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 …
Getting things done
This week I made lots of progress on my company intranet (thanks to help from an IT expert). The plan is to have all my procedures, checklists, style guides, etc in a central place, so that (a) they are readily accessible and (b) there is no confusion about which is the latest version. This is all part of setting up systems …
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 …
Taking a break
I have just returned from a much-needed holiday – a delightful journey up the east coast in a camper van. My laptop accompanied us on our 7-day trip, but I managed to leave it tucked away in a cupboard most of the time (not so hard given that we were out of mobile range for much of the trip). My …
I have way too much to do – when I set up my own business I meant to work four 8-hour days per week, not 48 hours per week, as I’m currently doing. However, there are some good things happening: The computer’s understanding of my speech has increased amazingly in just one week, and I can now use it quite …
Talking to the computer
A few things came together this week to persuade me that I need to start using voice recognition software. First, I gave myself sore shoulders by working all day on a formatting job while (yet again!) ignoring most of the reminders that popped up telling me to take a break. Then, in tidying my office, I came across a print …
Accepting my limitations …
I’ve really enjoyed my first year in business, it’s been a great experience and I’ve learnt a lot. One painful lesson, which I’ve had trouble accepting, is that I’m not a well-organised person. To some extent this deficiency has been offset by Intervals, which has been fantastic for keeping track of work. However, the program is only as good as …
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 …
Challenging week, and a win through LinkedIn
It has been another challenging week, with lots of editing to do and yet more problems with the computer (finally fixed on Saturday morning, thank goodness). At least my second computer is now set up, and I’ve learnt the important difference between a back up for restoring the computer (which I had) and one where you can see files in …
Being prepared
My main computer had a meltdown this week – it started freezing for no good reason. The problem first appeared on Monday but was intermittent, and I kept hoping that the many disk repairs that the computer took itself through before restarting would fix the problem. However, that didn’t happen, so yesterday I spent several hours setting up the laptop …