The question at hand rarely needs to be asked. You are working for, and getting paid by, the house that assigned the manuscript to you. Of course. But at the same time, you’re working for the mscript and the person who wrote it. You can’t help becoming some kind of advocate for the mscript in...Continue reading

My wife just finished reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I didn’t know anyone still did that. I tried, years ago, which is how she came to find it on my bookshelf. Previous to that, I’d pointed her toward Buddenbrooks, which by then I had read twice and enjoyed, and it turned out so did...Continue reading

English is a creole language, a mix of Saxon and Latin – “The multitudinous seas incarnadine / Making the green one red” – with some foreign spices added (goulash, ketchup). Plain English mostly means Saxon English, and the words tend to be shorter and punchier. They can be overused – just not in the mscripts...

Some of the of the strongest pushback from authors I’ve ever faced is over the term world view, which gets heavy use in the social sciences. Oxford has it as two words, Webster as one. I follow Oxford, mainly because it’s usually the house dictionary. Hell consistently breaks loose when I add the space. Gad,...Continue reading

The two aren’t the same. Writers are lucky to get published. By definition, an author is someone who, yes, is being published. Yet being an author doesn’t make anyone a writer, if by writer one means someone who has well-honed skill with, or heaven-bestowed gift for, written language. In fact, most authors aren’t natural writers...Continue reading

There’s a heat wave this week. I’m getting too old for those. My office is under the roof of this house, and it bakes. So I’d better keep this instalment short and take it mostly out of stock.This is my instruction to authors, when it’s left up to me:“Simply key your changes directly into the...Continue reading

No self-respecting CE would ever lobby for a mention on the acknowledgments page. Most of us are ambivalent or would prefer not to be mentioned. Add to that, most authors don’t really understand our job, even after they have seen what we’ve done, and aren’t the best judges of a copy edit, so praise from...Continue reading

If writing in French is an art, and in English it is a craft, then in German it is an applied science. German grammar is strongly rule-bound, and that mindset seems to get transposed onto English when German speakers are writing in it. A few years ago I was surfing a wave of German authors...Continue reading

Let’s see how tight I can keep this. Every sentence has a subject and a verb. Dogs bark. Cats purr. Most sentences also have an object. Most cats have fur. Sentences have spines that way. Almost everything else in a sentence is some kind of modifier, which can be a single word. Collies have long...Continue reading