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Good Goods at Yale Rep is the real goods
Yale Rep is a little like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates. “You never know what you’re gonna get.” Well, that’s not entirely true. It is a repertory company, after all, and you can pretty much assume...
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Logical punctuation
This post is about commas, periods, and quotation marks. If you are already stifling a yawn, just move along.In the United States, commas and periods go inside quotation marks, regardless of logic....
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To be honest . . .
I shouldn’t have to tell you this. Your parents should have taught you that honesty is the best policy. But maybe you forgot, or maybe you just suppressed it because it was hard to implement.But if you...
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Sproin-n-n-n-n-g
March 19: PG AzaleaMarch 20: AndromedaMarch 21: Forsythia; flowering quince budded with a couple flowers openOh my, this is early.
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Book design is no laughing matter. Okay, it is.
Knopf book designer Chip Kidd’s TED talk
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Why it's important to work with native speakers of the language you intend to...
I am sitting in a hotel room in Trieste, which is at the moment in Italy, although it is walking distance to Slovenia and has flown many flags over the millenia, including its own as an independent...
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Bulgarian ignoble; Cleveland fusty
One of the strategies spammers use to get past Bayesian spam filters is to include, in their hidden text, lists of infrequently used words. The unedited list below from such an email contains gems of...
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Kind words from a client
Dear Dick,Although I am usually a careful researcher before I make a major move, I called you to help me compose my book on no more than instinct. What a great decision it turned out to be. I had an...
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New interview on self-publishing
Tom Santos, one of the most active members in the Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association (CAPA) has a regular slot on his community access television station. He interviewed me in September,...
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Where in the world is the Press Democrat
I am exhausted from an all-weekend training seminar and therefore not in a civil mood toward anyone and shouldn't be posting at all so maybe you should just delete this before reading it as a kindness...
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Instructions to authors who think an Excel worksheet is a table
Well, it has been a very long time since I posted anything, and for that I sort of apologize. I guess my allotted social networking time has been absorbed by Facebook. However, in a conversation on the...
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Printers, publishers, and . . .
Earlier this morning, on a mailing list, someone trying to sort out a list of printers began to ask a question by positing "There are many, many on-demand book printers/publishers online, some with...
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Jargon as shibboleth
Yesterday, a colleague, a man who was trained in the law in his native England and has lived in Israel for many years, no dummy he, asked in an editing forum about the meaning of something he read in...
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A framework for thinking about book typography
While typography evolved from classical and medieval roots, the modern body of knowledge that forms the basis for best practices in commercial (keyword that I'll get to in a minute) book typography...
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Evoking an era in type
As typesetting technology has evolved over the centuries, the practices of compositors have evolved as well, both in response to advances in technology and in response to economic forces. Any...
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Making a point. Or three points. Or an ellipsis.
Someone asked a question today on Facebook, in an editing group, about a particular use of ellipsis points. The question had to do with whether there should be space before or after the ellipsis in...
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Switching hats, changing gears, taking your meds
Dear certain particular author (if this doesn't apply to you, then it doesn't apply to you),You have decided to publish your book yourself. Great. I'd love to help you do that. Please understand,...
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What you should expect when you ask for editing
In a discussion on Facebook, a new editor said that in a copyediting course she had taken, the instructor was a strict prescriptivist about grammar. She wondered how strictly she should enforce the...
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Mycelia of hatred
I've been thinking (always dangerous, I know). A common metaphor for hatred, bigotry, and discrimination of all kind is that a wind-borne seed falls on fertile ground and sprouts and blossoms. Another...
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Standing type
I lost track. I produce an annual directory. As directories go, it's not large—under 300 pages in 6″ × 9″ format. But I was looking forward to splashing a diagonal sash across the cover bragging that...
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Judging a book by its . . . no, not just its cover
For most of my life, the public was willing to trust experts—in whatever field—to render judgment on what was better or worse (an argument, a product quality, an artistic work). The zeitgeist has...
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The lowly speech tag
I think it's time for a general reconsideration of the convention around commas and speech tags. I'm sensing some grumbling among the ground troops (fellow editors), and I think it may be time for some...
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Comma—chameleon
This is a brief technical essay for editors. Writers are free to listen in.Why do we argue, er, debate, er, discuss commas so often? Why do we mostly all agree about one comma and have widely...
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BLOG MOVED
My website was getting gray around the temples, but now I have a spiffy new one, and you can find any newer blog posts there, if I get around to writing any.
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