in Twitter chats, and we’ve helped you learn the lingo. If you’ve jumped in and have found the interesting, helpful, tweet-prolific community of editors and others on Twitter, you might be wondering how to better filter and organize the experience. It’s time to tame the tweets.

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The Copyediting team is unabashedly enthusiastic about National Grammar Day and all of the good-natured creativity that leads up to it. We’ll have our own contest to announce soon (watch this space! ... your chance to win! ... etc.).

We’ve given you the basics and we’ve talked about participating in Twitter chats, but there are a few other things you can do to master Twitter as a copyeditor. First, as a communications professional, you’ll want to learn the lingo.

Site Vocab

GRAMMARHULK, one of a community of Hulk personas on Twitter and an even larger community of language lovers, has been delighting us with grammar, spelling, usage, and editing advice and observations for two and a half years.

WOW, IT REALLY BEEN THAT LONG?

How did your puny human alter ego, a mild-mannered Manhattan editor, get into editing? How long have you been editing and for what sorts of materials?

The most recent updates to the AP Stylebook show where many of us have our heads and do our work these days: in the cloud. AP defines cloud as the “collection of data and use of related computing services via remote servers accessed through the Internet.” So even our head-in-the-clouds, online daydreaming is really just “accessing data and services.” I’ll understand if you want to say “working in the cloud” instead.

Karen Wise is a full-time freelance copyeditor, proofreader, and blogger. She “started as an editorial assistant fresh out of college, when there were still lots of book publishers around.” She worked in-house for eleven years and has been freelancing for about fifteen.

What's your current copyediting gig?

I specialize in cookbooks and textbooks, although I also do other trade nonfiction books when they come along.

What do you find satisfying about cookbook editing?

Andy Hollandbeck has always been good at mistakes—finding them, that is. And he’s always been a bibliophile. He combined those two traits and began proofreading in 1999, acquiring a freelance project that would eventually turn into copyediting for Demography, the quarterly journal of the Population Association of America. In 2004, he started copyediting the For Dummies series for Wiley Publishing, moving to its online team in 2007.

How would you describe your current copyediting gig?

Tom Mangan is a freelance writer, editor, and blogger. He “gravitated toward” copyediting in college, has been editing professionally since 1987, and has freelanced since February 2011. In his current contract with IDEA Health & Fitness Association, he does substantive editing for print journals and Web newsletters.

How does your editing for the fitness association differ from previous editing jobs?

Colleen Barry, copyeditor at IDG Enterprise, a publisher of technology magazines for IT executives, has been copyediting since 2002.

How did you get into copyediting?

My college's student newspaper ran an above-the-fold page-one headline that misspelled Boston as "Bostron," so I applied to be an editor. A week later, I was sitting on a grubby leather couch poring over proofs, and I loved it.

Two weird projects you’ve worked on back-to-back?