(With a nod to How to Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell. I did not like the self-illustrated book but I loved the DVD.) You can make it easier to find files on your computer or smartphone if you structure your filenames according to how you are going to use...
There has been considerable debate in professional editing circles regarding the limits and boundaries of the editor’s role. According to Lozano (2014: 363), ‘correction or editing services [is] a practice that is openly endorsed by many journals and scientific...
One of the many questions on our members’ lips nowadays is ‘Why accreditation?’ This blog attempts to answer this question by highlighting its numerous benefits. Raising professional standards Fundamentally, accreditation aims to raise professional standards of...
In my previous blog post, we looked into the role of editors and proofreaders in trade books. I pointed out that there is more to editing than just fixing spelling and grammatical errors. There are different types of editing, and each serves a purpose. For first-time...
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,...
Social media is the new normal with regard to business. In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the POPI Act and its impact on direct marketing, and the need to establish an online brand, social media marketing has become an essential...
Developing a presence on the world wide web is crucial for freelance success. One of the best ways to market yourself as a language practitioner is by optimising your LinkedIn profile. The following basic principles can help to set you apart from your competitors: A...
In this fourth article in the series on social media marketing (SMM), I consider the questions: Content or paid SMM? What platforms should I consider? Again, I refer to the Digital 2022 Global Overview Report by DataReportal/We Are Social/Hootsuite as I delve...
In this third article in the series on social media marketing (SMM), we look at some of the basic data that relates to SMM and digital marketing (DM), the broader area of marketing in which SMM fits. For the purposes of this article, let’s assume that you have been...
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 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...
This article appeared under the same heading in PEGboard July 2018. Time | Quality | Price Prompt delivery (time), excellent standards (quality) and affordability (price). As editors, this is what we want to deliver and it's what clients of editing services should...
This is an extract taken from The PEG guide to grammar and punctuation (2018) by Myf Steynberg. Grammar is the greatest joy in life, don't you find? - Lemony Snicket 'Grammar' is the term used to cover the rules or conventions of English usage that help us to...
In this second of the two-part article on marketing and (social media marketing) SMM for editors, the focus will be on the social media (SM) landscape in South Africa, as at end 2020. In my previous PEGblog post, I defined social media marketing (SMM) within the wider...
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...
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. - Nelson Mandela Happy International Mother Language Day! We use language every day to communicate with each other, but our mother...
In this first of two articles, I will try to situate social media marketing (SMM) within the wider marketing discipline, after situating marketing within organisations. However, I will strip everything down to the bare bones and provide sound-bite type information...
On 11 December 2021, PEG held an online workshop, attended by 30 wordsmiths, on the subject of editing the genre of fiction. It was also the pretext for officially launching PEG's latest guide, Editing fiction, authored by Máire Fisher and Nella Freund, with the...
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...
