Imagine being an IMAX screen cleaner: you’d spend hours every day sucking the dust off the giant screens so we in the audience can get the full, vertigo-inducing effects of all the action. As a professional mattress jumper, you would,…
If you are an editor, you likely have an opinion about whether political correctness is a force for good or evil, and will have fought your own anti-bias battles against certain words and phrases. Sociologist BJ Gallagher contends that “While the original…
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…
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…
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…
When it comes to exercising your command of English grammar and usage in public, are you a respected but restrained and constructive source of knowledge … or a boorish, bullying show-off? What’s the difference between being helpful and being insufferable?…