Category: General

I’ve been asked to handle a structural edit (SE) often enough, but I’ve never had the sense that the house that is asking for one actually knows what it wants, except that it’s more than a CE. You’ll find plenty of definitions of a structural edit online, all saying roughly the same thing, but remember...Continue reading

This will be a short post. There’s too much I could say about the subject at hand, so it will be a two-parter. It doesn’t happen much up here, but I’ve seen it happen south of the border: a wealthy alumnus makes a large donation in the expectation – earmarked on the cheque, visibly or...Continue reading

I’ve had a Web master redesign my main website, matthewkudelka.ca. You can now enter this blog through a portal there. The pandemic A Friday night in March my wife and I went out for our anniversary dinner. Talk was of a coming pandemic and possible lockdown. We chose not to think about it yet, or...Continue reading

I considered the question earlier of whether a CE is working for the author or the house. Basically it’s the house, because it’s the house that is paying you. But here I would add some nuance to that. If you are a carpenter building a table for a client, you’re working for the person who...Continue reading

Mechanics as I mean it here is a catch-all for everything besides grammar and syntax that a copyeditor is expected to address. To start with, every publisher is going to have a style sheet for you to follow, and a CE will be expected to keep the text in that lane or show good reason...Continue reading

What usually happens is that I carry out the CE and send it to the author for review (usually routing it through the ME). The author gets the review back to me ahead of time, thanks me quite happily and presents a couple of quibbles, which I bow to with equal goodwill (unless he’s black-letter...Continue reading

Any experienced ME will tell you that every copy editor leaves their own fingerprints: a preferred sentence construction, a specific way of handling commas, and so on. Every copy editor also reaches for favourite words, which in my case include encompass, purview, especially, posit, and regarding. I can’t help myself. I simply think they sound...Continue reading

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...