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.
Ben Zimmer is a linguist, lexicographer, and language columnist—a word guru. From tracking the etymology of (and drama over) the word sneaker to interviewing Stephen Colbert about truthiness, Zimmer keeps tabs on the continuing evolution of language. With technology accelerating these changes and fueling debates over usage, Shop Talk decided to . . .
In honor of back to school time, we sat down with two experienced English teachers to find out what’s going on in the modern classroom. Bonnie Sunstein and Amy Shoultz are both English professors at the University of Iowa and both have years of experience teaching in classrooms. We talked to them on the phone…
Quotations permeate our life and our work, whether formally used in a research paper or informally tacked to an inspiration board. But making sure that a source actually spoke or penned those exact words can be tough. Sara Bader is making it her mission to compile and verify the quotes of the world via her…
Lynne Murphy is a linguist and author of the blog Separated by a Common Language, where she tackles the divergences and parallels between American English and British English. With entries ranging from adverb placement, the use of please in restaurants, and cars that hoot versus honk, she reveals how our language differences can . . .
Clear, strong writing is a goal that tops many writers’ and editors’ lists. But when the words must convey important information to an audience, such as the results of new research or the terms of a credit card agreement, unclear writing can be a serious problem.
