The Expert Editor has been editing academic papers, books and business documents since 2012, and we have been writing here since 2013. The blog answers practical questions writers face before and during an edit: What is the difference between copyediting and proofreading? What does a manuscript assessment look at? Which kind of edit does a draft need? We explain these things as we would to a client—plainly, specifically and with the needs of the draft in mind.
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Ask someone to list the punctuation marks in English and you'll get commas, periods, semicolons, maybe a colon if they're paying attention. What ties all of those together is the instruction each one carries. A comma tells a reader to slow down without stopping. A period tells them ...Read More
Here is the contradiction sitting inside one of the most commonly used words in English. "Literally" exists to do one job: to tell a listener that what follows is not an exaggeration, not a figure of speech, not a colorful way of putting things, but the plain truth. And ...Read More
I ask writers to do one thing before they send me a manuscript they think is finished: read it aloud, start to finish, in a room where they can hear their own voice. Most haven't done it. Some resist the idea outright — it feels theatrical, or slow, or beside ...Read More
Based on a common picture of dictionary editors as gatekeepers, they sit in judgment on which new words are legitimate enough to let through the door. The actual process runs the other way. A word doesn't get approved and then start appearing in print — it has to appear, repeatedly, ...Read More
Somewhere across the manuscripts I've turned back to writers over the years — a rough count puts it near forty, though I stopped keeping an exact tally a long time ago — a pattern eventually became hard to ignore. Almost none of them were rejected because the underlying idea ...Read More
Most of the manuscripts that cross my desk use one horizontal mark for three different jobs. A writer will hyphenate a compound, punctuate an aside, and indicate a page range with the same little dash, usually because their keyboard makes the shortest one the easiest to reach and ...Read More