Business

    Chances are, you have had a lot of experience or contact with business writing: compiling expense or business reports, writing up contracts, and crafting proposals. Whether you work for yourself or for a small or large business, many aspects of your job will involve writing. When most people think about "business writing," they probably think of the type of writing I listed above -- more formal, structured types...

Language & Editing

  It's pretty simple, right? A singular subject takes a singular verb, and a plural subject takes a plural verb. The dog is barking. The dogs are barking. Most of the time, we apply this rule without even thinking about it. But sometimes, we're stumped.   How Complicated Can It Be? It can actually be a bit unnerving to consult a grammar guide for help with subject-verb agreement. ...

Editing

In celebration of the 17th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (both hard copy and digital editions) we thought it would be appropriate to repost a blog from 2012 that looked at the humbler version of the CMS. Here at The Editing Company, we page through our hard-copy edition on a regular basis, and now we page through the online edition that we subscribed to just about a year ago....

Writing

Segues are an important part of writing in any genre, and knowing how to use segues well can be the difference between a successful or not-so-successful piece of content. First, let's get this out of the way: A Segway is a trademarked name referring to a motorized, two-wheel personal vehicle. A segue (in writing, anyway) is a smooth transitional phrase that moves the reader from one point or...

Proofreading

We editors can't help that our eye will fall on misspelled words or faulty punctuation. No matter where they appear. Take, for instance, a new eatery opening up a few doors down from us here on College Street. The menu offers a blend of sushi and burritos, rolled into one, and apparently you will be able to make your own. The location is under renovation, and...

Book Design

    We're not supposed to judge books by their covers, but like it or not, when shopping around a bookstore with nothing particular in mind, it's often a cover that will attract the eye. I was recently perusing the selection at the lovely Type Books in Toronto's Queen West neighbourhood, and certain books stood out to me, not by their outside cover, but rather by their typography—what was on the...

Language & Editing

Language and the way we use it is undeniably fluid. One doesn't have to look far to find idioms and words that have changed their wording and subsequently their meanings over the years. Especially in the 21st century, words that were once nouns have now become noun/verb hybrids. Examples that immediately spring to mind are "to text," as in "I'll text you," and the teeth-grindingly common "to...

Writing

  Strunk and White's The Elements of Style is a classic, a compendium of pithy advice for writers who want to get their ideas across clearly and succinctly. Their Rule # 13, "Omit needless words," sounds like a slam-dunk: just do it. But how do you decide what's needless? Where do you start?   Well, sometimes working your way backwards helps – like taking apart a clock so you can...

Do you know the appropriate place to break a word like "friendship" or "disenfranchised"? Word breaks aren't something many people think about anymore, now that we have word processing programs and software that can handle those details for us. But before that technology was available to us, words had to be broken manually from one line to the next (think typesetting, or typing on typewriters). At TEC, I often...

Usage

I recently subscribed to the Globe and Mail for the Friday and Saturday editions. Friday's paper includes the Report on Business the last Friday of each month, and is a magazine I want to read more regularly. The first issue I received wasn't a disappointment (June 2017). The cover story took an inside look at the changeover of CEOs at Rogers and made for a compelling read....

Book Reviews

Dr. Bartolo's Umbrella and Other Tales from My Surprising Operatic Life By Christopher Cameron Published by Seraphim Editions, 2017   Former TEC editor Christopher Cameron's Dr. Bartolo's Umbrella is an entertaining, informative, and cheeky look at an individual's experiences working in Canadian opera. The book takes the reader through the journey of Cameron's unlikely musical beginnings, lucky breaks, hard work, and various roles within the Canadian classical music scene. ...

Editing / Usage

This week, we wanted to re-post one of our most consistently popular blogs: Barbara's 2015 blog on hyphenation! Even two years later, it's always at the top of our "most viewed" lists -- clearly, tips about hyphenation are never out of season! We hope it reaches some new writers seeking guidance and helps them out too.     They say that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. ...

