To me, part of the beauty of a comma is that it offers a rest, like one in music: a break that gives the whole piece of music greater shape, deeper harmony. It allows us to catch our breath (Pico Iyer). This post gives the comma its due regard and highlights its...
(Note: The first part of this article introduced helpful resources for various dictionaries and general copy-editing.) A book can contain many elements besides solid blocks of type. ... It is the editor's job to make all these elements work together to present the...
No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft. HG Wells A passion it may well be, but altering ‘someone else’s draft’ also requires more than a mote of know-how. Now, that know-how does not necessarily all have to be crammed inside our...
The following post is an extract taken from Consistency, Consistency, Consistency: The PEG guide to style guides written by John Linnegar with Paul Schamberger and Jill Bishop. Publishing houses’ style guides establish house rules for language usage, such as spelling,...
What are trade books? Trade books probably have the largest market in comparison to other types of book. That’s because they are intended for a general readership and cover a variety of genres: biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, self-help, business, mystery,...
This article appeared under the same heading in PEGboard July 2019. From time to time, PEG receives requests for a reader’s review of a book before it is sent to a publisher. The article sets out a basic framework for carrying out such a task. The guidelines below are...
Who is at the heart of the New Hart's Rules? Helena Opperman tells us his story. His gloves were neatly folded on the shore; his body was found floating in Youlbury Lake near Oxford. It was 9 October 1916 and a few months into the third year of the First World War....