Tag: proofreading

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Lucy Kenward

Last But Not Least: An Interview with Leslie Vermeer

August 22, 2024 by Lucy Kenward | Leave a Comment

Leslie Vermeer is a longtime editor and academic who teaches editing and publishing. She is also the author of The Complete Canadian Book Editor and, most recently, Last But Not Least, a book about proofreading that includes tips and practical exercises. She spoke with Lucy Kenward about her newest book. The following interview has been […]

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Alex Benarzi Holly Vestad

Free (or Cheap) Tools for Freelance Editors: Part 2

June 27, 2024 by Holly Vestad | 5 Comments on Free (or Cheap) Tools for Freelance Editors: Part 2

We are back this week with more free or cheap tools to help you effectively run your editing practice. In our previous post, we shared resources that help organize your thoughts, your time, your published work and your money. Here, we offer some affordable tools specifically for editors.  Word processors There’s no way around it: […]

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Madeleine Vasaly

An Introduction to Proofreading Comics

May 16, 2024 by Madeleine Vasaly | 2 Comments on An Introduction to Proofreading Comics

If you proofread prose books or magazines, working on your first comic book or graphic novel can be intimidating. A lot of your skills are transferable and will serve you well across media types, but some editorial elements are handled differently. Reading comics from a range of genres and publishers will help you get familiar […]

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Gael Spivak

Gael Spivak: An Editor’s Top 3

May 5, 2020 by Gael Spivak | Leave a Comment

In this series, experienced editors reflect on their Top 3 tools, rules and suggestions for clients and colleagues. Gael Spivak works in communications for the Government of Canada, where she specializes in plain language writing and editing. An editor for 13 years, Gael has worked on topics that include food safety and food labelling, biotechnology, […]

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Natalia Iwanek

Making the Shift from Student to Freelance Editor

March 31, 2020 by Natalia Iwanek | 6 Comments on Making the Shift from Student to Freelance Editor

For novice editors, the transitional year from student to editor is often both remarkable and overwhelming. No amount of experience and education can prepare you for the phenomenon of imposter syndrome, the tendency to undervalue your work, and the persistent fear of failure. Above all, nothing quite prepares you for that first difficult client. Although […]

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Aaron Dalton

Checklists: Sharing Knowledge

November 5, 2019 by Aaron Dalton | 5 Comments on Checklists: Sharing Knowledge

I’ve spent most of my career in-house. Currently I work with dozens of individual authors from all across the organization on a diverse array of document types. Though our editorial team works as a pool, a certain degree of specialization is unavoidable. We need to be able to record and share institutional knowledge amongst ourselves […]

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Berna Ozunal

Letter to Non-Editors

October 22, 2019 by Berna Ozunal | 5 Comments on Letter to Non-Editors

This post is part of a series of case studies by and for in-house editors. The focus of this series is on the personal experiences and various roles of in-house editors. A post will appear on the Editors’ Weekly every other month. If you’re interested in writing a post for this series, please email the Member Services Committee. After […]

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Wendy Barron

PerfectIt 4: Faster and More Customizable Than Ever

July 2, 2019 by Wendy Barron | 3 Comments on PerfectIt 4: Faster and More Customizable Than Ever

When I joined the publishing department of Legal Aid BC last year, none of my colleagues had used PerfectIt. But I have used it for years; I was hooked the first time I ran it on a manuscript and saw how quickly and accurately it found the one U-less “neighbor” in a sea of “neighbours,” […]

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Kate Johnson

No Perfection Unless You’re a Sunset

March 26, 2019 by Kate Johnson | 7 Comments on No Perfection Unless You’re a Sunset

Those who read are an exacting bunch. We grew up with professionally proofread books, back when publishers could still afford to pay someone to make sure no spelling mistake got by, no errant comma, sneaky typo, sloppy grammar or lazy punctuation. We had high expectations of our reading material. Now we tend to notice when […]

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Wilf Popoff

Wasted Words: The Torments of Editing

March 19, 2019 by Wilf Popoff | 3 Comments on Wasted Words: The Torments of Editing

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 amounts to repetitive flexing of […]

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Tilman Lewis

Professional Editorial Standards: What Does an Editor Do Today?

