The first printing of the new sixth edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, which I have yet to purchase, apparently has a good many errors, and those who peruse the APA web site won't easily find links to list of corrections. This article in the online magazine Inside Higher Ed contains links to pages on the APA site detailing the corrections, including corrections to four error-laden sample research papers.
Medical copyeditors and writers, have you seen the preview of the streamlined new PubMed interface? The details about the redesign are here.
Have a knack for grammar and know AP, CMS, and/or MLA style inside and out? Maybe you want to try copyediting. We mention this because not only does mediabistro have a bazillion copyediting courses coming up, but we just discovered a fantastically thorough and free resource for copyeditors and copyeditor wannabes at Katharine O'Moore-Klopf's web site. The Copyeditors' Knowledge Base is chock-full of reading material and examples, and it is free, free, free. Learn where to get formal training and/or certification, see sample letters to clients (a project estimate, a sample contract), learn about reference books to buy, and so on. ...
Please do spend some time perusing the information accessed through the Copyeditors' Knowledge Base. Whether you want to get into editing or are already an experienced editor, there's plenty of information you can use on industry basics, education and certification, business tools, editing tools, networking, finding work, and profession-related reading. It's my theory that there really is enough work out there for all freelance editorial professionals, if only we know where to look for it. And doesn't it make work life just that much easier and more pleasant if we help one another? copyeditor copyediting editor editing publishing Copyeditors' Knowledge Base EditorMom
[Here] is the Web site [with] information for the self-employed: [The MCTMT] applies to the five counties of the City of New York plus Rockland, Nassau, Suffolk, Orange, Putnam, Dutchess, and Westchester counties, for net earnings with $10,000 as the threshold point. (Below that figure, you don't have to worry about this.) The tax rate is .34% (.0034) of total net earnings within the geographic area listed above. That's $34 on $10,000. We are supposed to calculate this and make estimated tax payments starting on November 2, 2009. See the Web site above for all the details.
Today, September 24, is National Punctuation Day, a celebration dear to this copyeditor.
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Ed uses this trailer to transport equipment from his cabinetmaking shop and cabinetry when it won't fit into our van even with the back seats removed. Periodically, Ed has to replace sections of the trailer even though by this point in its life, most sections are made from less-likely-to-rot pressure-treated plywood—because sometimes it sits outdoors, holding tree and bush cutoffs from our yard until it's full enough to be emptied at the town dump, exposing it to rot-inducing dampness.
Hi, Katharine.
I cannot receive the editted manuscript. What's the problem with you? Please check up the process of my paper. Thank you.
Hello, C.
I started work on your manuscript today and should be able to finish the first round of editing tomorrow. I have had some emergency editing projects in the last few days, which required that I do triage on all of my projects. I apologize for the delay; it was unavoidable.
I understand that you may be unhappy about the delay. I am hoping that you are not angry with me.
Hello, Katharine.
I'm not angry with you. I apologize for the my poor expression. I will wait your reply.
I am very pleased. I like to keep my authors happy.
Scary news for copyeditors: The new sixth edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association brings back two spaces between sentences! See here, under "Chapter 4: The Mechanics of Style," on the page of the APA's web site that explains what's different from the fifth edition of the book:Punctuation—return to two spaces after the period at the end of the sentence recommended for ease of reading comprehension
Just when we'd gotten all our holdout authors trained to use one space, the APA goes and messes with our heads.
A good while back, I used the the "LibraryThing Blog Widget" to create a rotating mini showcase of the books I've copyedited over the years. I placed it in the sidebar of this blog. But the really exciting use for it didn't occur to me until just this week: I also placed a book widget on the main Projects page of my business web site. I used the "Advanced options" link on the widget-creation page at LibraryThing to tweak the colors and type used in the widget for my web site. I really like it on the Projects page because it's something visual amid all the text there and so it brings to life the lists of clients there. I don't want visitors to my site put to sleep by too much text.
I'm on Twitter, I use Ping.fm, I use Twhirl, I have a web site, I have a blog, I subscribe to numerous RSS feeds through a feed aggregator ... but I am not sure exactly what it is he wants. Do any of you know?
I am not on Twitter, I do not use Ping or Twhirl, I do not have a web site (though I do have a blog), and I do not subscribe to numerous RSS feeds. I am starting to wonder why so many people do. ... So ... am I shooting myself in the foot? Are these communication options offering people a significant upturn in work opportunities or enriching their professional and personal relationships? Are these, in fact, today's Tools For Success?
What my business web site, blog, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn do for me is give potential clients more arenas in which to find me. And find me, they have—in droves. I am perpetually busy; I haven't had a work dry spell in years now. Now, it helps that I've been freelancing full time for nearly 15 years and have 25 years' experience, so I'm well established. But if I were well established and less visible, far fewer clients would find me. I ask new clients how they found me, and they've found me through my web site, my blog, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. They've also found me through the online member directory of the Editorial Freelancers Association and through the online directory of Copyediting-L freelancers. They've found me through my ad on the web site of the Council of Science Editors.
