A cog to the writer’s wheel
Copy-editors are not here to alter your book’s integrity. Your style – your tone of voice – remains intact. If your book is intentionally sprawling,…
Letting the train take the strain
About eight years ago, maybe a little under, an English writer living in Western France got in touch. He had spent half a decade researching…
Advantage: Northerner
The way I pronounce ‘no’ in English gave me a massive advantage when I moved to Spain. I can’t imagine how difficult it would’ve been…
On bohemians and puritans
A LinkedIn poster has becried countless errors in a novel by the recipient of multiple PEN America awards.The post’s author firmly placed the blame squarely…
Innateness
There’s a popular online game doing the rounds. Created by Monsieur Benjamin Tran Dinh, the Metro Memory Game has become an instant hit. You can…
Tense stand-off
Is the sentence in the image correct? As is often the case, it depends. This is my fitbit, and fitbit is a US-owned consumer electronics…
This is not copy-editing
Some years ago, I was hired as the British-English copy-editor for a vastly wealthy multinational after a lengthy and complex test.You know the company. The…
Living through lockdown
Distant trains metallically clickety-clack Sheffield-bound on the Peak District line, or smoothly thrum to Manchester Piccadilly on the TransPennine line. It’s named Branch Street Allotments…
Nit-picking
❓Who would have thought there was a common arthropodic thread running through the world of hair-splitters❓ Pedantry is tiresome to others, but it is a…
Hiring a professional copy-editor versus editing your own work
A first-time author asked what changes I would make to improve her novel. Here was my response: Hmmm, how can I help? Well, with the…
Hiring a freelance copy-editor
The advantages of commissioning a sole trader I’ve been mulling the merits of engaging a freelance copy-editor over employing the services of an editorial consultancy.…
Grammar nerd/nazi: a classic misnomer
Friends say I’m a grammar nerd, yet grammar plays such a minor role in editorial decisions. By far the greatest number of changes a copy-editor…
Pain and pleasure
It was with equal parts excitement and terror that I moved north, after spending almost exactly half my life in the south. The first example…
Rude
We each have talents. Stuff we’re really good at, subjects at which we excelled at school. Subjects we didn’t have to study because their content…
Pronunciation prejudice
Today’s news declared that northerners should modify their accents (http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/may/12/trainee-teachers-from-northern-england-told-to-modify-their-accents). We’ve been here before. Being a northerner, I have come up against this prejudice since…
Contractions and possessives
This short article concerns neither the labour ward nor jealous spouses. It’s about apostrophes. Apostrophes are tedious, insignificant, fiddly punctuation marks, right? Well, no, they’re indicators that…
Are you alienating customers?
Lax grammar, misspellings and shoddy punctuation cause confusion in some instances (the man eating tiger/the man-eating tiger) and feelings ranging from alienation to distrust in others. Let’s…
A brief lesson on publishing terms
Words that until the popularity of the home computer were the preserve of the printer are nowadays bandied about with nary a thought for their derivation.…
Free agent, rudely interrupted
Having recently undertaken a four-week in-house commission, after nine years freelancing, now is an ideal time to assess the pros and cons of these two…
Top tips for students
Read the question very carefully. Answer the question. Write a short introduction – explain what you will be discussing. Let it flow – on the…