While I was doing my usual setup for editing, I wondered whether other people knew about the usefulness of Draft view for documents you are not editing. If you follow the instructions in this post, it displays in a monospaced font like the old typewriter fonts...
PEG’s website has a nifty visual and FAQs, presumably for clients, which explains the difference between a proofread and an edit. I realised recently that, as editors, we may need to check our understanding too. In this blog, I share with you my thoughts on the...
A controversial concept I recently came across a social media post that unsettled me. The person who posted claimed that academic writers would benefit from training by popular fiction writers. The poster found the dense academic prose difficult to understand. This...
Did you know that odd-numbered pages should always be on the right in a printed book? Unfortunately, when Word shows two pages in Print Layout view, the odd-numbered pages are on the left and the even-numbered page is on the right, ie Word does not show the correct...
Shortly after I started editing seriously, I told a friend what I was doing and he asked, ‘Don’t you find it lonely?’ I was surprised by the question, because that hadn’t occurred to me, and he was surprised by my answer: ‘No.’ In this article, I share my personal...
I remember the first time I received cruel feedback from a client. I’d been freelancing for a few months. Although I could see the client was belittling me because they were confused by the tracked changes, their brutal words hit like a gut punch, leaving me unsure of...
At the last quarterly gathering of the PEG Gauteng group, the topic of discussion was ‘Conscious and inclusive language’. One member offered a novel solution to the problem of language that excludes – try to not be so sensitive. In response, I owned that I’m...
Question: I'm editing a document with many headings and sub-headings, only some of which have been taken up in the automatically created Table of Contents. How do I apply or remove the formatting that determines whether or not a heading is included in the automatic...
For around only SEK1 500 a year it is possible to subscribe to the artificial intelligence (AI) editing services that some reputable journal publishers offer nowadays. This seems like a brilliant way to save time and money on language editing services. But just how...
Reference list A reference list is a list of the books and other items referred to in a scholarly work, typically printed as an appendix. It can be in alphabetical or numerical order, and should give the author, title, date and source of the referenced items in enough...
Question Heléne van der Westhuizen asked: Are accurately, precisely and exactly interchangeable and are there context/nuance differences to be mindful of? Answers Oxford Dictionary Our Oxford dictionary defines the words by each other, which is not helpful in this...
Cripple, dumb, spaz, spastic, midget, crazy, invalid, handicapped, moron, idiot, retarded, deaf-mute, deaf and dumb, stupid, Mongol … these are only some hurtful terms that inconsiderate people use to refer to people with disabilities. Frequently used when...
To omit the label and number from a List of Tables or Figures in Microsoft Word, go to References > Table of Figures. The Tables and Figures dialog box pops up. Untick ‘Include label and number’ at bottom left in the dialog box, as shown below: Published on: Oct...
Sometimes you need to remove your name from Track Changes after you have already made corrections. Go to Review > Compare > Compare. Browse for the original document and the revised document. Select the name you want to ‘Label the changes with’ (eg Editor, as...
Paula is the colleague we got to know in the August 2014 issue of PEGboard as a writer of fiction as well as an editor. She now lives in Portugal, is an ATE and specialises in engineering. What life changes have affected your editing since August 2014? Changing jobs...
The word "sanction" has two seemingly opposite meanings, and it belongs to a category of English words called contronyms. A contronym is a word with two meanings that happen to be the opposite of each other. It is actually a word with a homonym (another word with the...
You can insert an emoji into emails and computer text by pressing the Windows key + a period (dot/full stop) and then selecting it from the popup panel. Published on: Oct 11, 2024 at 08:54 32 words
Nothing happens until something moves (Albert Einstein) Work slumps happen. But sometimes they go on a little longer than we’d like. This happened to me recently and I had to make something move. Armed with determination and the need to survive, I embarked on an...
I think the difference between redundancy and tautology is the following: Redundancy Redundancy is careless repetition, without any stylistic or rhetorical meaning, that can be seen as a thoughtless language error or stylistic fault. Think of the following: absolute...
I am not a digital native, I am not even a digital immigrant – I am an undocumented digital foreigner. I get daily reminders of this whenever I go onto the internet. A modern CV Let me explain. A while ago, Alexis Grewan suggested we form a PEG group to assess one...