This is Jonathon Owen's Typepad Profile.
Join Typepad and start following Jonathon Owen's activity
Jonathon Owen
Recent Activity
The inability to separate copy editing from proofreading is one of the biggest problems we face where I work, I think. Proofreading here is basically just copy editing on a typeset page, which means that everyone feels free to make fairly substantial changes. It tends to draw out the typesetting process and introduce unnecessary errors fairly late in the process. So far my efforts to try to differentiate the two have been pretty fruitless.
Wannabe Editors: Can You Pass a Proofreading Test?
Photo: Seth Sawyers When my office hires at the entry level, there’s a proofreading and copyediting test. My preference has been to give the test in person, on paper. That levels the playing field by eliminating acce...
Amen.
How Sticklers Give Copyediting a Bad Name
Public sticklers have annoyed me forever, and I’ve been meaning to write about that, but recently in a post titled “Editors, Would You Do Me This Tiny Favour?” Katy McDevitt at PublishEd Adelaide did a great job of it herself. McDevitt gets to the meat of it in point 3: “It gives people the ...
Thank you so much for this! I've looked for a macro that could convert plain text to linked notes, but I could never find one. I already have a script that can do the same thing for InDesign, but this could save us a lot of time. I'll have to talk my boss into buying some licenses for our office.
So You Think You Know Where You’re Going?
Photo courtesy Erin O'Keefe Have you ever been put out of a cab after you waited forever and finally lassoed one and got in, and after sailing past a street where you would have turned (if you had been driving), you said, “Shouldn’t you have turned there?” and the driver slammed to the curb ...
Great post, Carol. Notes and bibliographies are a frequent problem, because they're often quite messy when authors turn them in, and Chicago, as detailed as it is, simply can't cover everything. I try to remind my coworkers that the overriding concern is citing references adequately so that they're clearly attributed to their respective authors and so that readers can track them down if they're so inclined.
You’ve Got the Power: For Good or Evil
Photo courtesy Frédéric Bisson Time and again, copyeditors ask me questions that leave me scratching my head. The question always amounts to something like this: “If I follow all the rules, nonsense and chaos will result. What should I do?” What is it about American culture, or education, or...
Carol, I believe Lea was trying to point out that you have an extra w in "snowcloning".
And for what it's worth, CMOS recommends plenty of rules that you have to puzzle over or research every time.
“Logical Punctuation” and Quotation Marks: In Defense of CMOS
I must admit I was taken aback by David Marsh’s blog post last week at Mind Your Language. In “‘The British Style’? ‘The American Way?’ They Are Not So Different,” he explains that British style for punctuating quotations is not as “logical” as popularly thought. Am I the only one who didn’t k...
Amen, LeaGalanter. A while back, one of my coworkers came across the phrase "raised the specter of a lawsuit" (or something close to it). Then she and another coworker started discussing what the phrase should be, and they settled on "raise the scepter" rather than "raise the specter."
I was both surprised and annoyed that, first of all, they weren't familiar with the phrase and therefore assumed that it was wrong and second, that they didn't bother to look it up in a dictionary or corpus or Google search and concocted an ill-informed miscorrection instead.
I think one of the most important skills a copy editor can have is to look up everything that they aren't sure of.
True Crime in Copyediting
To my regret, in a lather recently over copyeditors who waste time searching for rules that don’t exist, I failed to acknowledge something important in defense of the offenders: that is, how much credit they deserve for looking up anything at all. Our ignorance is a given. We all have vast defi...
Jonathon Owen is now following The Typepad Team
Nov 10, 2010
Subscribe to Jonathon Owen’s Recent Activity