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Perilous Punctuation: The Email Salutation

Tuesday May 31, 2016

An old friend from Ottawa recently visited me in Vancouver. We hadn’t seen each other in years. “One thing I’ll never forget about you,” said Ann (who is not an editor), “is that you taught me the right way to begin an email. Every time I write ‘Hi comma So-and-So period,’ I think of you.” […]

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comma Frances Peck grammar punctuation style usage

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Rosemary Shipton

Mentoring

Tuesday June 7, 2016

What’s the best way to pass skills, experience and business smarts from one person to another? Mentoring tops the list. We humans have always known the value of one-on-one instruction: parents teach their trade or profession to their children, apprentices work for years with their masters and young hires look for an old hand in […]

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editorial skills mentee mentor mentoring mentorship Rosemary Shipton training

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Dwain Richardson

English Editing in Quebec: All About Gender

Tuesday July 19, 2016

If you’re passionate about foreign languages, you’ll know that most of them contain masculine and feminine nouns. Some languages, such as German and Russian, go the extra mile and use neutral nouns. English has its fair share of masculine and feminine nouns, too, though most of them have been eliminated to make way for more […]

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Dwain Richardson English Editing in Quebec French to English gender gender-neutral pronouns translation

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Time to Put the “Free” Back in “Freelance”

Tuesday July 26, 2016

I make my living as a freelancer, which means I work pretty much every single day, all year long. My only breaks are brief visits to out-of-town family. Real holidays are rare — perhaps once every five years. Sound familiar? I suspect many of you are like me. We never know when the next job […]

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editing editor editors at work freelancing sabbatical Susan Glickman

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Rosemary Shipton

Shorten It!

Tuesday August 23, 2016

“Every word is gold,” my author said, “but I suppose you’ll have to shorten it.” Indeed I will: this book manuscript totals 180,000 words, and the trade publisher wants a 40 percent cut. That will be tough. Editors often need to reduce text. Newspapers, magazines, brochures, textbooks and reference materials have strict word limits. It […]

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avoiding wordiness editorial skills Rosemary Shipton structural editing stylistic editing

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Being Intercultural: The Language of Health

Tuesday August 30, 2016

Being intercultural is often defined strictly in terms of ethnicity and geography, when really each of us lives a multiplicity of cultural identities on a daily basis. Our interactions at work and with family and friends, our activities, faith, offline and online personas, all have their own overlapping and intersecting sets of beliefs, values and […]

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health language change linguistics usage word choice Zanne Cameron

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The Ongoing Demise of English

Tuesday September 13, 2016

English just isn’t spoken as well as it used to be. As people who have to deal every day with the abuses of common users, we will surely all agree with this sentiment: “our unfortunate ears are doomed not only to excruciate in the torments of bad grammar, but to agonize under the torture of […]

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James Harbeck language change Linguistics Frankly usage

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Paul Buckingham

Ours Is Not to Reason Why — Or Is It?

Tuesday October 4, 2016

You’re editing a biography of Lester Pearson, and you see a line that says, “It is a fitting coincidence that Pearson was born the same year another great Liberal leader, Wilfrid Laurier, took the Canadian helm.” You’re drawn to the interesting coincidence of dates and decide to look up the facts. You discover that Pearson […]

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author-editor relationship editor's role fact checking logic Paul Buckingham

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What’s in a Name?

Tuesday October 18, 2016

Last month’s book club choice was from a bunch of bestseller and book club lists. It was one of those “family” stories with a sizeable cast of characters. You know the kind — three or four sisters with partners and/or lovers and children and a couple of pets. I was a hundred pages into the […]

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character names characters editor's role fiction Melva McLean novels