Category: Editing

June 14, 2012

Take My Commas—Please

Most editors are probably familiar with the rule that commas should be used to set off nonrestrictive appositives and that no commas should be used around restrictive appositives. (In Chicago 16, it’s under 6.23.) A restrictive appositive specifies which of a group of possible referents you’re talking about, and it’s thus integral to the sentence. […]

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Editing, Semantics 7 Replies to “Take My Commas—Please”
April 18, 2012

Grammar and Morality

Lately there’s been an article going around titled “The Real George Zimmerman’s Really Bad Grammar”, by Alexander Nazaryan. I’m a week late getting around to blogging about it, but at the risk of wading into a controversial topic with a possibly tasteless post, I wanted to take a closer look at some of the arguments […]

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Editing, Grammar 7 Replies to “Grammar and Morality”
December 23, 2011

Which Hunting

I meant to blog about this several weeks ago, when the topic came up in my corpus linguistics class from Mark Davies, but I didn’t have time then. And I know the that/which distinction has been done to death, but I thought this was an interesting look at the issue that I hadn’t seen before. […]

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Editing, Usage, Words 3 Replies to “Which Hunting”
October 12, 2009

Not Surprising, This Sounds Awkward

The other day at work I came across a strange construction: an author had used “not surprising” as a sentence adverb, as in “Not surprising, the data show that. . . .” I assumed it was simply an error, so I changed it to “not surprisingly” and went on. But then I saw the same […]

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Editing, Prescriptivism, Usage, Words 7 Replies to “Not Surprising, This Sounds Awkward”
July 13, 2008

Logography

This is a subject I’ve wanted to write about for quite some time, but the recent movie WALL-E has reminded me of the issue once again, and that is this: some people seem to think that logos are the ultimate guide to the orthography of some names. Now, Bill Walsh has already covered this topic […]

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Editing 7 Replies to “Logography”
June 2, 2008

Numbers and Hyphens

Recently I got a letter from my phone company informing me that my area code will be switching to 10-digit dialing sometime next year. Several times the letter mentioned that we will have to start dialing “10-digits.” It was very consistent—every time the numeral 10 was followed by the noun “digits,” there was a hyphen […]

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Editing 9 Replies to “Numbers and Hyphens”
February 4, 2008

How I Became a Descriptivist

Believe it or not, I wasn’t always the grammar free-love hippie that I am now. I actually used to be known as quite a grammar nazi. This was back in my early days as an editor (during my first year or two of college) when I was learning lots of rules about grammar and usage […]

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Descriptivism, Editing, Prescriptivism, Usage 7 Replies to “How I Became a Descriptivist”
January 2, 2008

Source Checking

In my current job making day planners, I get to read a lot of quotes. I don’t know who decided that day planners needed cheesy motivational and inspirational quotes in the first place, but that’s just the way it’s done. One of my tasks is to compile databases of quotes and to make sure everything […]

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Editing 4 Replies to “Source Checking”
August 5, 2007

Grammar quiz

From time to time, websites such as MSN and Yahoo challenge their readers to quizzes on grammar, spelling, and punctuation. These quizzes are often written more to stump than to educate, so the questions are worded in confusing ways, and the answers are masked in vagueness to the point where even those who know the […]

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Editing, Grammar, Usage, Words 7 Replies to “Grammar quiz”
January 2, 2007

Editing Chicago

Those who have worked with me before may remember that I was once nicknamed “The Index to The Chicago Manual of Style” (or just “The Index” for short) because I always knew where to find everything that anyone needed to look up. I’ve always been a fan of the big orange book. It is so […]

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Editing, Grammar, Rants 7 Replies to “Editing Chicago”
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