Blimey – it’s nearly Christmas, and I haven’t written anything for a whole month … how on earth did that happen?

Well it’s not something that I or any other freelancer am likely to regret, for the simple reason that I’ve had plenty [ read more ]

My business planning approach is woeful – many of the projects I work on are so prone to slippage or re-allocation that I have given up planning further than a week ahead. Spending time analysing work rates on a spreadsheet does not [ read more ]

Have you encountered a scholarly publishing organization or product that you thought was particularly impressive and demonstrated outstanding quality, creativity and innovation? If so, then you can nominate them for an EPIC Award, a new programme launched by the Society for Scholarly [ read more ]

One for the book nerds – check out this little nugget from ‘CMOS Shop Talk’, comparing and contrasting editorial style used in book publishing in the 1700s and modern Chicago style, using Fielding’s ‘The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling’ as an [ read more ]

June Casagrande’s ‘Grammar Underground’ is always a good place for finding clear, well-explained posts on the correct usage of grammar and idiom, and as someone who always doubts their own ability to give advice to others about grammar, I was tickled by [ read more ]

I love language and the way in which we use words.

I also love the sea, and everything in it and on it.

I grew up a few miles from Portsmouth on the south coast of England, which is steeped in royal naval history [ read more ]

I sometimes think that the peerless John McIntyre and I were separated at birth, so closely aligned are our editing brains. I have long privately lamented the death of the use of ‘that’ to maintain clarity before a dependent clause, and JM [ read more ]

OPTIMAL EDITORIAL SERVICES IS 3 YEARS OLD TODAY!

I became a freelancer because I felt I had nowhere else to go. I didn’t want to carry on climbing the greasy pole of promotion in fulfilment of the Peter Principle, and I’d had my [ read more ]

As discussed by Jaime A Teixeira da Silva in an article in September’s ‘Science Editor’ (https://www.csescienceeditor.org/article/detection-and-elimination-of-tortured-phrases/), it’s no secret that academic publishers are gradually cutting copyediting resources. However, they are doing so at their peril, given the growing ubiquity [ read more ]

It’s been a simmering issue for a while, but in the world of scientific journals, the insistence on manuscript submissions complying with a dense and ever-growing list of formatting and document structural requirements is now being seriously questioned, as Claire Neumann, Director [ read more ]