Many writers cite Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as the mother and father of contemporary poetry – or perhaps more accurately, as its queer, brilliant aunt and uncle. The two writers may at first seem to have little in common—Whitman is as expansive as Dickinson is compressed, as wild as she is precise. But they [...]
Posts Tagged ‘copy editing’
Quotation Dos and Don’ts
Your Highness: I hold a job that requires I write articles, press releases, and similar pieces in which I quote others. You’d think I’d have such matters down by now, but I’ll come clean: I never really learned the rules for using quotation marks. To complicate matters further, I’m a bit of an Anglophile—only the [...]
Snuffing Out Deadly Dull Buzzwords
At the height of the dotcom era, a few high-tech journalists created “Buzz Saw,” an email filter that would bounce messages from PR and marketing people who larded their pitches with overused buzzwords. If you laid it on too thick with catchphrases like “bleeding-edge,” and “strategic paradigm,” not only did your email get bounced, but [...]
Fun with Newspaper Corrections
From The New York Times, December 24, 2009: “A picture caption with an article in some editions on Tuesday about continuing transportation problems after the weekend snowstorm misidentified the location of a pile of slush in the Bronx. It was on Fordham Road, not Fordham Avenue.” Anyone else share my love of journalism corrections—especially fabulously [...]
