Edifix is an online system for formatting and retrieving references. For medical editing jobs, I’ve been using Edifix to find references, which I then put into Endnote. For example, one document contained 10 chapters written by different authors, only half of whom had used Endnote. Edifix made it relatively easy to obtain the references for the remaining chapters from PubMed, and export the …
Co-author of Effective writing: plain English at work!
Had a great time last week at the launch of Effective writing: plain English at work, at Paperchain bookstore in Canberra. As I said at the launch, the project involved a bit more work than I originally anticipated — many hours of editing, more than 1000 emails exchanged and three face-to-face meetings with the main author, Elizabeth Murphy — but …
Expanding my vocabulary
This week’s tip from Copyediting.com was about the new dictionary site Vocabulary.com. The site looks really interesting, because you can search for a word in different ways; for example, by parts of speech, number of syllables and rhyming words. You can also take a challenge, which involves answering a series of vocabulary questions. I’ve just done my first 15 questions …
Research misconduct can be fun!
Thanks to an article in The Scientist, I spent an enjoyable hour this morning playing a character in an interactive movie. Titled The Lab: Avoiding Research Misconduct, the movie aims to bring issues of research misconduct to life. The story concerns a medical research worker who misuses a junior colleague’s data and publishes a fraudulent paper. Viewers can play one of the four …
More resources
This week I picked up yet another book – The copyeditor’s handbook: A guide to book publishing and corporate communications. So far I’ve only read the preface and a few pages of the first chapter (What copyeditors do), and I’ve already found some useful ideas for the copyediting checklist I’ve been working on. I also found out how to access …
Useful style guide
Yesterday I picked up a copy of The Yahoo! style guide. I’d already looked at some of the content via the website, but it’s great to have the actual book. The guide covers everything from writing mobile-friendly content to copyediting and substantive editing. So far I’ve only read the first section, which gives advice on writing for an online audience (also …
Getting to grips with verbs
I recently took out a subscription to Copyediting, a bimonthly publication from copyediting.com. The August-September issue arrived by email last week. I wish I’d received it before I’d paid about $200 to upgrade to the Office 2010 suite of programs. Copyeditor reviewed the new release and basically said ‘If you’re already using Word 2007, don’t bother with the upgrade’. I also …
My real and virtual bookshelves
One of the first things I needed to do as a freelancer was to stock my bookshelves with reference material. I did buy a few books – The Editor’s Companion; the Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers; The Australian Editing Handbook; and The Design Manual. They look nice on my shelves and make me feel like a serious editor, but they were fairly expensive …