A favorite of mine is the book BUGS in Writing, by Lyn Dupré (1998, Addison Wesley). It's a teach-by-example book with lots of examples she rates as ugly, bad, good, and even splendid.
You might as well be a great copy editor
51–58 of 58 posts
Re: You might as well be a great copy editor
#52NYT's "Copy Edit This" quizzes are quite good. https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22copy%2Bedit%2Bthis%2... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/11/insider/copy-...
That was really fun. I got 1 of 15 lol.
This literally begs the question if people still can write correctly.
Re: You might as well be a great copy editor
#53I'm speaking from the perspective of non-native academic English speakers. I find that my time and the time of my PhD students is better spent focusing on the high-level problems. Once those are fixed, we rely on professional copy-editing. Done!
Re: You might as well be a great copy editor
#54Pro tip, from an actual pro: you can't copyedit your own copy. Lots of reasons why, including, your inability to recognize problems you are unaware of; the inexorable fact of reading what you think you wrote, not what is on the page; inability to see logical problems, missing assumptions, etc. Ad infinitum. There are line-level hacks which can help with some of this, e.g. reading backwards to find typographic and spe…
One copy-editing trick I employ is to use a text-to-speech system to read my work back to me. If I merely read it myself, my brain will autocorrect my mistakes into what I meant to write. When the computer reads my work, it pulls no punches.
Interesting. What software do you recommend? Do you know of something that can take a latex or pdf document?
Re: You might as well be a great copy editor
#55Something I've known for a while (but have really come to terms with more recently) is just how important writing skills are even for technical people (even coders). It's hard to get anything done if you can't convince people why they should listen to you. Especially in this increasingly remote-connected world, writing skills are key.
Could not disagree more. Documents are props. They exist to help your stage production evoke feelings of gravitas and rigor, but this is driven more by form than substance. It’s a similar story for large officially scheduled meetings. Real communication happens in the hallway outside just after the official document review, and is pretty much independent of what was in the document.
Technical writing is absolutely a skill that developers need to know, among many other kinds of writing and it doesn’t have any gravitas.
Re: You might as well be a great copy editor
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was really fun. I got 1 of 15 lol.
This literally begs the question if people still can write correctly.
I'm not sure if you are being ironic, but this is actually a common misuse of the phrase "begging the question":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
Noting of course that it's probably more common in the "incorrect" form!
Re: You might as well be a great copy editor
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are fun. Just got through the first one with 17 total tries (most of which were on the 8th question). Some of them are dubious, though, IMO. For example: > The total amount available to |disperse| will be $150 million annually. I guess in a journalism context more people are talking about disbursing than dispersing, but how am I supposed to know that? For all I know this sentence comes from an article about wan…
> How am I supposed to know "offensively excessive" wasn't the intended meaning here? I'm guessing if it were the intended meaning, "but" would be incorrect in "Republicans will not like many of these proposals, but they have been fulsome in their praise of Mr. Trump since his election"
I mean, if it's "offensively excessive" from the writer's point of view, then I feel like it'd make sense even with the "but"; that's indeed how I took the sentence to mean.
Re: You might as well be a great copy editor
#58A very useful trick for copyediting and proofreading is to use a text-to-speech tool. The default voice on Mac is quite good. I use it all the time to proofread intros, and explanation sections in my books. For math-heavy or code-blocks, it's not quite as good... but actually works OK for Python. See [1] for how to setup a keyboard shortcut.
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem...