Laura and I purchased Copyediting from Manifest in September 2015 with a goal of growing a brand we both loved to offer more to more editors. The last three years have been incredible. We’ve received an enormous amount of support from our subscribers and the broader editing community. Together, … [Read more...]
Making the Case for Your Editing Fees
One challenge that self-employed editors face is convincing potential clients that their fees are worthwhile. Clients have budget limits, and some clients will want to pay unrealistically low fees. But you need to earn enough to support yourself. What steps can you take to get clients to see your … [Read more...]
Book Review: Dreyer’s English
Benjamin Dreyer's forthcoming book, Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, is part grammar and usage reference and part how-to writing manual, from a copyeditor's perspective. (It's the book I always thought I would write.) The title of the book is telling. This is no … [Read more...]
Gerunds and Participles
Most of the parts of speech are fairly easy to grasp—nouns are things that can serve as subjects or objects, verbs are things that usually denote actions or states of being, and so on—but some are a little more slippery. Take gerunds and participles, for instance. Maybe you know that there are … [Read more...]
Decimating the Etymological Fallacy
Delving into a word's etymology can be enlightening, disillusioning, and even fun. But sometimes, word histories can be misused for prescriptive purposes. The etymological fallacy is the argument that a word's "true" or "best" current meaning should be the same as its original meaning or the meaning … [Read more...]
Add Value with Niche Knowledge
I love it when a copy editor helps us save face. I’ve worked with a couple of really excellent copy editors—ones who showed me how it is possible to address a problem area with the lightest possible hand. They really respect the author’s voice (and I wasn’t always the author). I also appreciate the … [Read more...]
Behind the Tapestry: Editing Translated Text
Miguel de Cervantes compared translated text to the back side of a tapestry: although the figures are seen, he said, they are full of threads that obscure them. Mind you, he said that—or, rather, he had Don Quixote say it—in 16th-century Spanish. ¡Qué de habilidades hay perdidas por ahí! ¡Qué de … [Read more...]
The Difference between Incident and Incidence
Uh-oh. He did something stupid again, and in public. Forget worrying about who exactly he is — is this yet another incident or incidence? These two related words can be confusing for many, and their similarities can make it easy even for copyeditors to miss. Incidence is a mass noun that refers … [Read more...]