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Tables That Eat Grass and Crows That Fly Upside Down
In the book To Kill a Democracy: India's Passage to Despotism by Debashish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane, I came across this sentence...
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feathertouchediting
- Mar 8
Copyediting Is Problem Solving
The sentence (suitably disguised for confidentiality) stopped me in my tracks: "The absence of pregnancy and lactation may explain the...
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 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
- Oct 15, 2021
Negative Connotations
Twelve years ago, I emailed a friend, congratulating him on his impending marriage. A few days later, we spoke, and he questioned my use...
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
- Jun 8, 2021
Indian and British English: A Handbook of Usage and Pronunciation
In a previous post (on researcher name coincidences), I mentioned Indian and British English: A Handbook of Usage and Pronunciation by...
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...
feathertouchediting
- Apr 23, 2021
Too Much Innovation
For many years, we used 3M storage products for data backup in the company where I worked, and I always thought there was something wrong...
feathertouchediting
- Mar 21, 2021
Researcher Name Coincidence
Humor and academia are an unlikely combination, and I didn't think they could coexist until I read Academia Obscura: The Hidden Silly...