Resources for writers and editors

Help with hiring a freelance editor

From the Editors’ Association of Canada:

• Definitions of Editorial Skills: find out what kind of editing you need.
• Professional Editorial Standards: a detailed description of what an editor can be expected to do at each level of editing.
• Find an editor through the online directory of editors.

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.

• Editors’ Association of Canada: has branches throughout Canada. Members can advertise through the online directory of members.
• Society for Editors and Proofreaders: based in the U.K. Has a listing of members.
• American Copy Editors Society offers news and information, some good resources, and a job mailing list that’s open to non-members.

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 It recently disappeared off their website (temporarily, they say) so I’ve linked to an archived version.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

• Peck’s English Pointers: A collection of clear and entertaining articles on English grammar, punctuation, usage, and clarity. Most sections include a short quiz.
• The Writer’s Toolbox from Geist Magazine
• George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language”
• Excerpt from William Zinsser’s book On Writing Well
• The Victory Page for Fiction Writers has some useful resources. She has a handy document on how to punctuate dialogue and use speech tags.

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

• Book News Online from the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival has news about books and writers, and a schedule of events happening in Vancouver. Read it online or subscribe.

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.