An editor’s job is to make the manuscript marketable, even if it’s at the expense of a writer’s wishes, right? Not necessarily! While an editor might occasionally ask you to “murder your darlings,” their goal is to bring out the best in your writing and they want your feedback even if you disagree. Here are six steps for having a productive disagreement with your editor.
Online curriculum is being produced at a higher volume than ever before, much of it being for consumption online through Google Classroom, school newsletters, and, of course, social media. Here are the four most common errors that we see slip through in curriculum editing.
There is one type of error that we see come up consistently across skill levels and genres, and that is run-on sentences. But what is a run-on sentence? How do you fix it? Can you ever get away with it? And where does a style guide like CMOS stand on making exceptions to the rule?
In this edition of Interview with an Editor, we check in with two of our editors who won NaNoWriMo and hear about their approaches to National Novel Editing Month.
Whether you’re creating character dialogue or quoting nonfiction, writing speech can be a difficult job to tackle. Should you use double or single quotes? Do you need a comma? Where do you put the ending punctuation? Luckily, The Chicago Manual of Style is here to help. From the many types of discourse to faltering speech, the CMOS is your go-to …
As a summer of major cultural upheaval, partly spurred by the untimely deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbury, and Breonna Taylor, and the subsequent protests over racial inequality, continue, those of us in the editing world must ask, what, if any, changes we must make in our own work. While other industries address racism and diversity in their own ways, editing has its own issues to grapple with.
Few aspects of grammar are as confusing as the comma. What does it do? Where does it go? As with most grammatical conundrums, The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) has all the answers.
The difference between colons and semicolons can be challenging, and it is not uncommon to see them used interchangeably and hence, incorrectly. Let’s dive into the unique uses for each punctuation mark.
Get ready for National Novel Editing Month this March with these tips, originally published on February 2, 2019.
Blame Downton Abbey or Kate Middleton’s beautiful wedding, or the fact that we owe over 1,700 English words to Shakespeare. Anglophilia (or love of all things English) is alive and well in much of the United States, and many British rules and styles have crept into common usage in our writing. Let’s take a look at some of the differences between American and British grammar, as explained by The Chicago Manual of Style.