Language & Editing

    The political world gets progressively denser every day, especially the world of US politics. And, though Canadians often pretend at being secure from the political meltdown south of the 49th parallel, the reality is that it's incumbent upon those of us who live north of the border to learn all we can about both the Canadian and US systems of governance . and propaganda.   Participating in, or at...

Editing

    Remember Groucho Marx's famous quip? "One morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got into my pyjamas I'll never know. " What makes this joke work is, of course, the misplaced modifier "in my pyjamas. " But what if Groucho hadn't added that second sentence? Would you have noticed a problem?    What Are Misplaced Modifiers? Put simply, misplaced modifiers are words, phrases, or clauses separated from...

Event

    With April's end, we draw ever closer to Editors Canada's 2017 conference, entitled "Guardians of the Lexicons. " With just over a month until the conference's start (the conference runs from June 9 to June 11), panelists and presenters are likely busy working out the kinks in their presentations and finalizing their travel arrangements for their trip to Gatineau, Quebec, where the conference will be held.   But what will the...

Guest Blogger

    Standing up and standing out is easier than you may think!   Picture this scene: You are speaking confidently in front of forty people in your company, delivering a special presentation. Your heart is beating fast, but as you scan the audience, you see smiles and looks of appreciation on the faces of your colleagues. You know all is going very well; you feel confident, proud, appreciated, and skilled.   Now,...

Editing & Technologies

Leafing through a copy of The Editorial Eye, Vol. 17, No. 9 from September 1994, I noticed a helpful article on abbreviations for technical terms. In it, Candee Wilson showcases suggestions from a number of Eye readers on how to appropriately abbreviate the terms kilobyte, kilobit, megabyte, and megabit.   To avoid confusion, some readers suggested using "kbyte" and "kbit. " IBM's practice in 1994 was to use...

Editing

TEC has had a number of dissertations cross our desks over the past few months, and working on these important documents is always a process that requires a lot of attention and an eye for detail. We take editing dissertations (and theses as well) very seriously: when we work on such a document, we know the work we do can have huge impact on our client's life. We...

Editing

  Having your thesis or dissertation edited by a professional editor can be an incredibly valuable investment. After all, a graduate degree is typically a once-in-a-lifetime venture, and is meant to be foundational to your future career. A professional editor is paid to spend substantial amounts of time and energy (something even the best supervisors don't have a lot of) reading your work and providing thorough editorial feedback on...

Language & Editing

    I'm set to play Jack Manningham in The Tipling Stage Company's production of Gaslight. And because the play, Patrick Hamilton's psychological thriller about a husband trying to drive his wife mad in order to benefit from her committal to an insane asylum, is set in Victorian England, I've been thinking about the etymologies of various theatrical terms, myths, and superstitions.   As a theatre student in my 20s, I was...

Event

  If you haven't looked at a calendar yet today, you might not know that today, March 15, is actually the Ides of March. I'm sure you've heard of it before, but what exactly is this special day all about?   History of the Ides of March The origin story of the Ides of March is actually pretty nondescript. Ides was one of the ancient markers used to reference dates in relation...

Usage

    Few punctuation marks are misused as often as the comma. Sadly, many semi-professional or hobby writers of today seem to think that the comma is meant to signify vocal pauses. But, like any punctuation, the comma has specific uses: none of them involve noting vocal pauses.   In The Editorial Eye Vol. 25, No. 11, I saw a comma usage aptitude test entitled, “Be Conservative but Canny...

Books And Reading

  The Book and Periodical Council's Freedom to Read Week, beyond simply being an annual event that showcases and remembers banned books, is an excellent time to consider the merits, or lack thereof, of broadly applied censorship. Last week, as we sat in the office doing exactly that, we fell to wondering how many banned or challenged books we had read or might even have on our bookshelves at home....

Event

Next week, from February 26 to March 4, we will be observing a very important event in Canadian culture: Freedom to Read Week. Freedom to Read Week is a project run by the Book and Periodical Council (BPC), which is an umbrella organization for Canadian associations that are or whose members are primarily involved with the writing, editing, translating publishing, producing, distributing, lending, marketing, reading, and selling of written words.   More...