Writer, Editor, Helper

A Would-Be Anthropologist Looks at Trucker Lingo

Recently my brother let me ride with him for a week of long-haul trucking in his eighteen-wheeler. Who hasn’t ever wanted to do that? It’s been a dream of mine from the time I was little and was thrilled by The Big Red Pajama Wagon, by Mary Elting, in which pretty much nothing happens but which thrilled me anyway.

A week in which nothing happens is the trucker’s goal, it turns out. And Tom is a relative novice, having taken up trucking a few months ago after twenty years of teaching high school math. He’s learned that a great week is when you don’t back over a street light, pick up the wrong load, or nearly flatten a sports car that brakes in front of your 50,000 pounds doing 60 mph.

Can You Read This? (or, Is Cursive Dead Yet?)

 

 

As far back as the early 1990s, I thought that any school curriculum lacking instruction in typing was shortsighted. Had I been asked to jettison cursive writing to make room for keyboarding, however, I would have been surprised and doubtful. But today that is exactly what has happened in many elementary-school classrooms. Already, we hear, there are high-school and college students who when asked to read memos in longhand might as well be asked to read Linear B.

Typographic Book Covers

In a recent post about the timing of cover design in the publication process, I mentioned a colleague’s comment that typographic covers have the potential to wow just as much as those that feature a photograph or other illustrative art. To learn more, I put some questions to some design and marketing professionals.

Will Your Citations Pass or Fail?

Photo by Manuel Bahamondez H

When an academic book manuscript is under contract and comes to my department for copyediting, it undergoes an initial review by the assistant managing editor (yours truly) before assignment. If I find any major problems, I send the manuscript back to the acquiring editor, who returns it to the author for what is probably not the first round of revision but is hopefully* the last.

Things have to be pretty awful for that to happen. After all, copyeditors expect to do a lot of cleaning up; it’s our job to sort out problems, both written (renumbering figures, correcting totals in table columns, realphabetizing bibliographies, editing notes to a consistent style, conforming tables of contents to the actual contents) and electronic (removing formats, combining or separating files, adding paragraph indents, removing hot links, taking out extra spaces and tabs).

I’ve written before about standard citation styles and the reasons for observing them. Today I’ll give examples of some notes and bibliographies that have passed muster and some that haven’t.