When is it okay to use "about" -- How to be more precise when copyediting

Rich Adin recently published a blog post on the vagueness of about. When precision is wanted, he maintains, about isn’t going to cut it. Adin points out that if you can use a precise date rather than “about 50 years ago,” you won’t make readers work hard for the meaning. His example: About...

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How to query the article author

One of the most important things copyeditors learn in the process of going through an author's work is to respect his/her writing. This means no matter how many "mistakes" or inconsistencies you find, you have to query in a professional manner. Otherwise, you run the risk of either being a "know-it-all"...

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Website copy not smelling too good?

Now, this is not a matter of editorial skills, but this online perfume store could use a proofreader. I'm neither a big fan of justified text alignment. Note that this is not the only mistake I found in this website's copy. Attention webmaste...

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Non sequitur, anyone?

Throw out any sentence that does not flow logically from the previous one, lead logically to the next one, or sound right.   Here the skeptical reader might accuse me of trying to weasel out of my promise to stop at ten tips. This is not the case. I end with logic, because it is the key to...

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Seriously, redundancy, and other serious matters that need serious attention

The holidays are almost here! But hey, I'm not taking a break being on the lookout for articles that make it on the Internet but desperately need some "juice" to make them sizzle. Truth is, there's no shortage of websites, news items, and written stuff that are passable but can be injected with creativity....

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All clogged up! Using spaces between punctuations

Because we live in "rushing" society (quoted from wildlittlefan), most of us forget to add space in between our punctuation marks. Not acceptable. If you find it annoying, get a load of this article I edited from Yahoo Voices. There are plenty of mistakes, but the outstanding one is definitely the...

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Its versus It's and other sordid shenanigans

I took a quick catch-up on the aspect of keyword density again. One of the popular articles I read came from the authoritative site of SEOBook.com. Upon finishing the text, here are some glaring errors that were "spotted!" by me: Early / primitive search technology was not very sophisticated...

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