feathertouchediting
Copyediting Is Problem Solving
The sentence (suitably disguised for confidentiality) stopped me in my tracks: "The absence of pregnancy and lactation may explain the...
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feathertouchediting
- Mar 6
The Mainstreaming of the Word "Shit" in Personal Transformation Parlance
The book I was editing was about personal transformation for corporate managers. The author was a well-known coach. The language was so...
feathertouchediting
- Mar 5
Creative Titles in Scientific Papers
In my post Researcher Name Coincidence, I quoted from the book Academia Obscura by Glen Wright: As part of a long-running bet, five...
feathertouchediting
- Mar 4
The Difference between "Sum" and "Summation" in Mathematical Writing
The difference between summation and sum should be clear enough: summation is the process of adding, whereas a sum is the result of the...
feathertouchediting
- Feb 28
Incident in an Editing Office
On a hot afternoon many years ago, a trainee editor walked in with furrowed brow and deposited the following offending sentence in my...
feathertouchediting
- Dec 18, 2021
Spelling Errors in Titles and Headings
Last year I was editing a report for a major international consulting organization. There were several co-authors, and the review...
feathertouchediting
- Dec 11, 2021
When Automatic Footnote Renumbering Fails in Word
This should not happen, because Word automatically renumbers the remaining footnotes if a footnote is deleted. I have experienced this...
feathertouchediting
- Dec 9, 2021
The Book That Wrote Me a Letter
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...
feathertouchediting
- Dec 9, 2021
The Serendipitous Pleasures of Work-Related Googling
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...
feathertouchediting
- Sep 16, 2021
The Case of the Sticky Figure
It seemed simple enough. The style called for figure captions to be placed above figures (in fact, they were even called figure titles),...
feathertouchediting
- Aug 24, 2021
No Carelessness Until There Is a Cure
This is a terribly worded public health message that seems to be spreading like a virus: it is now appended to routine SMSs from public...
feathertouchediting
- Aug 5, 2021
A Period Never Follows an Exclamation Mark: An Exception to the Rule
Double punctuation is ugly, but unavoidable sometimes. For example, it appears in dialogue: He said, "I try to avoid double punctuation."...
feathertouchediting
- Jul 26, 2021
The Case of the Jumping Cursor
I edit PDF documents using Acrobat Reader DC, a free tool. It generally works flawlessly, but which complex piece of software is bug...
feathertouchediting
- Jul 4, 2021
The Case of the Jumping Table
The 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...
feathertouchediting
- Jun 19, 2021
Agent Ransack for Multi-Folder Search: A Tutorial
The 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...
feathertouchediting
- May 7, 2021
The Atomic Typo
The 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...