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Two people playing catch with a large ball. (Copyright: bsd555 © 123RF.com)

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“Playing Catch”: A Strategy to Regain Momentum with Authors

Thursday October 1, 2026

You’re working with an author on a project, and things are going great. Then, out of the blue, they go silent. Deadlines fly past, multiple emails go unanswered and if you do get a response, it’s the author admitting that they’re really, really stuck. Even just opening the document feels impossible. This was the case […]

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A young red-haired woman with orange-rimmed glasses sits, emotionless, in front of a computer, her torso wrapped several times with a white electrical cord.

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Kate Icely

Dispatches 6: Are Interns Taken Advantage Of?

Tuesday August 27, 2013

Dispatches from an Editorial Intern is a series of posts from a neophyte editor in the publishing trenches. According to my recent articles, internships can be awesome. You get a ton of experience, and getting a job is a snap — all you have to do is follow the steps in my last post. But […]

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intern interns internships publishing

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Karen Virag

English Can Be So Two-Faced

Tuesday September 17, 2013

My head literally exploded when I read it! What text, you are wondering, could have caused such a messy and bloody scene? (And if my head literally exploded, shouldn’t I be dead?) Well, the text in question was from an article in Salon magazine (August 22, 2013) decrying the Merriam-Webster (MW) Dictionary definition of the word literally to […]

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definitions language lexicography literally The Baltimore Sun The Guardian usage

Getting an internship can lead to a job—but it might not be the job you were expecting.

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Kate Icely

Dispatches 7: Finding Work in Unexpected Places

Wednesday October 2, 2013

Dispatches from an Editorial Intern is a series of posts from a neophyte editor in the publishing trenches. Getting an internship can lead to a job — but it might not be the job you were expecting. When I first started taking courses at Ryerson University, I didn’t have a clue about the variety of […]

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editing editing jobs editorial skills finding work freelancing in-house work mentorship publishing transferable skills

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Victoria Neufeldt

Shy Words

Tuesday December 17, 2013

“New Words, Old Words, Shy Words, Bold Words” is a four-part series about English words and their origins. When I took on the commitment, a year ago, of contributing blog postings about language, I began bravely by tossing out a little ditty that came into my mind, inspired by Dr. Seuss: “New words, old […]

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etymology language lexicon shy words vocabulary

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James Harbeck

Topics, We Front Them | Linguistics, Frankly

Tuesday January 14, 2014

English is normally a subject-verb-object kind of language, but there are some interesting exceptions, especially in casual contexts. Consider examples such as the following: Poodles, we walk them. Labradors, they walk us. Chickens we have; roads, not so much. Not one of the clauses above follows standard English sentence order, and yet we understand them. […]

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grammar language Linguistics Frankly syntax usage word choice

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Susan Glickman

What Does It Take to Start Freelancing?

Tuesday April 8, 2014

If you’re just starting out as a freelancer, whether you’re a writer or an editor, keep in mind that the only way to survive is to be brutally efficient — which means you will have no social life. You should, however, get a gym membership and use it, because you’ll need to keep your energy […]

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editing editor editors at work freelancing writers writing

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Victoria Neufeldt

What’s an Editor to Do?

Tuesday January 6, 2015

The vagaries of language can cause even the most experienced editors headaches. Editors as a group are more attuned to the whims and ways of language than the average speaker, but many strange and challenging usages regularly fly under the radar and pass into public text, despite our best efforts. When should an editor accept […]

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editing editor's role grammar language usage word choice

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Susan Glickman

Facts and Fiction: Artful Flight

Tuesday February 3, 2015

I’d like to recommend two of my favourite books for writers, one ostensibly fiction and the other, not. Except that both are so idiosyncratic, so luminously zany, so full of revelatory insights, humour and poignancy, that generic boundaries seem to melt and what you take away from each is reaffirmation of not only why you […]

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book reviews Facts and Fiction fiction literature writing writing resources

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Susan Glickman

In My Opinion

Tuesday March 17, 2015

There are a heck of a lot of opinions out there. Some days they come at you as thick as blackflies over Lac Ouareau on a July afternoon. Small, insistent opinions: some winging singly and some blackening the sky in noisy hordes. Some are meaningful and some mean well and some are just mean, but […]

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judgment opinions writers writing