[slideshow]
“The History of English” (video)
Love history, the English language, surreal comedy, and voice-over artists with Oxford English accents? Check out “The History of English in Ten Minutes”; it’s 1,600 years of language history, crammed into ten one-minute tracks.
Track titles
- Anglo-Saxon (Whatever happened to the Jutes?)
- The Norman Conquest (Excuse my English)
- Shakespeare (A plaque on both his houses)
- The King James Bible (Let there be light reading)
- The English of Science (How to speak with gravity)
- English and Empire (The sun never sets on the English language)
- The Age of the Dictionary (The definition of a hopeless task)
- American English (Not English but somewhere in the ballpark)
- Internet English (Language reverts to type)
- Global English (Whose language is it anyway?)
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3r9bOkYW9s?rel=0&w=640&h=360]© The Open University; also licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0: UK: England & Wales.
YouTube compilation: OUlearn (Learn with The Open University YouTube channel).
Voice-over: Clive Anderson.
Event Audio: What Editors Need to Know about E-Books
Couldn’t attend EAC-BC’s October 17, 2012, lecture on e-books? Listen to the audio recording.
Couldn’t attend EAC-BC’s October 17, 2012, lecture on e-books? The lecture, given by Lara Smith, print and digital coordinator at D&M Publishers, was detailed and educational. She reviewed different e-book formats and the kinds of content best suited to each.
She also:
- Discussed different conversion methods and compared in-house and conversion-service workflows.
- Reviewed a typical conversion and explained what kind of work is required after export, particularly to accommodate various e-reading devices.
- Reviewed the inside of an EPUB file and metadata requirements.
- Discussed digital rights management options.
- Discussed how deciding to produce an e-book can affect the editing process.
Listen to audio recording (EAC log-in identity and password required).
Writers Wanted: The Bookshelf
You there. In the library. We want to know: what’s that you’re reading? EAC-BCers are avid readers. We want to know what you’re reading so we can read it too.
Sign up now to become a guest columnist for West Coast Editor’s recurring column The Bookshelf. Have your three favourite books (or magazines, or mangas, or catalogues, or whatever most strikes your reading fancy) featured in a future issue.
To reserve space, email westcoasteditor@editors.ca.
Semicolons: aids or affectations (poll)
Imagine. You’ve been captured by a plunder of punctuation-hating pirates and forced to walk the plank. As you teeter, The Oxford Guide to Writing and The Chicago Manual of Style clutched to your breast, the pirate king speaks. “The semicolon has no place in online writing!” he says. “Renounce your admiration for it and live!”
What do you do?
Take the West Coast Editor poll and tell us. Are semicolons essential aids to understanding—even in online writing—fulfilling a role distinct from that of the full stop? Or are they mere affectations, relics from our print-bound past?
DRIVE-BY EDITING: punctuation & spelling
Maureen Phillips spotted this sign for “Mike’s Tailor” (His own tailor? Lucky Mike!) and “professional altetration” services (whoops) while driving along Broadway Street in Vancouver. She didn’t have the heart to go in and point out the mistakes, though. Photo by Maureen Phillips.
Event review: #LFMF
Couldn’t attend EAC-BC’s #LFMF event? Don’t worry. Programs co-chair Frances Peck has compiled a list of the “editing lessons learned”—editors’ true confessions, if you will—that were shared that evening.
At EAC-BC’s first meeting of the season (on September 19, 2012), about 35 of us gathered at the YWCA in Vancouver to drink wine, nibble cheese, catch up with fellow editors, and confess our failures. Humility was the watchword of the evening as we tweeted editing lessons we’ve learned the hard way (using the hashtag LFMF, learn from my fail) or described our embarrassing moments to the group.
The “winning” #LFMF lesson
The (unofficial) winner, for its black humour and high “uh-oh” factor:
Always turn off autocorrect. My instructor’s last name, Vigna, was autocorrected to vagina without my noticing.
More #LFMF lessons
The various lessons—about the importance of proofreading, the need for careful estimating, the pitfalls of technology, and more—were too valuable to keep to ourselves, so we’re sharing them with WCE readers. A big thank you to those who laid bare their biggest gaffes so that others needn’t repeat them.
“Materiel” isn’t always a misspelling. Learned the hard way from a military client.
Always review the document, or a good sample of it, before estimating. What’s described as an easy edit may really be a nightmare.
Proofread every invoice. I once tweaked my template and got my postal code wrong! Delayed payment, red face.
Say yes to every project and you’ll sacrifice quality. I look back on work from hectic times and know it wasn’t my best. Ouch.
If you’re sending an attachment, attach it BEFORE you write the email and forget to do it.
Before sending a style sheet to the client, don’t forget to give it one last A-to-Z sort.
Proofread your invoice template. There is no such thing as the GSH tax.
Mix estimate with educate for big jobs. Itemize the tasks you’ll do at each stage. Helps client appreciate the value for the $$ estimate.
Make sure all comments to self are deleted from final edit. Author should never see “Boring!” or “Gibberish.”
Always estimate based on word count—never on page count.
I edited a dissertation in LaTeX. When the (now) prof gave me the published copy (in person), I saw I’d edited no footnotes.
Your awesome new time-tracking software doesn’t do much good if you don’t press the “start” button.
Sent out a resumé several times mentioning articles I had published in a “newpaper.” Applying for copy-editing jobs.
When signing off with “Regards” in a memo to an author, keep in mind that the G and T keys are in close proximity.
Event photos: #LFMF
Couldn’t attend EAC-BC’s #LFMF event on September 19, 2012? Check out this slide show and then read the event review.
[slideshow]
Buying Twitter Followers: A Penny a Person
Psst! Have you heard? Many people, including politicians, celebrities, and reality-show hopefuls (but, we hope, not editors), are buying “large blocks of Twitter followers.”
So says Austin Considine in his article “Buying their way to Twitter fame” (The New York Times, August 22, 2012). He continues:
the practice has become so widespread that StatusPeople, a social media management company in London, released a Web tool last month called the Fake Follower Check that it says can ascertain how many fake followers you and your friends have.
Although Twitter “filed suit in federal court … against five spammers, including those who create fake Twitter followers,” we suspect that few will be dissuaded from the practice; it’s cheap (as little as a penny a person) and easy (when we searched “buy Twitter followers” on Google, we received 8,490,000 hits), and we suspect that for every Twitter-follower provider Twitter shuts down, 10 new ones will emerge.
Read the complete article.
Troubling trendlet: grouping books by colour
In what can only be a sign of the decline of Western Civilization, there’s “a trendlet … kicking up dust on decor sites: grouping books on the shelf according to hue.”
Yes, you read that correctly. Certain design magazines and blogs want to convince readers to group books by hue—not by author surname, not by subject matter, and certainly not by Dewey decimal number.
To make matters worse, Random House is purported to be in on the trend.
According to Sophie Kohn in her article “Dewey decimal redux: should we organize books by colour?” (Globe and Mail, September 19, 2012), Random House will be launching a “Books are Beautiful” series in October 2012:
[thirty] iconic titles each assigned a specific shade by colour specialist Pantone … so that the collection forms a rainbow on your shelf. (The edges of the pages are spray-painted to match, ensuring that the book is a physical work of art from every conceivable angle—except if you open it.)
We hold out hope that this is a hoax since we haven’t yet found confirmation on Random House’s website or Twitter account.
Feeling brave enough to read the entire article?