Posts about “Editing”
Nothing like a slip-up in bullet list formatting to completely change meaning. Check out this hilarious example from failblog.org:
Now that’s a major copy-editing FAIL.
I was trying to figure out how many people are reading my writing/editing and the numbers are pretty huge. First of all, I’ve been writing for the print edition of alive at a readership of about 500,000. Then every Tuesday articles I’ve edited for Metro Canada comes out countrywide at a readership of 700,000. And the tips of the day I write for Living Naturally are published on at least 7000 websites in the US and Canada, according to this Google search.
When editing technical documents, how aware should you be of regional differences in pronunciation? Here is an interesting article on the subject by Brian Forte. Forte raises the following issue regarding the usage of an indefinite article with initialisms:
How do you pronounce an initialism like HTML?
I was taught English in public Australian schools of the 1970s. So I was taught aitch rather than haitch. Which means I pronounce ‘HTML’ with an initial vowel sound and I write ‘an HTML page.