Next month, Copyediting will hold its popular Freelance Accelerator in Waltham, MA, for editors new to freelancing. Wondering if this full-day workshop is for you? Read the following excerpt from the course workbook. Defining Your Editing Business A major step in starting your business … [Read more...]
Allusions, Illusions, and Elisions Can Elude Spell-Check
Some common spelling errors can elude even for the best editors, so don’t let spell-check illude you into thinking it will catch every problem. Four similar words — allude, illude, elude, and elide — are just waiting beneath your fingertips to be mistyped, misplaced, and confused. The following are … [Read more...]
Repetitive Strain Injury 101: What Editors Need to Know
In last month’s column, I wrote about my recent experience with repetitive strain injury (RSI), and how it has affected my life and my freelance editorial business. As an editor in today's tech-driven world, you are a computer athlete—and that means you're also at risk for developing RSI. Here's … [Read more...]
Understanding Metadata
Metadata means “data about data.” In that sense, the mean, median, and mode are data about data. But in the book sense, we mean the data that describes the book: title subtitle author author bio edition publisher publication date page count or audio length genre … [Read more...]
Style Guide Exceptions
Copyeditors often champion one style manual over the others. In doing so, they may be blinded to the faults of their favorite. In fact, every style guide is inadequate. And every good style guide admits this inadequacy. “Everyone is free to make exceptions if you don’t think a rule suits your … [Read more...]
The Kids Are All Right: Emmy Favilla Looks at Language in the BuzzFeed Age
this book is 🔥 af OMG **DED**, that hyphenation section is #goals Admit it, copyeditors: your eyebrows just shot skyward when you spotted one of your own writing the above in Copyediting—even though you might have typed a Facebook comment just like it right before reading this … [Read more...]
House Style: Exploring Other Viewpoints
The copyeditor's job, at its most basic, is to make decisions — decisions about word usage, about punctuation, about flow and readability and how the words just look on the page. Many of those decisions stem from copyeditors' understanding of and feel for the language — their sprachgefühl — which, … [Read more...]
Questions for a BuzzFeed Editor and Book Author: Emmy Favilla
Emmy Favilla has been editing and copyediting since her NYU days. She is currently the senior commerce editor at BuzzFeed, where she coauthored the BuzzFeed Style Guide, and is the author of the upcoming book A World Without “Whom” (available in November). Hi, Emmy! So your book, A World Without … [Read more...]