When I taught business writing, I found many participants grew weary of the “do-the-exercise-discuss-with-your neighbour” training model. Because the course covered a range of strategies for page fright, I hoped that at least one of them would stick. Enter collage…
There are two reasons to toast October 13 this year: it’s Thanksgiving here in Canada, and it’s also International Plain Language Day. Though most Canadians will celebrate the former, few have even heard of the latter. Why is that? After…
Earlier this summer, editorial blogs and the editors’ corner of the Twitterverse focused on “Weird Al” Yankovic’s music video “Word Crimes,” with its list of grammatical errors and its condemnation of those benighted individuals who make them. Everyone from the…
I love my work…except when I don’t. I love that I get paid to read, to work with words, and to collaborate with talented professionals to produce something meaningful. I love the tactile component of editing: consulting reference books, working…
Like other professionals, editors do interesting things when they’re not at their desks. In my “spare time,” I keep honey bees. Now, editing and beekeeping aren’t always the perfect combination. For example, the bees will inevitably swarm just as you…
Delete, search, replace, revise, revise, revise—changes and corrections are so easy with our electronic tools. But what if your words were literally cast in stone and you wanted to change them? Cemeteries are sometimes called “gardens of stone” and the…
After 66 years of comic strip life, Rex Morgan M.D. is welcoming an editor into the soap-operatic world that revolves around his medical practice. This gratifying development follows a storyline about domestic violence that saw Buck, Rex’s friend from high…
Like witnessing the demolition of a derelict building, there’s something splendid about seeing a false language idol topple. And topple it did when the Associated Press Stylebook announced in March that it’s now okay to use “over” interchangeably with “more…
These days the discussion about busyness, that long-lauded work-ethic virtue, doesn’t focus on how to become busier (most of us could write the ebook 10 Ways to Achieve a 16-Hour Work Day… if only we had time). Rather, the new…
In his new grammar and style guide, For Who the Bell Tolls, David Marsh of The Guardian newspaper offers a host of suggestions for navigating the ever-changing grammatical peals of the English language. He recommends, for example, not fussing over split infinitives, conjunctions…