The Copyeditor as Word Detective: Using Lookalikes and Soundalikes to Crack Word Puzzles
During the course of their work, academic copyeditors often meet strange words. An online search with keywords drawn from the context of...
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sensitive editing + finishing touches = clear expression
Journal of an Academic Copyeditor
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- Feb 27
The Case of the Sticky Background
I'm not sure when I began to chafe at the white background in MS Word documents. I think it was when dark mode began spreading like...
- Oct 16, 2022
Copying Text with Tracked Changes in MS Word
I had to deal with this problem when I copied and pasted a chapter from a book into a new document, only to discover that the tracked...
- Oct 13, 2022
The Case of the Line That Would Not Go
A misplaced horizontal line in an MS Word document I was editing had to go. The problem was that it stubbornly dug its heels in and...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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),...
- 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...
- 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...
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