Editing Aficionado Gifts

Campaign for Plain English

"Meet The Author"

A Copy Editor and His Dog

Punctuation Police

"Your hunch was right, Officer Garcia. We'll need a good editor to clean up this manuscript and bring his unfinished novel to a satisfying conclusion."

"Your usually vicious sarcasm is weak. Go pump some irony."

"O.K., O.K., people - we're not workshopping these, they're already set in stone."

"It's about sex and revenge, except for a short chapter on the Continental Congress."

Personnel - "This letter of recommendation is full of misspellings!"

"Baxter...about this report...your punctuation, spelling and grammar are perfect. No one can understand it!"

Keeping all the balls in the air - skills

Contemporary English Lesson: The Cat was Sat on the Mat.

"Still suffering from writer's block?"

"What your memoir really needs is an addiction."

"Various entrances to the gates of Hell."

"If I Can Make One Critic Smile..."

"No—You're thinking dog years—Editor years are twice as many."

"It's about the murder of an editor who refuses to publish a writer's work..."

Your resume begins Once Upon A Time...I like that!

"Confounded spell checker... never catches anything."

"Moby Richard by Herman Melville" "Wonderful! Not sure about the title—let's discuss editor."

Ironing Punctuation

'I can hold a match to his notebook.'

Tesseract of the D'Urbervilles.

One of the failed candidates for the copyrighters job wants to know 'wat was rong with his applicashun'.

'The grammar's awful and the spelling's atrocious - otherwise it's an impressive CV.'

Editor.

"Your appendix is fine. It's your glossary I'm worried about."

THE REPORT: Some of this is brilliant, but that can be fixed.

'Do it write the first time.'