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. …
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 …
When I began writing this article I knew, like most of you, that editing is an unhealthy occupation. It’s so fraught with hazards it’s a wonder anyone will sell us health or life insurance. We sit long hours, our work is mentally taxing, we stare at monitors, our physical effort …
Have you noticed how Christmas is sneaking back into respectability? Three decades ago school Christmas concerts and office Christmas parties began to disappear in apparent deference to multiculturalism. Even the word for this feast was proscribed. I promptly fell into line. Everyone should feel welcome, and I acknowledged that Christianity’s …
I was amused to read that some Hamilton landlords, faced with a public relations crisis, want to rebrand themselves as rental housing providers. They feel landlord has too many negative connotations, imputable to its medieval traditions; landlord also suggests a “callous and wealthy man collecting cheques each month and doing …
Good poetry, I believe, projects the essence of culture. It conveys profound concepts and articulates observations while captivating the listener with its beauty and power. It does this with a matchless performance of words that blend language with wisdom. The listener is both enlightened and entertained. Bad poetry, on the …
At times this blog can set off a chain reaction. When Anna Williams wrote about childhood reading, I began exploring my fading cranial archive. Anita Jenkins focused my search with her comments on Grey Owl’s cultural appropriation. I must confess that a lot of the books of my youth would …
In the past I refused students seeking a thesis editor — mainly for ethical reasons. The preamble to the Editors Canada “Guidelines for Ethical Editing of Theses / Dissertations” states: “In part, academia uses theses as a way of testing the ability of students, especially graduate students, to use written …
The Grey Cup eluded the Edmonton Eskimos again this year, but that’s not the worst of the team’s troubles: the political correctness refs want it to lose its name as well. The club chose its regrettable label in 1949, but it had been widely used by other Edmonton football squads …
There are many writers and, apparently, more than a few editors who think that to be and some of its conjugations are not actual verbs. I regularly encounter headings like this: Blabworth is Picked to be Next Publisher. This grammatical confusion is exposed in titles using the conventional upper and …