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,...
What is a developmental edit? During developmental editing, the editor focuses on the ‘big picture’ of the story and makes recommendations to ensure a winning structure that will keep readers absorbed to the end of the book. This editing step can be done during an...
This challenging and often prickly topic has elicited a great deal of controversy. There are many editorial purists who do not see editing as a process but are prescriptive about what should and should not be done. They believe that a line is firmly drawn in the sand...
This article appeared under the heading To hyphenate or not to hyphenate: that is the (thorny) question in PEGboard July 2018. Judging by the queries raised on the PEG chat group, the humble hyphen seems to have a lot of explaining to do! In this post, I focus on its...
In the first post in this series, we defined professionalism and identified three criteria of being a professional editor. We discussed specific knowledge and skill in the second post and remuneration in the third. In this final post, we'll look at an ethical code of...
A good editor can add significant value to the quality of a thesis. In this edition of PEGblog, Jacqui Baumgardt tells us why and how. The worth of a thesis A thesis is the personal work of a student attempting to achieve a master's or doctoral degree in a chosen...
In the first post in this series, we defined professionalism and identified three criteria for being a professional editor. We looked at skill and knowledge in the second post. Now it's time to think about what it means to charge for professional editing and...
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....
Part two of a four-part series on professionalism. The first post in this series defined professionalism and identified three criteria of being professional. This post discusses the first criterion - specific knowledge and skill - within the context of PEG's Code of...
Ever wonder how to use colons and semicolons? In this edition of PEGblog, Lyn Aecer attempts to win over some editors to the use of these marks while they improve texts. This article appeared under the heading Colons and semicolons: More honoured in the breach than...