In this series, experienced editors reflect on their Top 3 tools, rules and suggestions for clients and colleagues. Gael Spivak works in communications for the Government of Canada, where she specializes in plain language writing and editing. An editor for 13 years, Gael has worked on topics that include food …
Editors’ Association of Earth (EAE) is a Facebook group set up in February 2013 by Greg Ioannou and others, with the aim of fostering links between editors internationally. On Oct. 17, its membership reached 10,000. It’s a testament to editors around the world that EAE has become so successful. EAE …
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 …
The prevailing orthodoxy in online editors’ groups, I have noticed, is one of huge respect for, and empathy with, the author. The author is king/queen. We, as editors, primarily serve the author’s vision, the author’s voice. However, in my own work (both in-house and freelance, primarily as a copyeditor of …
Editors say they love words, with finding just the right phrase for the context, but, ironically, they can only fail with two terms critical to the world of publishing: “editor” and “author.” When someone says she’s an editor, you have no idea what she does. Is she the editor of …
We’ve all as editors had the odd grumble over something an author has written. Maybe a string of noun clusters has pushed us to the limit of our patience, or we’ve broken down over a text awash with comma splices. It’s easy to criticize when we’re on the sidelines, though. …
We editors talk at length about different kinds of editing and who does what, and we generally assume that we’re working on a text written by someone else. Together with the author, we massage the content, the structure and the presentation into the best possible shape for its intended readers. …
Later that afternoon, I arrived home and plunked myself down in front of a blank screen. It felt like I’d joined the ranks of such writers as Hemingway and Faulkner, Ludlum and Michener, and many others who’d lost manuscripts and had to start over from scratch. Of course, in this …
In this instalment of our “Editors in the Spotlight” series, Abby Egerter interviews editor Jennifer Foster, who worked on the award-winning Dirty Science: 25 Experiments with Soil, by Shar Levine and Leslie Johnstone. Jennifer Foster has been editing for 17 years and freelancing for 10. However, book publishing is something …
In every good boot camp movie there’s a scene where a tough army trainer leaves the rebellious recruit out in the cold and rain all night or makes them do 1,000 pushups. This is one way to make the recruit begin to sacrifice ego. The other short story boot camp …