I simply do not want to close off any avenue through which potential clients find me. I wasn't fond of the feast-or-famine roller coaster (to mix metaphors) of my early years as a freelancer. The absolute only way to get off that roller coaster is to constantly be doing marketing, whether your desktop is empty or piled high with projects. And the various social media venues make it much easier for me to market my services: I don't have to get on the phone and talk with people I've never met and who might not want to talk with me because they don't know me, I don't have to prepare snail-mail marketing letters, and I don't have to get all dressed up and meet potential clients in person.
At the moment, I'm incredibly grateful for those venues, because my family very much needs all the income I can bring in. The recession has made my cabinetmaker husband's wealthy clientele sit on its money, so the only income he's bringing in right now is from a low-paying part-time job as a driver for a grocery-delivery service. It isn't that he hasn't been looking for fuller employment, either. He's about to turn 48 and has 25 years' experience in his profession, as I do in mine. No one wants to hire someone whom they think has "too much" experience, because they think he'll demand high pay or won't work well with younger, less experienced managers—and they won't even give him a shot to see whether their prejudices are true. Without additional income from him, we are in danger of foreclosure on our mortgage. But because I am constantly booked with work, we can still pay all our other bills, including expensive health-insurance premiums, with my income alone. Except for our mortgage, I am nearly single-handedly supporting a family of four, no mean feat on New York State's Long Island.
So yeah, I'll spend the time necessary each day to maintain an active presence on multiple forms of social media, but I try not to let the process take up too much time.
The value of RSS feeds? Blog posts and news stories on topics I'm interested in come to me, saving me valuable time because I don't have to go hunt them down, one by one. I'll use all the time-saving devices I can find. I find it extremely helpful to my business to keep on top of information about industry trends. If' I'm out of the loop on major events and trends, I can't prepare for changes in my industry and will likely be less able to attract enough work to keep busy through every industry sea change.
Don't even get me started on Twitter, which strikes me as egotism run amok.
been encouraged to subscribe to are riddled with cute kid stories, pining for happy hours that are hours away, and cute back-and-forth—in other words, life as Facebook-status update.
Twitter is a tool that universities use to let their students know about emergency conditions. It's a tool that people used today [July 30] in Texas to let people in the area of Texas A&M University know that if they hadn't heard already, they should evacuate the area because a large chemical plant was on fire and could be explosive. It's a tool that professors use to communicate online with their students. It's a tool that one town used to update commuters with BlackBerry devices regarding traffic snarls during a major event. It's a tool that medical journals use to draw in more readers, which could be seen as bad because it's a kind of advertising, but when journal staff members tweet, they often post headlines and links to quite helpful medical research—that's how I found out recently that the brand of insulin that I take just might be linked to increased rates of cancer.
E-mail can be abused, as it is by spammers. That doesn't make e-mail bad overall. Blogging can be abused, to cast aspersions on others or to impart misinformation. That doesn't make blogs bad overall. Facebook users can post inane and boring stuff; that doesn't mean everything posted to Facebook is valueless. Some, like me, post information there about their industry that others find helpful. And others use it to make contact with people they haven't seen in decades, which can be life-changing.
Once upon a time, the typewriter was seen as a bad thing because it lured women away from home (gasp!) to work in offices. But the world did not end because lots of women used typewriters. TV could be seen as evil, I suppose, because some of the shows on it are mushy oatmeal for the brain and the ads try to sell people junk they don't need. But it does have good uses: news coverage, broadcasts of political debates, broadcasts of classical or jazz music concerts ...
A tool is just a tool. And people don't have to use any particular tool if they don't want to. No one's forcing anyone to use Twitter or any other social media tool. But please don't tar all users of a tool with one broad brushstroke. We're not all egotistical or stupid or boring.
If you're a medical editor—and even if you're not—and are interested in following some biomedical journals on Twitter, here is a list of which ones are there.
Katharine, I want your editing. My concern is the quality, not the time. I will wait.
This is a tale of damnable, ridiculous book-cover racism by a publisher."... This week Bloomsbury officials have switched course. 'We regret that our original creative direction for Liar—which was intended to symbolically reflect the narrator's complex psychological makeup—has been interpreted by some as a calculated decision to mask the character's ethnicity,' Bloomsbury officials said in a statement to [Publishers Weekly]. 'In response to this concern, and in support of the author's vision for the novel, Bloomsbury has decided to re-jacket the hardcover edition with a new look in time for its publication in October. It is our hope that the important discussions about race and its representation in teen literature continue. As the publisher of Liar, we also hope that nothing further distracts from the quality of the author's nuanced and accomplished story, and that a new cover will allow this novel's many advocates to celebrate its U.S. publication without reservation.' ..."
You can read the rest of the story in Publishers Weekly here.
