Peter B. Kaufman is Associate Director of Development at MIT Open Learning. He is the author of The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge (Seven Stories Press, 2021) and founder of Intelligent Television, a video production company that works with cultural and educational institutions around the world.
Rebel with a Clause follows the adventures of Ellen’s Grammar Table and will have its New York City premiere on March 4 at the SVA Theatre in Manhattan. A book with the same title was published in 2022.
Anyone who’s familiar with contemporary English-language novels would have little trouble reading a novel published in the 1700s in an original edition. By the middle of that century, conventions related to printed text and punctuation were starting to look almost modern.
Chatbots are designed to analyze reams of text and then, based on that analysis, generate a sequence of words that would be statistically likely to correspond to a specific prompt. They can answer questions, write new copy, and revise or edit an existing text.
Over the last year and a half (beginning in April 2021), Microsoft has been rolling out its “modern comments” to Word 365 users on both Windows and Mac platforms. If you use Word, and unless you have your updates turned off, there’s a good chance you have them by now, or will soon.
If you’re a copyeditor, you probably use Microsoft Word, a desktop program introduced in the 1980s. Or maybe you use Google Docs, a browser-based application that debuted in 2006.
William Germano is professor of English at Cooper Union in New York. He’s also had a long career in publishing and brings some of that experience to his work as a teacher, in seminars and workshops worldwide and in the college classroom.
The comma between city and state—or, following the same principle, between city and province or city and country—is so thoroughly inscribed in the written record that most editors don’t give it a second thought.
Like many copyeditors, I sometimes find myself enforcing rules I don’t fully agree with. For one thing, I wouldn’t want anyone who might know the applicable rule to think I’ve made a mistake.
An epigraph is a brief quotation placed at the beginning of a book or at the head of a chapter, article, story, or other work. Most epigraphs are ornamental, helping to set the tone or mood of a work but going unmentioned in the text.
