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.
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.
Editors spend a lot of time attending to the smallest of details. And though many of us also take care of the bigger stuff—rewriting for clarity, checking facts, formatting for different media, and so on—the little things will always be there, in every document, to keep us busy.
If you’re a copyeditor like me, you probably rely on the ability to track your changes, not only so others can see precisely what you’ve changed, but so you can keep track of where you’ve been.
If you work with words, you’re probably familiar with the related but supposedly antithetical concepts known as prescriptivism and descriptivism. And people take sides. Either you’re a stickler (you’re a prescriptivist) or you go with the flow (you’re a descriptivist).
In publications that follow Chicago style, commas and periods are placed before a closing quotation mark, “like this,” rather than after, “like this”. This convention has persisted even though it’s no longer universally followed outside the United States and isn’t entirely logical.
