Feather Touch Editing

This is a wonderful story from the People's Archive of Rural India about a bookseller who cannot read. Selling books is not just a trade for him, it's a mission to empower his people, largely illiterate tribals whose "innocence" has been exploited for decades. He learns about interesting books from those who can read, and selects only those that move him. Prospective buyers at his stall are treated to capsule oral book reviews. https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/articles/the-boo

Last year I was editing a report for a major international consulting organization. There were several co-authors, and the review process involved several rounds of evaluations by external subject matter experts. The document came to me after this. A few days after beginning work on this massive report, I made a discovery that stunned me. There was a spelling mistake in the title of the report! I had, of course, read the title more than once while working on the document, bu

This should not happen, because Word automatically renumbers the remaining footnotes if a footnote is deleted. I have experienced this many times. However, recently, I deleted a couple of footnotes, and the remaining ones were not renumbered. I was worried, because footnotes and endnotes in Word are vulnerable to corruption. I had to get to the bottom of this at once. I Googled the problem The search turned up an article by a well-known figure in the Microsoft Word world, All

This email from Better World Books is the most creative letter I've ever received. I was smiling from ear to ear by the time I got to the end. The journey will certainly be "fraught with peril." (My dear friend, did you consider perilous and reject it? No? Never mind. After some time here, you'll find yourself thinking on these lines. And, yes, you will need a dust jacket. This is the Tropics, you know. Heat and dust.) I remember a book my brother sent me from the US that did

I spend a lot of time Googling while editing; it's an integral part of working with scientific material. To speed up the search, I use Paul Beverley's GoogleFetchUS() macro: I select the search text in Microsoft Word and fire up the macro with a keystroke combination (ALT-G in my case). The macro opens a Google page with the search results in a new tab of the default browser. Very convenient! Editing life science material laden with genus and species names involves heavy Goog

Shot on July 8, 2015.