A prolific, hard-boiled crime novelist, Donald Westlake wrote nearly one hundred novels, many under the pseudonym Richard Stark. After Westlake died in 2008, Levi Stahl, promotions director at the University of Chicago Press, took on the mission of creating a portrait of the master storyteller. The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany explores Westlake’s craft through his own writing.
Bill Walsh has been at the Washington Post’s copy desk for nearly two decades, riding out changes in both the newspaper business and the wider world of publishing. He helms their live grammar and style chat, Grammar Geekery with Bill Walsh, ruling on everything from hashtags to whether puns are encouraged at the Post.
Peter J. Olson is an English major in a science world. As senior copyediting coordinator for Dartmouth Journal Services, he manages copyediting services for a variety of science and medical journals and has learned to navigate a sea of styles and style guides. In this month’s Shop Talk, he shares his tips on creating a…
Language lovers now have a new place to get their linguistic fix. Schwa Fire is a new, digital-only magazine devoted to language journalism. Its founder, Michael Erard, is aiming for the publication to be “This American Life, but for language” and has already put out a strong first issue. Both paid and free content . . .
Plant scientists, zoologists, microbiologists, and many other scientists often deal in special characters and precise formats beyond even the scope of the thousand-page Chicago Manual of Style. That’s where Scientific Style and Format comes in. Overseen by the Council of Science editors, it offers sections such as “Stereochemical Nomenclature,” “Plant-Pathogenic Fungi,” and “Dwarf Planets and Small Solar System Bodies (Asteroids and Comets).” We talked to Lindsey Buscher, the project manager for
Janet Burroway is the author of the newly released collection A Story Larger than My Own: Women Writers Look Back on Their Lives and Careers as well as eight novels, including The Buzzards and Raw Silk; two best-selling textbooks, Writing Fiction and Imaginative Writing; and the memoir Losing Tim. She is also the author of
The Chicago Manual of Style made its first foreign-language debut this year with the arrival of Manual de estilo Chicago-Deusto. The University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain, created a full adaptation of the Manual, deftly shaping the text to fit the needs of Spanish-language publishers. Javier Torres Ripa led the editorial team and talks now about what it took to bring más to CMOS.
Academic journals are some of the first places that groundbreaking scholarship makes its debut. Speed and accuracy are both important, and so manuscript editors working with journals must be able to deftly maneuver among different styles and strict deadlines. Mary Nell Hoover, a senior manuscript editor, talks about her job in the Journals Editorial Science…
After pouring years of researching and writing into a dissertation, many scholars are faced with the question, “What do I do with it now?” For many, the answer is to turn that dissertation into a book. Yet making that leap means more than adding a few pages and finding a publisher. William Germano has spent…
This month Keith Houston is our guide to the sometimes-forgotten (but eternally-interesting) realms of punctuation. His blog Shady Characters and its eponymous book Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation explore the history and use of the marks that make our work so readable.
