by Jamie Chavez | Mar 26, 2018 | Words & Language
A friend of mine wrote: I’ve never been able to decide for certain whether it’s “April Fool’s Day” (i.e., a day belonging to a fool or fools) or “April Fools Day” (i.e., a day celebrating all the fools in the world).* What’s your opinion? I confess I’d never really...
by Jamie Chavez | May 14, 2016 | Your Editor Says …
A comma splice is only a little error, easily fixed. If you gave me a manuscript full of run-on sentences caused by them, it would be an easy edit. But—the “world’s top* grammarian,” this short article from Business Insider tells us, “fears that this punctuation error...
by Jamie Chavez | Dec 7, 2015 | Your Editor Says …
The apostrophe, that is. And what I’ve been seeing lately makes my eyes bleed, y’all. I know I’m not the first. (Here’s looking at you, Lynn Truss. Thanks for bringing it to our attention, but you need a copyeditor, too, friend.) Most recently, Kate Brannen wrote a...
by Jamie Chavez | Nov 9, 2015 | Your Editor Says …
As you might expect from someone who grew up to be an editor, I am (generally) an orderly person. Everything in its place, organized, methodical, systems, processes, plans … that sort of thing. This includes the way a manuscript looks when I am working on it. I like...
by Jamie Chavez | Aug 8, 2015 | Authors & Other Writers, Your Editor Says …
I read quite a bit of Shirley Jackson’s fiction in middle and high school—lots of her short stories, and the “fictionalized memoirs” Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. Since the former begins with a family that has “two children and about five thousand books,”...