The Art of Copyediting Blog

Summary

This blog recommends a combination of standard Word shortcuts and a few basic macros (with recommended shortcut keys) to help a copyeditor navigate efficiently within a Word window and edit with a clear focus. This involves a one-time set up and may benefit both new and experienced editors....

A typical daily copyediting problem

A question that some students had asked me off and on came to my mind. It was about using (or omitting) a comma before the conjunction but. We all know that we'll have to look at it on a case-by-case basis. But to explain this I needed to have a bunch of (prefera...

Back in the days when I learned copyediting, we worked on hardcopy manuscripts, and the world itself was spinning at a rather much lower pace. We didn’t have any structured training; we were taught some titbits here and there, had some definite do’s and don’ts, some style points for every journal—an...

Most people who use a Windows desktop or laptop use the File Explorer (earlier called Windows Explorer) for file management simply because that's what comes inbuilt with Windows. Something comes with the PC and people use it for their day-to-day file management activities. Nothing wrong with that.

I want to take this course!

Many of us would have had this experience of having a college education and entering one of these professions that revolve around writing or editing—and then realizing that we're absolutely not ready to handle our work with confidence! This course, Essentials of Written ...

This blog is my response to an article shared by John McIntyre on Facebook and the comments there. My first instinct was to post my reply there, but I felt that my response was long and rather personal. So I decided to put it up as a blog here on my website and provide a link to it in that discussio...

Copyediting outsourcing to India

It was sometime between the late 1980s and early 1990s that the experiment to “outsource”—the term was not common then—editorial work to India began. Typesetting had been there for some years, and it was perhaps felt that copyediting too can be done in India, if the...