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Blog post on computer and symbols of digital communication; an email icon, a "like" icon, a lightbulb, and video play button.

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Zanne Klingenberg

Get to Know Your New Blog Team: Zanne Klingenberg

Thursday August 28, 2025

This week, meet Zanne Klingenberg, managing editor, in our third and final post in our mini-series introducing the new editorial board at The Editors’ Weekly! What kind of editing work do you do? I like variety in my work! Having clients from a variety of industries and working on different stages of a document keeps […]

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blog management editorial team Zanne Klingenberg

Workman on a roof

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Gettable Grammar: Grammar Class Wars

Tuesday December 18, 2012

Gettable Grammar is a monthly series of conjectures, opinions and postulates by Karen Virag. GRAMMAR CLASS WARS Grammar. If it’s not your gramper’s wife, what the heck is it? Well, grammar is the field of linguistics that covers the conventions of a language; it involves morphology and syntax, phonetics, phonology, semantics and pragmatics. Still scratching […]

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CBC Radio descriptivism editing grammar Grammar Gals

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new words 2 (Veer)

Collage of comic book dialogue bubbles representing “new” or colloquial words and language, on the topic of new words in the English language.

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Image of sepia-toned, handwritten words in a grungy collage with red and brown smeared colours.

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Victoria Neufeldt

Old Words

Tuesday April 16, 2013

Old words are just as interesting as new words. But how old is old? We use a good number of words today that go all the way back to Old English, the language of the Germanic peoples who invaded and then settled in England in the fifth century A.D. These “native” words are some of […]

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etymology lexicography lexicon Old English old words

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GETTABLE GRAMMAR: I come to praise typos, not to bury them

Thursday August 15, 2013

Summer is often called the silly season—it is, after all, generally a time of cheap escapist paperbacks and brainless blockbuster movies (Sharknado, anyone?). So, in honour of that most thought-free, indolence-inspiring and cogitation-challenged of seasons, for this posting I will neither opine nor berate; instead, I will celebrate the little language mistakes that make us […]

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Gettable Grammar grammar mistakes proofreading typo typos

Literally is not The word “literally” is the topic of this week’s blog, "English Can Be So Two-faced," by Karen Virag for The Editors' Weekly, EAC, Sept. 17, 2013. only word in this crazy language of ours that has opposing definitions. But it's the topic of this blog post, "English Can Be So Two-faced," by Karen Virag. The Editors' Weekly, EAC, Sept. 17, 2013.

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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

The love of money is not only the root of all evil; it is also the root of ghastly copy.

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WASTED WORDS: Squandering Words on Money

Wednesday October 9, 2013

The love of money is not only the root of all evil; it is also the root of ghastly copy. I find it particularly ironic that word economy has only a fleeting acquaintance with commerce. Consider the grating and ubiquitous tautology, expensive price, as in, “The house with a river view comes at a more […]

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editing redundancies redundancy tautologies tautology Wasted Words wordiness

canola_field

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Victoria Neufeldt

Bold Words

Tuesday February 18, 2014

One could say that bold words enter the language shouting. An example would be the word AIDS, which was coined in the early 1980s, probably by a journalist, as an initialism for the descriptive medical name of the disease: acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. Because the disease burst upon the world so devastatingly, the word AIDS was in the news just about […]

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bold words etymology language lexicon usage

fresh_orange

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Lessons Learned From Eminem, David Ogilvy and a Sex Hotline

Tuesday April 29, 2014

It all started respectably enough. Publishing courses at Ryerson, EAC workshops and conferences, the Banff Book Editing Workshop. I’ve had rock-solid editorial training. So what have a rap artist, an ad man and a sex hotline taught me about writing and editing? Some pretty useful things, it turns out. Eminem: Write and edit like a […]

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editing editor's role language marketing style word choice writing

An open dictionary shows the letter A on the left page and the letter B on the right page.

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Wasted Words: Careless Pirates

Tuesday May 27, 2014

To create a great language simply plunder other tongues of their attractive words, assimilate them and profess longstanding ownership. English proves this. Oxford has half a million distinct words. Add technical and slang and you’ve topped one million, says the Global Language Monitor. Most are swag. Unfortunately, piracy can be thoughtless. We are all accomplices, […]

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language tautology usage Wasted Words word choice