Resources

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…

By Andy Hollandbeck The adverb too, as common and as useful as it is, can also be a source of irritation for editors. As an intensifier meaning “excessively” or “more than necessary” (“Oh that this too too solid flash drive would melt!”) it doesn’t lead to many problems except in its overuse. But when it’s…

By Molly McCowan No matter how a prospective client finds you (personal referral, search engine, networking event, etc.) it’s your responsibility to make sure you’re a good match. The biggest rule in freelancing—and one newbies often break—is “trust your gut.” You don’t want to end up with a problem client, and take it from me:…

By Crystal Shelley Every writer and editor has their own working process. When I first started editing, I would open a new Notepad file before I began working on a new manuscript. As I would progress through the edit, I made note of every character name and location I came across, as well as any…

By Adrienne Montgomerie A picture is worth a thousand words but is a fuzzy picture worth any words at all? Unless an editor is also a photographer or production staff, the only time they are likely to run into image resolution details is when previewing an image or making an image request. DPI VS PPI…

By Mike Pope and Jed Hartman At Google, we produce a lot of documentation for software developers. We have hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation for Google Cloud products, Android, Google Maps, and other technologies. You can imagine the challenge of trying to make all this text consistent and to make it sound like it comes from one company. The best tool we have for this challenge is the Google developer…