Editing

Let’s start with the basics — what are prepositions? A preposition is a word that governs, and usually precedes, a noun or pronoun and expresses a relation to another word or element.

It could be that most of you will skip this article and think that I am teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, but these errors are appearing more frequently in the manuscripts I edit, so I thought I’d use this page to highlight them.

Why do so many people insist that you can’t split infinitives in English? Are they right? Does it bother you? Is it something that we even need to consider?

Let’s start with the basics – what are prepositions? A preposition is a word that governs, and usually precedes, a noun or pronoun and expresses a relation to another word or element.

In most situations there is no difficulty in deciding whether a subject takes a singular or plural form. However, there are situations that cause problems.

Over the summer, I edited an academic book about waste management. I know it doesn’t sound that enthralling, but it did have some interesting information. It also made me think about my assumptions of what is clear and will be understood by readers.

Before I started writing and editing professionally I was aware that there were different types of dashes but I wasn’t sure when and where to use them.

Commas are not usually considered to be problematic, perhaps we take them too much for granted.

One of the first things I was told as a trainee technical author was that I should write in the active not the passive.

At the risk of “teaching my grandmother to suck eggs”, this is the first of a series of articles about using the right word.