A blog about editing, writing, and the world of publications, from Dragonfly's senior editor, Samantha Enslen.
Well, wordie types everywhere must be quivering with excitement. The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition, has just been released! Woo-hoo!
And, guess what? It’s blue. Blue, people! Not orange. Can you believe it?
OK, anyway, here is a handy list of the most significant rule changes in the new guide. I’m glad to see the Chicago editors now recommend lowercasing web and website – though they still recommend capitalizing Internet and World Wide Web. Though we don’t say that much anymore, do we?
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You can use these tags to search through the jungle of Twitter to find posts relevant to writing and editing. The authors note that “#amediting” is used to label posts about editing; “#amwriting” to label posts about writing. Many more are listed in the blog.
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Just sharing a few thank you’s received from clients this week. Seriously - we work with the best folks ever. Even under the tremendous deadlines of writing proposals and deliverables, they take time to thank us for our small role in the process.
Our mash notes this week have ranged from happy:
Thanks so much for your and the team’s effort to help us get all of these documents edited and delivered to the client. The client has been very pleased with the work, and you and your team share in any praise we receive.
To apologetic:
Unfortunately for Sam and Amy, they should remember me from our previous work reviewing and editing about 50+ resumes that I kept sending to them in bursts of 3-5 with terribly quick turnarounds. They were very helpful and patient with me, so hopefully they’ll bear with me again this time.
To simple:
Hi, Sam . . . thanks for all of the great work today!
I’m so grateful for all of these comments from our clients. Knowing that they understand and value the work we do inspires us to work even harder.
Posted in I love my clients | no comments »
I’ve long felt that most proposals are written in a style that’s at once stiff, boring, jargony, dense . . . nigh on unreadable. Every proposal seems to contain the worst of business writing distilled (or usually expanded) into one mind-numbing document.
This article suggests that proposal writers instead employ the best of business writing in their props — writing that is conversational, direct, and passionate. Writing that has personality, and that tells a story.
Here at Dragonfly, we edit literally hundreds of proposals every year. In 15 years, I’ve yet to see one written in such a style.
Now that would be a key discriminator.
[Note: For you non-proposal-heads out there, "key discriminator" is proposal jargon for the cool aspects of your company that set you apart from your competitors.]
Posted in Proposals and the people who love them | no comments »
All of our very sweetest clients are in Germany.
We recently helped one such customer proofread a very messy 300-page document. Apparently the document had been edited at some point but still contained a ton of errors that were discovered only after the document had been composed.
Here’s our client’s response. Mind you, this is from a very senior executive.
Many thanks for helping out on this task so quickly! That is highly appreciated! I went through the reports in more detail and really liked your work!
1 million thanks!
Now, that’s just sweet.
Dear client, 1 million thanks for the opportunity to help!
*****
p.s., Here is the same client’s feedback on a small follow-up project done a few days later:
Great! Thank you! Great job and very fast!
I’ll say it again: that is one suh-weet client!
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I was tickled to be featured this week in Wendalyn Nichols’ Copyediting Tip of the Week. This email newsletter is sent out every Monday to subscribers of Copyediting.
Last week, Wendalyn asked readers to weigh in on the topic of whether publishers should continue to set acronyms in small caps. Apparently, this used to be done regularly as a way of signaling to readers that a certain term was an acronym (e.g., RADAR, pronounced “ray-dahr”) as opposed to an initialism (e.g., DOD, pronounced “dee-oh-dee”).
She summarizes her question thusly:
Last week I put the question to you of whether the practice of setting acronyms in small caps to show they should be pronounced as names should be done away with. I gave two reasons for considering this step: (1) the argument that long acronyms look terrible set in full caps is undermined by the fact that some initialisms, which are set in full caps, are longer than some acronyms; and (2) readers are more likely to perceive the small caps as a mistake because they don’t know the reason for setting them that way in the first place.
In her follow-up column this week, she was kind enough to include my two cents on the topic:
Wendalyn, probably wisely, did not include my final comment on this topic: acronym versus intialism? Who the h**l cares?
I know that suggesting copyeditors stop making a certain change “because no one cares” is a potentially dangerous road to go down. What lay reader, in all honesty, really cares whether we switch out a “which” for a “that,” or an “is comprised of” for an “is composed of”?
But my overall philosophy of copyediting is to keep in mind that we shouldn’t make changes just because “we’ve always done it that way.” That instead, we need to be attuned to changes in usage and be willing to change our editorial approach if we determine that a certain rule has become hopelessly passe, clunky, or pointless.
If we don’t do this, we risk being perceived as cranky old obstructionists, slowing down the editorial process and being subservient to rules for the sake of rules — rather than rules for the sake of readability.
Posted in Editorial style, Freelance editing | no comments »
Hyphenation is apparently changing along with many other elements of style and wondering what tracks everyone is following. One trend seems to be dropping hyphenating all together as in “oped,” and “antihyphenation,” the latter of which bothers me. Undoubtedly, “drop the hyphen” emerges from texting and tweeting and other shortened communication venues, but how far should that go?
Thoughts, opinions, anyone?
Here’s my response:
You are correct that the rules of hyphenation do change over time, and are changing. However, you’ve got to have a baseline standard to follow in order to ensure consistency in your editing. I recommend choosing a dictionary and a styleguide to follow as first and second references, such as Merriam-Webster’s 11th or Chicago 15th.
Then, if you want to develop a house style for a particular client that closes up some words that MW would leave open — such as “lifecycle” or “decisionmaker” — you can specify that in the house guide.
If you work for forward-leaning clients, or those involved in the IT industry, I would certainly take the lead in recommending that they close up some terms that MW leaves open — thus “website,” instead of MW’s stodgy “Web site,” or “email” instead of “e-mail.”
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I was helping a colleague edit a document on U.S. Navy policies this week, and talking with her about which style guide we should follow — GPO, Chicago, or AP.
Then, lo, a brief online search revealed . . . the U.S. Navy Style Guide! Who’d a thunk it?
Interestingly, the guide advises readers to use the AP Stylebook rather than GPO as a secondary reference. We tried this, but found that many Navy-specific terms, such as shipbuilder or linecrew, weren’t address in AP but were in GPO.
Thus, our style took a winding road: we looked first at the U.S. Navy Guide for style guidance, then at AP, and then at GPO.
Somehow it all worked out. Because ultimately, which style you choose is less important than making sure that a style — any style — is implemented consistently across your document. And that’s what we did.
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Project manager Amy writes to say that she found a unique spellout for “FTP” today in a technical document we were editing: “Filet Transfer Protocol.” (For those of you who don’t know, FTP actually stands for File Transfer Protocol, and refers to the transfer of data from one computer to another.)
Great catch, Amy! Just another example of helping our clients look like superstars instead of dorks.
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Here’s what he has to say:
Thanks for your response! The appeal succeeded in taking GMAU3 from #4,000 on Amazon.com to a high of #280. It was #1 in dictionaries for a time, and #3 in editing resources. And the book received a good deal of positive attention as a result. Many thanks for your support. Now what the major chains will do is perhaps still a ticklish matter . . .
Good luck, Bryan! We’ll continue to buy the book direct from Oxford if needed . . . but here’s hoping that Amazon continues to carry it as a result of this grassroots push.
Posted in Bryan Garner, Usage | no comments »
“I’ve worked with the staff at Dragonfly for years, and I trust their editing completely. We’ve used them on federal proposals, commercial proposals, IT documentation, marketing collateral … you name it. They are especially helpful on large projects, when we need a team of editors to get a lot done in a short timeframe. They also have great writers who can handle everything from white papers to case studies. Dragonfly is our editorial dream team!".
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