feathertoucheditingMar 8 Copyediting Is Problem SolvingThe sentence (suitably disguised for confidentiality) stopped me in my tracks: "The absence of pregnancy and lactation may explain the...
feathertoucheditingMar 6The Mainstreaming of the Word "Shit" in Personal Transformation ParlanceThe book I was editing was about personal transformation for corporate managers. The author was a well-known coach. The language was so...
feathertoucheditingMar 5Creative Titles in Scientific PapersIn my post Researcher Name Coincidence, I quoted from the book Academia Obscura by Glen Wright: As part of a long-running bet, five...
feathertoucheditingMar 4The Difference between "Sum" and "Summation" in Mathematical WritingThe difference between summation and sum should be clear enough: summation is the process of adding, whereas a sum is the result of the...
feathertoucheditingFeb 28Incident in an Editing OfficeOn a hot afternoon many years ago, a trainee editor walked in with furrowed brow and deposited the following offending sentence in my...
feathertoucheditingDec 18, 2021Spelling Errors in Titles and HeadingsLast year I was editing a report for a major international consulting organization. There were several co-authors, and the review...
feathertoucheditingDec 11, 2021When Automatic Footnote Renumbering Fails in WordThis should not happen, because Word automatically renumbers the remaining footnotes if a footnote is deleted. I have experienced this...
feathertoucheditingDec 9, 2021The Book That Wrote Me a LetterThis 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...
feathertoucheditingDec 8, 2021The Serendipitous Pleasures of Work-Related GooglingI 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...
feathertoucheditingSep 15, 2021The Case of the Sticky FigureIt seemed simple enough. The style called for figure captions to be placed above figures (in fact, they were even called figure titles),...
feathertoucheditingAug 24, 2021No Carelessness Until There Is a CureThis is a terribly worded public health message that seems to be spreading like a virus: it is now appended to routine SMSs from public...
feathertoucheditingAug 5, 2021A Period Never Follows an Exclamation Mark: An Exception to the RuleDouble punctuation is ugly, but unavoidable sometimes. For example, it appears in dialogue: He said, "I try to avoid double punctuation."...
feathertoucheditingJul 25, 2021The Case of the Jumping CursorI edit PDF documents using Acrobat Reader DC, a free tool. It generally works flawlessly, but which complex piece of software is bug...
feathertoucheditingJul 4, 2021The Case of the Jumping TableThe deadline was near, and I had to copy a table the author had sent into the main document. A routine task—except that the table would...
feathertoucheditingJun 19, 2021Agent Ransack for Multi-Folder Search: A TutorialThe books I edit arrive as separate Word files, one for each chapter. I cannot recall ever receiving a book as a single file. For one...
feathertoucheditingMay 7, 2021The Atomic TypoThe typo is the bane of the copyeditor. However careful I am, I'll invariably find a handful during my final read. It could be an extra...