A client asked me, “Should a Latin expression be hyphenated when I use it as an adjective? For example, should status quo be hyphenated?”
No. In general, there’s no need to hyphenate Latin phrases used in English. To know when to hyphenate and when not to hyphenate Latin words used in English, you need to first understand hyphenation rules. Read More
H. is a Cambridge graduate who found writing is better for her mental health than scientific research. T. is a part-time teaching assistant who writes part-time to make ends meet. L. is a freelancer who writes digital content when her baby is sleeping. M. is a retired IT technician with a career spanning from punch cards to cloud computing who writes to keep her mind sharp and a roof over her head. These, and many other people you’ll never know, ghostwrite web content for a living.
They’re professional writers who work full-time or part-time from their home offices. They’re not doing some freelance content writing on the side while hopping around the world.
Most of the content online—LinkedIn posts by thought leaders, company blogs by marketing experts, magazine articles by CEOs, whitepapers by Fortune 500 companies, and more—was ghostwritten.
Almost all businesses that have a website are publishers, and many hire web content ghostwriters. If you own a growing business and have a presence online, sooner or later you’ll need a content writer, whether on an ad hoc basis or on staff.
If you’ve never hired a web content writer before, you might not know many things about their work. This post illustrates some less-known aspects of a freelance content writer’s job to help business owners improve their relationships with their freelance writers. Read More
Typos happen. But when they’re particularly creative—like the seven typos I wrote about earlier this year—they deserve the spotlight. Here are five more illustrated typos to make you smile. Read More
An editorial style guide answers questions such as these: Is it startup or start-up? Our business’s priority or our business’ priority? Three percent, 3 percent, or 3%? How about the comma before or in the previous sentence? Do we need to use the trademark (™) and copyright (©) symbols in business reports? And is it correct to start sentences with and? Do contractions (like haven’t instead of have not) make us sound informal?
These are the sorts of editorial style decisions you’ll need to make when creating reports, website content, and other forms of written business communications. Consulting a dictionary or reference book isn’t practical, because style questions don’t have just one right answer and you may waste a lot of time trying to decide what works for you. That’s why you need standards—an editorial style guide—and perhaps a freelance editor, too. Read More
Fill in the blanks: “Instead of reading this, I should be______”. Yes, you’re probably procrastinating: postponing doing what you should be doing only to do other things, useful or useless.
Procrastination is not the same as laziness, which is the lack of action. Procrastination is often packed with action. And when you’re a PhD student, procrastination disguises itself as busywork—what looks like work, feels like work, but is not useful work—more often than you think. Here’s an example of how a PhD student procrastinates. Read More
Everybody makes typos—just remember to proofread your document before publishing it. You never know what misspellings you may find, because sometimes keystrokes conspire to create hilarious expressions such as these: Read More
The best academic writing books are those you’ll refer to throughout your time in academia. They become your desk’s permanent residents and give you reassurance when you are struggling to write a paper, report, or thesis.
To make it easier for you to discover those books, I’ve created this list. As with many other lists of the best academic writing books, mine too is bound to be subjective. But I hope it helps anyway. My list comprises not only books about academic writing but also books on nonfiction writing that would benefit anyone who writes scholarly texts. Read More
A team member asked me: “When you use quotes, where does the period go: before or after the quotation marks? How about the other punctuation marks, do they go inside or outside quotes?”
The rules of punctuation with quotation marks depend on whether you follow the American or British convention. Here’s a more detailed explanation of these conventions, as well as examples of punctuation with quotation marks in a sentence. Read More
I was born in Bucharest, Romania, and learned English when I was 11 years old. Two decades later I became a freelance English editor.
When I was a fledgling research scientist, I didn’t know there was such a thing as a freelance English editor or proofreader. Only publishers had copyeditors and proofreaders on staff, I thought. Research scientists who had manuscripts in need of revision didn’t hire freelance English editors. They asked a colleague whose first language was English to review their drafts. That’s what people around me were doing. I didn’t. I should have. Read More
