Taking a philosophical turn on the editing and proofreading thing today. There are all kinds of tools that editors use to find inconsistencies in word usage or capitalization, punctuation, etc. that make a proofreading pass, for example, go faster. Since most of these tools are not available for the Mac operating system (the one I…
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The Virtue of Editorial Flexibility
When I first read this article on a conversation between novelist Donna Tartt and publisher/editor Michael Pietsch, I could definitely see Tartt’s frustration in dealing with editors in the past, which pretty much solidified her wish to stand out by rebelling against “the rules.” I’ll bet she does write readable, comprehensive prose, though, or she…
What is Book Shepherding?
As I’ve been expanding my skill set in the publishing process, I’ve been thinking about what to call what I do, and last year, the idea of shepherding came to mind. I’d been informally advising some self-publishing authors about that particular process and the basic aspects of editing that they’d have to go through, along…
Proofreading: Beyond Spelling
I’ve been working on a textbook update where the client wants “copy editing” over top of the new author’s changes to the text (!!!). A bit messy to look at a marked-up copy, but I’m getting through. Doing just copy editing on a PDF of the textbook rather than a Word manuscript does point up…
Freelancing, Yes or No?: Part 2
And now for Part II of my response to Michael Poh’s “20 Reasons to Say ‘No’ to Freelancing.” As I wrote in Part I, I found that Michael’s perspective was not always reflective of my own twenty-five years as a freelance book indexer, copy editor and proofreader. In this part, I’ll respond to Michael’s section on “self-traits,” as…
