In my Proofreading Secrets of Best-Selling Authors, I address the myth that writers should never start a sentence with a conjunction (and, or, nor, because, for, yet, so, since, unless, until). But I recently heard that there’s a new “rule” floating around in the industry that says that starting a sentence with an -ing word […]
One new thing in the 17th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (which just came out in September) that I found helpful is a section on tips for proofreading PDFs. Most of my editing is on Word files sent to me by authors and publishers. But I also do some proofreading for organizations […]
I just found out that The Chicago Manual of Style is coming out with a new edition in September. Here are just a few changes in the 17th edition: E-mail will become email (no hyphen). Internet will become internet (lowercased). The chapter on grammar and usage will contain more than thirty new sections on syntax. The […]
After a recent extraction of a decayed tooth, my dentist prescribed antibiotics for me. The paperwork that came with the pills instructed me to take one pill every six hours, four times a day. Even after my Novocain-induced mental fog lifted, I couldn’t figure out how to follow those instructions without setting an alarm to […]
