by Susannah Noel | Jan 6, 2021 | Editing Nuts & Bolts
I think we can all agree, it’s fun to fix a spelling error, or a grammatical mistake, or a comma that should be a semicolon. Rooting out these distractions in the reading experience brings deep pleasure. If your responses on our Book Editor Profile Quiz indicate...
by Sheryl Rapée-Adams | Jun 21, 2019 | Inspiration
I was the eleven-year-old miscreant with a purple Sharpie correcting restaurant menus, school textbooks, and the science fiction novels on my parents’ bookshelves. In the 1980s, my college English professor, author Evelyn Wilde Mayerson, told me I’d make a good...
by Susannah Noel | Jun 7, 2018 | Editing Nuts & Bolts
Most of my career, I’ve been a copyeditor for large NYC publishers, an intellectually stimulating but also somewhat straightforward task. It starts with this injunction: A copyeditor must never fix or improve the author’s style. (What is style? See Dave...
by Susannah Noel | Feb 21, 2018 | Inspiration
“Can anyone find the mistake?” Mrs. Bressette, tall and slim with close-cropped black hair, pointed to a picture of a construction site with a yellow sign in front that read, DEVELOPEMENT COMING SOON. We stared at the book. We were the advanced spellers, sitting at...