I always get a good response to the Myths of Editing posts. This week, I’m hitting another myth: insisting on a distinction between over and more than. The myth Over should never be used to denote a greater numerical value. Instead, you should use more than. Sample sentence: We’ve been in business over 10 years. Knee-jerk editorial fix: We’ve been in business more than 10 years. The reality Over and more than can …
Dragonfly Guide to Style Guides
Next to a dictionary, an editor’s top resource is a style guide. Style guides dictate how editors should handle hyphenation, capitalization, and number style. They describe how to format elements like bulleted lists and reference lists. They even proscribe certain elements of spelling, grammar, and punctuation. But which style guide should be used for which type of material? This handy …
Samantha Enslen’s crooked path straight to success
It might have taken Dragonfly President Samantha Enslen a bit of time to find editing, but it was worth the wait. As a girl growing up just outside of Dayton, Ohio, Samantha had none of the doctor/firefighter/princess/veterinarian aspirations of her peers. Things weren’t much clearer when she headed off to The College of Wooster in northern Ohio, where she graduated …
The Enneagram for Editors
Perhaps you’ve heard about the Enneagram model of personality typing. Represented by a geometric shape with nine points, the Enneagram describes nine basic personality types, including their key motivations, fears, and tendencies. The Enneagram is coming more into the mainstream lately, with books, blogs, podcasts, and Twitter accounts exploring its ideas. Consequently, there are many online tests to help you …
2019 editorial conferences
2019 is shaping up to be a great year for editorial conferences. Here are just a few. Are you planning on attending any of these? We’ll be at the ACES conference in Providence, Rhode Island, and at the IABC Conference in Toronto! Date Place Name March 28-30 Providence ACES Conference 2019 May 8-10 Melbourne, Australia Institute of Professional Editors June …
Periodic table of copyediting
The ultimate guide to all things copyediting: from style guides, usage guides, and editorial associations to podcasts and fact-checking resources. You can download the PDF file here. You can also get it as a poster here. This post is part of a series featuring Dragonfly field guides, tips, and tricks. You can download the PDF file here. You can also …
Lessons learned and friendships formed: One Dragonfly’s professional journey
James Fraleigh is a copyeditor’s copyeditor. After a day of working on documents as a contractor, he’s happy to spend time reading books about editing, talking to other editors about the nuances and best practices of the job, and actively participating in online and real-world editorial meet-ups. And you thought you were dedicated to your career. The owner of a …
Editing adventures in the public domain
January 1, 2019, was more than just New Year’s Day this year. To researchers, educators, and artists everywhere, it was also “Public Domain Day”—the day on which every work published in the United States in 1923 entered the public domain. Novels, poems, music, paintings, and more from that year will now be publicly available in online archives such as HathiTrust and …
Myths of editing: never use a comma in the second part of a compound predicate
Being an editor is fun. If you’re like me, you love catching and fixing mistakes. But sometimes, we fix things that don’t need fixing, following rules that aren’t really rules. And sometimes, we want absolute certainty in our rules … when we actually have a little room to use our judgment. Here’s one of those cases. The myth If …
12 tips for crafting readable writing
Wouldn’t it be nice if readers dutifully read every scrap of our copy? Don’t kid yourself. They need information, and they need it fast. Your best bet? Create content that can be quickly scanned and that conveys your message unmistakably. You can download the PDF file here. 1: START WITH THE MOST IMPORTANT CONTENT Assume your reader will …