Life as a Copyeditor

Do you ever find at the end of workday that even though you know darned well you weren’t slacking for even ten minutes, somehow you didn’t make any progress in editing your manuscript? Or do you ever try to explain to someone why even though you put in forty or fifty hours a week, your editing time is way, way less? Recently I was ransacking my archives looking for something, and I ran across a file

Margaret D. F. Mahan (1933–2018)

Known for her patience, generosity, sparkling wit, and ready laugh, Margaret D. F. Mahan played a significant role in the University of Chicago Press’s history and success. Margaret joined the Press in 1962 as a marketing copywriter for the Books Division and moved to the Manuscript Editing Department five years later. By the time she retired in 1998, she had

A comma with eyes

An Update on Using Commas with Etc.

At paragraph 6.20, the 17th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style notes that the abbreviation etc. (et cetera, literally “and others of the same kind”) and such equivalents as and so forth and and the like are preceded by a comma. In a slight departure from previous editions of CMOS, such expressions are