Language & Editing

Earlier this year, University of Toronto Press’ Journal of Scholarly Publishing featured a book review of Michael Billig’s Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2013). In it, reviewer Stephen K. Donovan talks about academic writing and the unfortunate trend of unnecessarily big words and complicated sentence structures. Academic writing has never been easy reading; no one expects you to...

Language & Editing

Grammar quiz: When is it appropriate to use “whom”? Answer: You would use "whom" when you refer to the object of a sentence. Use "who" when you are referring to the subject of a sentence. For example, it is "Whom do I love?" because you are asking about the object of the sentence—the target of your love!  So when is it OK to use "who"? If you were asking about...

Language & Editing

Lately there has been a fair bit of news coverage dedicated to Canadian English as a language—what it is, why it’s important, and how it fits in as part of our culture. But while our use of “eh” as a fitting end to a sentence and our (alleged) habit of pronouncing “about” as “aboot” might be what we’re most known for internationally, many Canadians might not realize some of...

Language & Editing

Why do Canadians persist in spelling certain words the way we do? Is it a Canadian quirk that we keep all of our British “-our”endings but also borrow the “-izes” from our American neighbours? Maybe like the cliché often used to describe us — we’re just too darn nice. Maybe we just want to get along with everybody.   Maybe … but sometimes it is annoying to work with American...

Language & Editing

There’s no question that, for better or worse, texting has brought about a whole new kind of written communication. Certainly, the way we speak heavily influences the way we text. But what should we think about our increasing tendency to speak the way we text? Some Examples A former colleague of mine was fond of saying "BRB" when she left the office. While there's absolutely no doubt that she,...

Language & Editing

As editors, we use style guides and resources for particular projects to ensure that we follow consistent guidelines. Every now and then acquaintances ask me for simple answers to questions about grammar and spelling. I often have to say that “there is no right or wrong response; the answer to the question will depend on a few factors. ” Yes, it’s true that sometimes there are clear answers when...

Language & Editing

 I’d like to take a look at two pairs of words that are increasingly, incorrectly interchanged. No, I’m not talking about your/you’re and it’s/its — not that it doesn’t hurt a little inside every time I read “your welcome” in online correspondence, or when a parking lot sign tells me that “Management is not responsible for any vehicle or it’s contents. ” No, these are two pairs of words that,...

Language & Editing

Mid-October is that wonderful time of year when the air takes on a fresh new chill, the leaves turn their rich autumn colours … and rubber bats hang in doorways, cotton cobwebs appear in corners, and cardboard cut-outs of black cats, jack-o-lanterns, and monsters peer out from the doors and windows of homes and stores.   It’s fairly well known that the word Halloween (now more commonly — and officially...

Language & Editing

A Road Trip   Last month, my husband and I went on a road trip in California. It was a welcome relief from a crazy winter of study. We shifted from work mode into vacation mode quite easily, but there was another shift that we had to make.   Rather than planning our trip out day-by-day with a rental car and a new...

Language & Editing

  I have a good friend who's a copy editor, just like me — except that she does it about 700 kilometres southeast of here. Or, in her estimation, about 450 miles. And therein lies a world of difference.   Usually our professions bond us. We routinely update each other with the many awful spelling mistakes that we spot out in the world. But then sometimes we encounter...

Language & Editing

The Chicago Manual of Style and I disagree on something.   This almost never happens. I look at Chicago the way some people look at the Bible: as a source of comfort, guidance, and authority. But section 5. 227 of Chicago says this: “The only gender-neutral pronoun in English is it, which doesn’t refer to humans. ”   Oh, Chicago, Chicago, why hast thou forsaken me?   In fact, gender-neutral pronouns...

Language & Editing

Bookish types, such as we are, can run into problems with pronunciation. As a child, the language I was reading was more advanced than I usually heard spoken, and so I developed a few peculiar pronunciations for words that I had seen but never heard. This led to a particularly embarrassing moment in grade school when I pronounced “chaos” like “cha-hos. ”    Nina had a similar experience, believing that...

Language & Editing

Earlier this month, I said a temporary farewell to the TEC office and headed across the ocean. One of the stops on my two-week European journey was southern Germany, where much of my family still resides.   In some ways German could be called my first language, but in reality it’s not entirely clear. As a toddler I mostly spoke a language that my bilingual parents referred to as...