Eva van Emden
Freelance Editor and Proofreader
eva@vancouvereditor.com
Resources for writers and editors
Help with hiring a freelance editor
From the
Editors’ Association of Canada:
Editors’ organizations
These editors’ associations offer support for both freelance and in-house editors, including training, accreditation, advocacy, help finding jobs, annual conferences, and professional development.
Dictionaries
- Dictionaries: Oxford (U.K. spelling); Merriam-Webster (U.S. spelling); as far as I know,
there’s no free online version of the Canadian
Oxford. These student dictionaries at Word Central
(Merriam) and Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary give
useful information about grammar.
- The Canadian Oxford, 2nd Edition, is often used as the
spelling reference for Canadian English projects. Get the hardcover
version if you need to look up word breaks; it also has more detail in
the definitions.
- Both the Vancouver Public Library and the UVic library provide
their members with free online access to the full Oxford English
Dictionary, as well as a number of other amazing resources. See Vancouver Public Library and UVic
Library Databases.
Style guides and editing references
- Chicago Manual of Style: access to the online version costs a very
reasonable $35 a year, and there is a 30-day free trial available.
- Proofreaders’ marks: a short guide to the standard set of symbols used to proofread on paper.
- The Editors’ Association of Canada’s Editing Canadian English, 2nd Edition does a great job of describing editing issues that are specific to Canada. They have a very useful comparison of the spellings given by several major U.S., U.K., and Canadian dictionaries.
- The Economist Style Guide in the Internet Archive: This is a very complete online guide to Economist style. It recently disappeared off their website (temporarily, they say) so I’ve linked to an archived version.
- The Canadian Style: an online guide put out by the Bureau of Translation
- The Purdue Online Writing Lab Guide to APA
Formatting
- Subtleties of Scientific Style by Matthew
Stevens. Full text of a great book on writing clearly about
science.
- Scientific Style and Format
- The Elements of Editing by Arthur Plotnik. I
read and enjoyed this years ago, before I even considered getting into
editing. A short, very readable introduction to editing.
- The Subversive Copy Editor: both the blog
and the book by Carol Fisher Saller of Chicago University Press are
great. There is lots of concrete advice here on how to deal with
authors tactfully and productively, organize your work, use word
processors effectively, work with freelancers, be a freelancer, you
name it.
- Diagnostic
Grammar Test used by Ryerson University in their publishing
certificate program. Marking sheet.
Writing resources
Editing Fiction
- Characters & Viewpoint and How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy by Orson Scott Card. Lots of great advice on how to build a good story. Characters & Viewpoint is applicable to all fiction writing. I found the last section of the book, which deals with techniques used in the narrative voice, particularly useful. See his Writing Class online.
- TV Tropes: An entertaining and impressively thorough wiki about the patterns that appear in stories.
- The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist by Thomas
McCormack
- Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever
Need by Blake Snyder. A screenplay editor suggested that
the rules for writing a good story are similar for novels and
screenplays, so I thought it might be useful to learn about how to
write screenplays. Save the Cat is a fun read and provides some
interesting commentary on movie genres (“Monster in the
House,” “Institutionalized”) and structure (state
the theme on page 5). I’m sure lots of people consider his approach to
be too formulaic, but I believe it’s good to know the rules before you
can break them.
- Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee. This book has a lot of excellent content about the conflicts, themes, characters, and structure that makes a compelling story.
Book news
Free software
- OpenOffice.org is a free
alternative to MS Office. OpenOffice Writer has a track changes
feature, can save files as PDF, and can read and write a wide variety
of other word processor formats including docx.
- For graphics, the Gimp is a
free image manipulation program. It will do a lot of what Photoshop
does.