January 29, 2019 by Tilman Lewis | Leave a Comment

Editors Canada’s Professional Editorial Standards (PES) describe the responsibilities of an editor. The scope of PES is broad; this series explores how the standards apply to a variety of editing contexts. I’ve always found the granularity of PES daunting; I’m more inclined to “find the voice and let it sing.” But comparing the 2016 revision […]

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Wendy Barron

My brain hurts! (Or I’ve been proofreading from right to left!)

December 4, 2018 by Wendy Barron | 6 Comments on My brain hurts! (Or I’ve been proofreading from right to left!)

This post is part of a new series of case studies by and for in-house editors. The focus of this series is on the personal experiences and various roles of in-house editors. A post will appear on the Editors’ Weekly every other month. If you’re interested in writing a post for this series, please email the […]

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Dwain Richardson

English Editing in Quebec: Proofreading Bilingual Documents

July 31, 2018 by Dwain Richardson | 1 Comment on English Editing in Quebec: Proofreading Bilingual Documents

For most of us, it is easy to proof documents written in one language. Copy editors and proofreaders are familiar with flow, style and grammatical rules as they pertain to their mother tongues. But what happens when working with a bilingual or multilingual document? How do you ensure consistency, especially when the standards of one […]

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Anna Williams

PerfectIt for Mac

June 26, 2018 by Anna Williams | 6 Comments on PerfectIt for Mac

As a Mac user, I’ve often read Twitter and Facebook feeds enviously where other editors enthused about Intelligent Editing’s proofreading software, PerfectIt. Adrienne Montgomerie’s review of PerfectIt 3 in 2015 particularly made me drool. Well, my drooling days are over! Intelligent Editing has just released PerfectIt Cloud, the first version of PerfectIt available for Mac […]

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Standards Communication Task Force

PES in the Field: Raising (the Topic of) Our Standards

February 27, 2018 by Standards Communication Task Force | 3 Comments on PES in the Field: Raising (the Topic of) Our Standards

“I’m talking about making something less boring.” This was feedback from an Editors Canada member on a draft of the latest update to Editors Canada’s Professional Editorial Standards (PES). The 2016 update was a year-long process that incorporated feedback and comments from many members. When a draft of the new text was circulated for final […]

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Dwain Richardson

English Editing in Quebec: Local Realities — Quebec City and Area, and Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean

February 17, 2015 by Dwain Richardson | Leave a Comment

♪♫ À Québec au clair de lune. Comme il fait bon… ♪♫ On those first few words of Marius Delisle’s 1959 hit, I make my way to Quebec City and the surrounding area to find out how language professionals fare with English on a daily basis. Of the more than 700,000 inhabitants of the Quebec […]

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Abby Egerter

Keenness of Eye and Humble Pie, Along That Path Awards Will Lie

September 2, 2014 by Abby Egerter | Leave a Comment

In this instalment of our “Editors in the Spotlight” series, Abby Egerter interviews editor Jennifer Foster, who worked on the award-winning Dirty Science: 25 Experiments with Soil, by Shar Levine and Leslie Johnstone. Jennifer Foster has been editing for 17 years and freelancing for 10. However, book publishing is something of a new venture for […]

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Adrienne Montgomerie

Software for Editors

June 3, 2014 by Adrienne Montgomerie | 6 Comments on Software for Editors

The editing of words is well into the technological age now. While paper still exists, it would be surprising to find an editorial or production workflow that doesn’t involve computers. What programs are editors using? Editors I interviewed when writing the technology section for the third edition of EAC’s Editing Canadian English said this is […]

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Rosemary Shipton

What Should an Editor Be?

January 7, 2014 by Rosemary Shipton | 26 Comments on What Should an Editor Be?

We were nearing the end of a Stylistic Editing seminar — a group of about 30 people of varying ages and experience working in-house or freelance for book publishers, magazines, businesses or governments. A woman in the third row raised her hand: “In my work I’m the only editor,” she said, “so I don’t really […]

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Karen Virag

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

August 15, 2013 by Karen Virag | Leave a Comment

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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Iva Cheung

What does your markup say about you?

March 19, 2013 by Iva Cheung | 5 Comments on What does your markup say about you?

A friend of mine was venting to me about his old boss, who used to look over his reports. Whenever his boss found an error, he’d not only circle it but also emphasize his discovery with an exclamation point—a practice that drove my buddy nuts. Encoded within this tiny mark of punctuation was his micromanaging […]

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