My phone chimes. It’s one of President Donald Trump’s people. Desperate Donald has written a book he hopes will cinch his re-election next year. But it needs a good editing. Can I do this? Of course I can. The question is, will I? The Donald is not my favourite politician. …
This post is part of a new series of case studies by and for in-house editors. The focus of this series is on the personal experiences and various roles of in-house editors. A post will appear on the Editors’ Weekly every other month. If you’re interested in writing a post for this series, please email …
A recent family adventure took me to Phuket’s Big Buddha. As the name suggests, this marvel is a giant Buddha stretching 45 metres into the sky, overlooking the Andaman Sea. One of the top tourist sites on the island, the Buddha sits peacefully on his mountaintop, his white Burmese jade marble …
The big adventure isn’t always in the story. Sometimes it’s in the editing. A few years ago I spent the morning with two classes of junior high students to talk about how to give editing feedback to each other. They were writing adventure stories. Part of their assignment was to …
Background I’m an in-house editor for the Alberta Energy Regulator. Authors are required to work with our group as they move towards publishing their documents. It’s essential that we cultivate and nurture relationships of respect and trust. One element of that is always being able to rationalize and justify our …
We editors have our own celebrities. At the March meeting of Editors BC, which featured Stefan Dollinger, editor-in-chief of the DCHP-2 (A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, second edition), a name on the guest list caught my eye. Could it be? Really? It was. In the audience was Margery …
When I joined the publishing department of Legal Aid BC last year, none of my colleagues had used PerfectIt. But I have used it for years; I was hooked the first time I ran it on a manuscript and saw how quickly and accurately it found the one U-less “neighbor” …
“Everything’s happening at once,” laughs Margo LaPierre, the winner of the 2018 Claudette Upton Scholarship. She’s chatting with me while her husband refuels their car, three-quarters of the way through their 15-hour drive back home to Ottawa after the 2019 Editors Canada Conference in Halifax. A week before finding out the …
There’s a short paragraph in Budget 2018 that didn’t garner much buzz last year. But it holds hope for women-owned companies that want a bigger piece of the roughly $20 billion annual federal market. As part of boosting the overall number of female-run firms in this country, the Government of …
Because I was a confirmed reading addict when television appeared, it failed to dislodge my teenage obsession. Like Groucho Marx I found the idiot box “very educating”: “Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” It’s been a relentless dependency. I …