In this post, Louise Bolotin* talks about her experience of trying to revive her editing business after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic wiped out her work. Like many freelancers, I was hit hard by the pandemic. 2020 started well enough, including a huge two-month project for a Commission. But in the week before we […]
Commas can be very useful little additions in our punctuation arsenal but they can also be intensely irritating. Luke Finley discusses using commas with conjunctions and independent clauses – an insertion that can raise questions and even arguments. When I looked at commas in the July/August and September/October 2017 issues of Editing Matters, I warned […]
By Katherine Kirk When Janet MacMillan, our Cloud Club coordinator, told us she had organised a virtual visit from the Subversive Copy Editor herself, I almost fell off my chair. As our excitement grew, my friends sent in questions for Carol Saller. I may have spent the entire Zoom call grinning mutely like a star-struck […]
By Andy Coulson Accounts are a fundamental part of your business, but like many people, I loathe doing them. For a long time, I’ve used Excel and an accountant to deal with mine, but have been exploring accounting packages for some time. I experimented with FreeAgent, which offers a discount to CIEP members, and found […]
By Tim Curnow Following on from Lynne Murphy’s recent focus paper about global Englishes, the CIEP information team asked if I’d write a piece about my native variety, Australian English. Of course, Australian English is spoken by around 25 million people over a huge area, and there are some small regional differences, but much less […]
By Andy Coulson This issue of The Edit has a theme of working efficiently, so let’s take a look at how we can persuade every editor’s favourite tech tool to work efficiently. 1. Keyboard shortcuts Keyboard shortcuts are a great little time saver. Think about what you do when you use a mouse – you […]
By Cathy Tingle It’s Tuesday. I was supposed to write this blog yesterday. According to our COVID-19 routine, on Mondays my husband runs ‘school’ for my two children, aged 7 and 9. But yesterday the kids were particularly restless. They didn’t want to do the tasks set by their teachers. The younger one kept interrupting […]
By Robin Black Working in the shadows of nearly every project, editors could do with a bit more public understanding. ‘We don’t have much of a budget,’ invokes the client, though I wonder about companies that don’t have the budget to be good. Who sets a budget to be bad? Show me a copy-editor and […]