How to be a good editor
We all spend time writing things, every day. We just don’t think about it, until things go wrong.
What can editors do for businesses? They can look at promotional material and make sure that is accurate, correct, elegant and spelled right.
Two style guides with which I have grappled: the Cape Times Style Book is the 1974 edition, while Do It In Style dates from 1995.
The Associated Press has cast a very big stone among the editing pigeons: they have changed their style and now say that “more than” and “over” can both be used to indicate a greater numerical value. This probably passed most of the world by, but in the editing world it is a very big deal (read more on that from the inimitable Grammar Girl).
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I am in two minds about Twitter’s decision to allow 280-character tweets. One the one hand, when only 140 characters were allowed, I often felt that I could do with just an extra few characters to get in an extra hashtag, or a telling phrase. And I think that the imposed brevity meant people often substituted a short hashtag for actual meaning, as seen here: Looking for inspiration during #NaNoWriMo2017? These classic authors have you covered.…
There are different kinds of editors, who do different things to text. Here’s a quick guide to the main ways something you write might be changed…
The world of the copy editor and proofreader is dense with detail, fraught with finickiness, complicated by comma rage.
Grammar – no one likes it. And no one likes people who correct grammar. But editors have to do it all the time.
