’Tis the season for spooks, so what better time to talk about zombie rules? First, a little background. The term “zombie rules” was coined by Stanford linguistics professor Arnold Zwicky in a 2005 blog post: In the process of dissemination,…
When I was a kid, I was certain I’d be a writer. I wrote constantly: poems, stories, plays, cartoons, newspapers, magazines (including the cover and fake ads), and novel beginnings—many, many beginnings. I didn’t care about quality or completion. I…
It seemed like a straightforward announcement from a body that is rarely in the public eye. On March 22, 2016, the Policy and Standards Division (PSD) of the Library of Congress (LoC), the national library of the United States, issued…
marathon: (n.) A long-distance running race, strictly one of 26 miles 385 yards (42.195 kilometres). A long-lasting or difficult task or activity; an endurance contest. Al Howie: The short warm-up run ahead of a very, very long outing. During a…
As editors, we regularly make style sheets for our clients, documenting the decisions we’ve made about spelling, capitalization, and so on that aren’t covered in the larger style guide we’ve been directed to use. Sometimes clients actually ask us to…
In March, mature coastal Douglas-firs are 12 months into their 17-month reproductive cycle. March is the time of pollen making, and in April the pollen-bearing cones burst and pollination of the seed cones begins. Pseudotsuga menziesii was first discovered on…
T.S. Eliot wrote that April is the cruellest month. To my mind, January on the West Coast runs a close second. Even though we’re past the winter solstice, the hours of darkness still exceed the hours of light, and the…
As editors, we know the power of choosing the right words to get a message across to readers. As readers ourselves, we see how words can change people’s perceptions: are the thousands of people on the move “migrants”—or are they…
Although I’ve been a writer and editor for almost 30 years, most of my work has been outside the book publishing world, and I’ve never worked in-house. So when I pitched a children’s book idea to Orca Book Publishers a…
Indexers, like editors, regularly run into people who think human indexers have been replaced by computers. “Doesn’t Word have an indexing function?” they ask. “Can’t it index the book I’ve just written?” Those same people might also ask, “Why do…