Blog
How One Technical Editor Champions Clarity and Good Rapport with Writers
By Mike Maisen Marcy McAuliffe has always stood out. In my 15 years as a technical editor, I can say she is one of the rare editors who veers into the extrovert side of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. She was hired as an on-call editor at my company to edit some of our biggest and most high-profile technical reports. On our work…
Read MoreHow to sell your boss on sending you to an ACES conference
By ACES Staff You know you’ll come away refreshed and recharged, but how do you convince your boss that you need to attend an ACES conference? Here’s a cheat sheet for talking through the typical concerns: We’re understaffed; we can’t lose you for that long. The ACES conference is a chance for inspiration with extraordinary editors…
Read MoreFor translation editors: Four practices for maximizing your value
By Stephen Jensen TLDR The problem: Translation editors face a unique problem within the editing profession: clients who judge quality based on the features of another language. Structural and stylistic differences between two languages, such as Japanese and English, can be vast. And when a client is unfamiliar with those differences, they are less likely…
Read MoreAdventures in business planning: Best annual retreat ever!
By Julie Willson A few months ago, I held my first-ever annual business retreat. It was a jam-packed week of planning, strategizing, and hundreds of sticky notes. I had been meaning to do it for years, after being prompted by edibuddy Melanie Padgett Powers to do so. And it was AMAZING. But why I would…
Read MoreImpostor Syndrome: The unwelcome guest at the party
By Erin Roll Tell me if any of these thoughts sound familiar to you: “I’m not really any good at this job.” “I just landed that plum editing assignment out of sheer dumb luck.” “When people praise my work, they’re just saying that to be nice.” “It’s only a matter of time before people figure…
Read MoreIndexing Basics
By Heather Pendley Indexing is a form of writing—probably the only form of writing in which the goal is to get the reader out of your creation as soon as possible. A criterion of ASI’s (American Society for Indexing) annual indexing competition requires an index to bring together references to similar concepts scattered in the…
Read MoreHelp, citations are killing me!
By Erin Brenner Citations can be the bane of a copyeditor’s existence. Whether one author writes them or multiple authors do, copyeditors are often left to fill in blanks and apply a style where none exists. Theoretically, writers are responsible for writing complete, properly formatted citations. Editors should only have to do a light edit,…
Read MoreDiminish imposter syndrome by following the three “C’s” model
By Christine Steele I have felt imposter syndrome (IS), also called imposter phenomenon, since I started my editing career more than 20 years ago. I always wondered why I had felt this way, because I thought I was a pretty good editor. I regularly attended ACES conferences to attend relevant workshops, read books on grammar…
Read MoreWrangle footnotes into place with Note Stripper
By Adrienne Montgomerie The file was in a right hot mess. Cue editing stage sub-1: panic. The publisher wanted end notes created using Word’s built-in End Note feature. Numbering was to restart with each chapter. The author submitted this: Footnotes numbered using Word’s feature, but with no content in the linked footnote area at the…
Read MoreOnline citation and bibliography software: A journey from nemesis to hero
By Dawn McIlvain Stahl It’s the rare academic work or corporate report that isn’t missing a name, date of publication, or page number in at least a handful of references. So as copyeditors edit bibliographies, we often fill in or ask authors to provide missing pieces of information. Formatting references in our pet styles becomes…
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