AI has changed the way academic writing is refined and polished. Tasks that once took hours can now be completed in minutes From an editor’s point of view, AI has changed the way academic writing is refined and...
It’s easy, when you are copy-editing, to get lulled into a sense that the words you are reading are as they should be. But the good editor’s motto is to take nothing for granted. An article on the News24 website made...
Editing is not just someone correcting mistakes in something you’ve written. It’s a dialogue in which the writer has a vital part to play … When I submit a quote for an editing job, it contains this sentence: ‘The fee...
A future with machines Should we be concerned about a future alongside AI? Does the future hold productivity gains or mass employment? We are only just starting to see how this new technology will affect our particular...
In my previous blog post, I told you why and how I use Draft view for the documents I am not editing. In this blog I tell you how I set up my screen for the document I am editing. Hiding headers and footers I start by...
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...
PEG’s website has a nifty visual and FAQs for clients, which explain 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Have you ever wondered what impression you make on potential clients when they first see anything about you, the editor? First impressions In Gauteng, a few of us were keen to find out a little more about making a good...
I still remember the first time it happened. I was standing in the foyer of the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town, waiting for my friends to join me. They were driving together and running late, but one was keeping me...
I’m sure we’ve all done the brainteaser where the word ‘the’ is repeated in print but when it is read out loud, invariably only one ‘the’ is read. Wordsmiths, however, being astute and wise to the ways of words, tend...
After studying and teaching science for 30 years, I thought I knew everything about Système International (SI) units. Turns out I didn’t. Editing has introduced me to a whole new, unsuspected realm of SI idiosyncrasies...