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A text-only image, which is a definition by Ambrose Bierce, from his acerbic book, The Devil’s Dictonary. The definition reads: “Defame, verb transitive. To lie about another. To tell the truth about another.” In the red and black background, a dictionary excerpt of the word “justice” fades in at bottom.
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R. Franklin Carter

Know Your Legal Limits

Tuesday February 26, 2013

Let’s begin by sketching a fictional but plausible scenario. Dan Ascot is a librarian who works at the University of Western Nebraska. One day, in 2009, he posts a few remarks about a publisher on his blog. He says that Knightsbridge Press, a publisher of scholarly books in Massachusetts, produces “over-priced works of dubious scholarship.” […]

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5 empty white paper thought and speech balloons, hanging from brown strings against a blue background.
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Virginia Durksen

THE INNER EDITOR: The Useful Conversation

Wednesday July 24, 2013

The desciptive-prescriptive war is over. Long live the conversation. In the past month, my colleagues have been chatting about an article called Descriptivism vs Prescriptivism: War is Over (if you want it). Its heading perpetuates a flawed premise, but the author offers good evidence that prescriptive and descriptive can both be thoughtful approaches to the […]

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Anna Williams

Editor’s Note: Thank You for Your Patience

Sunday March 1, 2015

Dear Readers, Thank you for your patience these last several weeks while our blog went through some technical issues. We are aware that our subscribers weren’t receiving their usual notices when new content was published. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you. Things should be back to normal again, although we’re still ironing out […]

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Paul Cipywnyk

Tips for Dealing with Freelance Isolation

Tuesday October 6, 2015

Freelance editors are a mousy, introverted, cat-loving lot. They’re pale creatures who are often confined to mouldy basement offices where they stare with glazed eyes at glowing computer monitors, barricaded from the world by stacks upon stacks of dusty tomes. Right? Ha! If that’s what you think, you’ve never been to an Editors Canada conference. […]

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Dwain Richardson

English Editing in Quebec: Avoiding Wordiness

Tuesday March 22, 2016

Plain language communicates written messages clearly and concisely. This is true whether you’re editing stand-alone English copy or translating from other languages. In my experience as an editor and translator, I have had to work with a number of stiff and wordy texts. I usually start by asking, “What needs to be improved?” Should I focus on […]

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Frances Peck

The Story of Canadian English

Tuesday November 21, 2017

For those of us still grieving the defunct Canadian Oxford Dictionary, the release of the second edition of A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, on March 17 this year, lent some comfort. First published in 1967 to coincide with Canada’s centennial, the DCHP not only gives spellings and definitions but also tracks (and sometimes […]

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Frances Peck

Freedom to Read, Willingness to Edit

Tuesday February 26, 2019

Good stories, for me, have never been treacly. My father, an RCMP officer, put people in jail; my mother, a halfway house director, put them back into society. My childhood was one of sensational publications and limited adult supervision. By age 11 I’d read Jaws, Helter Skelter and The Eden Express, a memoir of schizophrenia. […]

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