Blog

By Andy Hollandbeck The word person, which, when you focus on its plurals, presents a few unusual considerations. These days, the standard plural of person is people. Native English speakers might not even realize, in the larger scheme of things, how odd this is. Person and people don’t even have a common etymology! Person stems from…

By Brit Stamey While for many winter can conjure up images of decorated pine trees, houses covered in lights, and even snowy locations, this idea is largely based on a Northern-Hemisphere-centric, Western, and Christian ideal of the winter season. Talking about “winter holidays” groups many varied and unique celebrations. This article aims to describe a…

By Eloise DeHaan Every copyediting field has its own special words. My field is medical copyediting, and I edit reports about healthcare that are written in an academic style featuring many clinical terms. I watch out for special typos as I edit reports about new medical treatments. A drug regimen can be transformed into a…

By Erin Brenner Here’s a work situation that can be a bit unnerving: You copyedit feature articles for an online publication. Generally the managing editor (ME) does a developmental edit on the article and then sends you the article for copyediting. Your latest copyedit comes back to you with list of 17 problems and the…

By Jill Campbell Language around mental health has come a long way. In the past, medical professionals and the general public commonly described people with mental health conditions in stigmatizing terms we no longer use. As editors, we can honor and further that progress by using conscious language to avoid defining people by their conditions.…

By Adrienne Montgomerie Publishing departments are on a production schedule; if one editor isn’t available when they need them, they call the next editor on the list. Yet, some editors have waiting lists full of projects. How do they get the deadlines to move? Well, for one, these editors have “clients”—boss, writer, or coworker—who prefer…

By Vee White Last fall, I was part of a Zoom meeting with a group of other medical developmental editors discussing how our roles seemed to be metamorphosing. Some of us were experiencing loss of work and felt opportunities seemed to be disappearing. Others saw our roles expanding with new and exciting opportunities. But we…

By Mark Peters Misspellings are everywhere. It’s annoying, particularly for editors, to see someone write loose when they mean lose, but something totally different is going on when a tweeter types wut (what) or welp (well)—or refers to Murrica (America) and President Obammer. These aren’t mistakes; the intentional misspellings are words in their own right…