I love language and the way in which we use words.

I also love the sea, and everything in it and on it.

I grew up a few miles from Portsmouth on the south coast of England, which is steeped in royal naval history [ read more ]

I sometimes think that the peerless John McIntyre and I were separated at birth, so closely aligned are our editing brains. I have long privately lamented the death of the use of ‘that’ to maintain clarity before a dependent clause, and JM [ read more ]

OPTIMAL EDITORIAL SERVICES IS 3 YEARS OLD TODAY!

I became a freelancer because I felt I had nowhere else to go. I didn’t want to carry on climbing the greasy pole of promotion in fulfilment of the Peter Principle, and I’d had my [ read more ]

As discussed by Jaime A Teixeira da Silva in an article in September’s ‘Science Editor’ (https://www.csescienceeditor.org/article/detection-and-elimination-of-tortured-phrases/), it’s no secret that academic publishers are gradually cutting copyediting resources. However, they are doing so at their peril, given the growing ubiquity [ read more ]

It’s been a simmering issue for a while, but in the world of scientific journals, the insistence on manuscript submissions complying with a dense and ever-growing list of formatting and document structural requirements is now being seriously questioned, as Claire Neumann, Director [ read more ]

If you’re a word nerd like me, you’ll appreciate this little nugget about the word ‘run’ that The Scholarly Kitchen’s David Crotty uncovered. Sometimes it is the most commonplace and basic of words that carry the heaviest burden of meaning and idiomatic [ read more ]

Over the years, I’ve come across a fair number of inexperienced academic authors with a less-than-sound grasp of their responsibilities regarding the re-use of their own work in other publications. I have to remind them that the moment they sign a copyright [ read more ]

The European Association of Science Editors (EASE) has launched a Request For Information on their recently drafted publication ‘Recommendations of the Use of AI in Scholarly Publishing’, to gather feedback on its content. The draft publication forms part of EASE’s Peer Review [ read more ]

John McIntyre – a man after my own heart … the wit and the wisdom in his latest post are a total delight.

https://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-old-editor-gets-cranky-in-morning.html

I know that editorial exactitude gets up most people’s noses, but words matter to me. So I was delighted to discover an ally in an argument I have long been having with a succession colleagues: ‘data set’ (two words) versus ‘dataset’ (one [ read more ]