The Editing Hour Archives

Edit Yourself, Advanced Blogging, Bay Area Book Festival, and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

A few announcements: This week I have two classes open for registration—a six-week Advanced Blogging Workshop and a one-day Edit Yourself workshop. Also, in early June I’ll be teaching a one-day Successful Blogging class at Book Passage in Corte Madera (see below) and participating in a panel about writing communities at the Bay Area Book […]

Colons: Don’t Let Them Be a Pain in Your Ass

The Editing Hour is back today with everything you want to know about colons. First, eat lots of fiber to keep your colon clean and, if you’re over 50, consider getting a colonoscopy to test for polyps and colorectal cancer, and oh, wait … wrong type of colon! Let’s try this again.

I’ve always followed […]

When Should We Limit Literary License?

An interesting discussion took place over lunch here at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto last week. The topic: literary license. The talk was sparked by The Lifespan of a Fact, a book co-authored by essayist John D’Agata, who teaches at the University of Iowa, and his former fact checker, Jim Fingal, that was published by […]

5 Tips For Hiring The Right Freelance Editor

As a freelance editor and someone who has hired several freelance editors, I wanted to give my two cents about if/when/how you need to hire an editor. Anne Allen wrote a wonderful post about this topic Sunday as well. Be sure to check it out when you’re done reading this:

1. Do I need a […]

The Editing Hour: More Commonly Misused Words

If a person interested in food is a foodie, does that make us wordies? I’d say yes. And all you wordies out there may remember that I took a class at Editcetera called What’s New in Chicago 16 a couple of months ago, which outlined the differences between the 15th and 16th editions of The […]

The Editing Hour: What’s New in CMS 16

Like I mentioned in my last post, I took a class this week called “What’s New in Chicago 16?” For those of you who edit, or are at least familiar with the Chicago Manual of Style, you probably know that the sixteenth edition came out in August of this year. This is a big deal […]

The Editing Hour: Save The Em-Dash!

I bet you had no idea the em-dash was endangered, did you? Well, when Julia Scheeres commented on my post about semicolons that she loves to use em-dashes as well, I remembered having read a tweet that said the em-dash had gone out of vogue with flared jeans and peasant shirts. I was shocked. So […]

The Editing Hour: The Semicolon revisited

A quick note about semicolons. I’ve blogged about them before: how to use them to connect two independent clauses and alternatives you can use instead: a period and a capital or a comma and a coordinating conjunction, or FANBOYS. But what I didn’t say was use them sparingly. It’s tempting when you learn a new […]

The Editing Hour: Creative vs Academic Writing

When editing and critiquing submissions, the academic in me wants to copyedit every sentence until it’s grammatically and typographically perfect. That means, if I’m following the Chicago Manual of Style, I may want to add a comma before “and” in a series: “I love ice cream, cake, and pies.” Or I may want to make […]

The Editing Hour—More Mispronunciations

More mispronunciations!

Okay, here are a two I’ve been pronouncing wrong: era, pronounced “EAR-ra” not “AIR-uh” and “equinox,” pronounced “EE-kwi-nahks,” not “EH-kwi-nahks.” Also, “err,” is “UR,” not “AIR.”

This guy claims “eschew” is “es-CHOO,” not “e-SHOO,” but he also includes a lengthy letter from the pronunciation editor of Merriam-Webster on why they include […]

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