In honour of my 200th blog post here, I’m posting an archive of the other 29 that didn’t make on this blog yet. With this one, that means the count is up to 230 now. As for podcasts, I’ve done 27 episodes and have two more drafted — they’re part of this blog count. There are another 35 blog posts drafted in the cue on this site, and another 24 cued or drafted for my How To and Canadian, Eh? columns on Copyediting.com. Just in case you were wondering.
Below is a list of my posts that made it onto Copyediting.com before I thought to “archive” them here. And since I now search my site quite often to find older posts, I need to have these in the database.
Errata | Fees | Genres | Legal
2014-01-15 Should an Editor be a One-stop Shop? —
As the editorial processes collapses, clients are expecting editors to do all passes and stages of editing. Some editors have to code manuscripts and design layout too. Should an editor be skilled in all editing tasks or is specializing the best path to quality?
2014-01-08 Upton Scholarship Open — EAC’s bursary for a Canadian student of editing
2013-12-18 Award for Excellent Canadian Editors — EAC’s recognizes outstanding editing with the annual Tom Fairley Award for Editorial Excellence
2013-12-11 Queen’s U Offers Full-Credit Editing Course
2013-12-04 Practice vs Practise: Can’t we get along?— Are prescriptivists fighting an ill-informed battle when it comes to enforcing two spellings of practice in Canadian English?
2013-11-20 Certification for Copyeditors, Proofreaders, Stylistic and Structural Editors — Editors in Canada can get their skills certified through a series of four exams via the national professional association.
2013-11-06 Giller Prize Goes to Short Story Collection, Where are the Editors? — The font type often gets credit on the copyright page. Why do editors accept less respect than the font demands?
2013-10-16 Thanksgiving and Other Signs of Fall in Canada — uniquely Canadian vocabulary roundup for fall
2013-10-02 Coca-Cola’s Bilingual Faux Pas: Pardon My French — Coca-Cola’s bilingual bottle top gets lost in translation, offends English audience.
2013-9-25 The Legend of Québec’s War on Apostrophes — There never was an apostrophe in our favourite coffee shop’s name
2013-9-24 Commas and the Restrictive Clause — Some examples are restrictive, so shouldn’t be set off by commas.
2013-9-04 Canadian Copyediting Plug-ins for MS Word — Review of PerfectIt’s new MS Word add-ins to help you adhere to the vagaries of Canadian spelling and style preferences. These cover CanOx, Gage, and The Canadian Style.
2013-8-21 HTML for Copy Editors — This post focuses on how you can learn HTML, rather than explaining what it is. It accompanies a more instructive article I wrote for the print version of the Copyediting Newsletter.
2013-7-31 Editing in Two Tongues — The search for bilingual editors is on, but is that a false economy?
2013-7-24 Canadian Cultural Reference Points — Tim Hortons IS Canada, I argue here. And I didn’t hear any backlash, either. Double, double!
2013-7-16 Canadian, eh? — My very first post for Copyediting.com, introducing the weekly column.
Genre
2013-9-18 Advice for SciFi Copyeditors — Beyond learning the author’s preferences, knowing your tropes is essential to copyediting genre fiction. Advice from Robert J. Sawyer.
2013-10-30 Do vampires wear snow suits? Advice for spooky editors — Fantasy and horror present special challenges to the copyeditor and proofreader.
On Errata
2013-8-07 Error rates in editing — No one is perfect. In fact, there are a few studies that say that spotting 95% of typos and other indisputable errors is about as good as any human can get. Presumably spotting homonyms and other usage errors is even harder. I later expanded this post into a podcast. This post got over 17,200 reads in just over a year. It hit a nerve.
What’s your save percentage?
2013-9-11 How many errors trigger a reprint? — Precious few. And they don’t seem to hurt sales for most genres. Non-fiction being one possible exception; but that doesn’t include cookbooks.
“Oh, for heaven’s sakes, a few typos never hurt a novel’s sales!”
2013-11-06 Editor Sins, an anonymous confession Tumblr — Editors know they are imperfect too. Come see the lighter side of editors and unburden yourself anonymously.
Fees
2013-8-15 Talking Fees with Colleagues — Sometimes you seem to be in a tug of war with colleagues over rates, each racing to the bottom. This one was expanded into a podcast episode as well.
2013-8-28 Rate Setting Shortcut for Editors of All Kinds — This quick-and-dirty calculation will help you find the hourly rate in your market, and for your level of experience. The expanded podcast version of this is popular as well.
2013-10-29 Pricing a Project, a guide for copyeditors and other editorial professionals — Still throwing darts at a price chart when the phone rings? Try this book from Melanie Thompson.
Legal Issues
2013-10-09 Copyright Changes in Canada — Will users’ rights and the burden of proving financial impact take the teeth out of copyright law in Canada? Fourteen legal scholars weigh in on last year’s five copyright cases in the Supreme Court of Canada.
2013-11-26 Was the Beastie Boys song used fairly in that ad? A fair dealing test for editors and content creators
2013-10-23 Libel for Copyeditors in Canada — Flagging libelous statements is a task for every kind of editor but where does responsibility end?
