If you don’t know about Proofed’s Writing Tips blog, you should! It’s a wonderful resource on all things writing. I recently wrote content for this blog, and below is a roundup of the posts I authored. Some (or all) of the topics may be useful to you if you’re an English language learner, a student, a researcher, an editor, a writer, or a fellow linguistics nerd.
You may have heard the expression “like a bull in a china shop.” But what does this mean? And where does this saying come from? We’ll answer these questions in this post.
To understand this expression, it’s useful to first consider the word “china.” In this case, we’re talking about dinnerware, not the People’s Republic of China—although there is a connection between the two.
Pottery includes articles such as dinnerware that are made from clay and fired at high temperatures. Porcelain is a particular type of pottery that uses different raw materials, glazes, and temperatures. Porcelain has a tougher texture than most pottery, although you wouldn’t want to drop it on your tile floor! Porcelain is more transparent and has a finer luster. Because porcelain originated in China, people historically referred to it as “china.” To this day, the term still refers to porcelain dinnerware.
A “china shop,” therefore, is a fragile place—one that requires a bit of awareness. So, to be “like a bull in a china shop” means:
to fail to show sensitivity in a situation that requires it
to be clumsy or aggressive in a delicate situation
to do damage in a social or physical sense due to ignorance or callousness
The phrase first appeared in 1834, in Frederick Marryat’s novel Jacob Faithful. It may have been used before that, since Aesop’s (620-564 BCE) writings include a similar metaphor: an ass in a potter’s shop.
If you use this phrase in your writing, you’ll want to lowercase the word “china” because it is a common noun. You’d capitalize the word when referring to the country of China, as that is a proper noun. For example:
The three-year-old boy was like a bull in a china shop, running and playing wildly among the rows of antique furniture.
Relations between China and Australia have deteriorated in recent years.
Now that you’ve reviewed the meaning, history, and use of the phrase “like a bull in a china shop,” hopefully you’ll find an opportunity to work it into a sentence soon.
And if you need a professional editor to check your work, we can help! Give us a call or send us a message today.
The first time I saw Hamilton, I was blown away by the sweeping story, the diverse casting, the brilliant lyrics, the incredible music, the knockout choreography, my leaping emotions in response—how much it inspires. I had all the big feels. If that weren’t enough, a small detail regarding punctuation captured my editor’s attention. Perhaps you noticed it too. The brilliant Angelica sings:
In a letter I received from you two weeks ago
I noticed a comma in the middle of a phrase
It changed the meaning. Did you intend this?
One stroke and you’ve consumed my waking days
It says:
“My dearest, Angelica”
With a comma after “dearest.”
You’ve written
“My dearest, Angelica”
Ooh, things just got interesting. What’s going to happen here? After all, Hamilton’s married to Angelica’s s-i-s-t-e-r, Eliza! When Angelica first meets Hamilton, she feels an electric current. But her sister also loves Hamilton, and as the oldest, Angelica knows she would be expected to marry rich. This combination leads her to put her own feelings aside and yield to her sister’s desires. But did she really put those feelings aside? She’s thinking about that comma a lot.
You see it, right?
Perhaps you don’t, and if so, you’re not the only one.Most people don’t think too much about commas.
How could a little comma stir the blood so?
If Hamilton had simply written “My dearest Angelica” (without the comma), it would have been a warm, though ordinary, form of address. He might have addressed anyone this way to be polite and congenial.
Dearest is a superlative word, like the word “favorite.” It is the highest in its category. To use a comma before a particular name in conjunction with a superlative is to set that person apart and assign the category to them alone. To say “My dearest, Angelica” (with a comma after dearest) is to say that out of all the beating hearts in this world, Angelica is the dearest to him of all.
Mercy! It does make you wonder what was going on there.
How good is Lin Manuel Miranda, who quickens our hearts with the stroke of a comma?
I’ve been very quiet on my editing blog lately. That’s because I have, in the last six months, moved with my family of five from Australia to… Japan!
It’s a move we made with mixed emotions, as we loved Australia and were fortunate to live in the most wonderful community there. A bit of my heart will always be a little Australian as a result of the time we spent there. But, as a friend so aptly said before we left, the only constant in life is change. Too true. The change involved in moving from Australia to Japan has been whopping! But I’m grateful for the life experience and the learning involved.
We’re part of an American community in Japan, and after being out of the country for 3.5 years, I sometimes feel as though I’m visiting two foreign countries at once. I’m seeing my country of origin with fresh eyes, and obviously much about life in Japan is different for me. I love to learn, so I’m very much in my element.
All in all, we’re adjusting quite well. Seeing more of this amazing world is a privilege I don’t take lightly. Since December, we’ve been more than a little busy getting the basic building blocks of our lives in place: housing, schools for the kids, household goods, work. The food is delicious, the people are unfailingly kind and helpful, the geography is beautiful, and we’re slowly getting involved in our community. We’re all learning a bit of Japanese (though we’d be in serious trouble without the Google Translate app.)
For work, I’ve been teaching English to a wonderful group of adult Japanese students. I’ll also soon begin teaching university writing at a local American university, and I am still editing! I joined the editing team at Proofed, Inc., which has been valuable experience. I’m part of a team that edits career-related articles received from CopyPress for publication on indeed.com.We edit work for a number of markets and dialects, including the UK, Australia, Canada, India, and Singapore. Here’s one example:
That’s my big update! I don’t plan to move continents (anytime soon), so I hope not to ignore my editing blog for such a long stretch again. If you have editing-related topics you’d like to see me address in this space, please drop me a message to let me know. I’d love to provide some useful content to you.
How you punctuate an abbreviated title (e.g., Mr., Mrs., Rev., Dr., Prof.) depends on the dialect of your client and the dialect of the audience reading the text.
The first proofreading job I did in Australia, I noticed that most of the abbreviated titles in the document didn’t have periods (full stops) after them. I wanted to turn every Dr into Dr., until I learned there was no need to do so. In Australia and the UK, abbreviated titles are treated differently than they are in the US.
In American English, titles are always followed by periods (full stops).
Rev. Richards and Mrs. Gomez are dining with Prof. Osteen.
In British and Australian English, titles are only followed by periods (full stops) if they are missing the final letter of the full word:
Rev. Richards and Mrs Gomez are dining with Prof. Osteen.
Here, we hang on to the periods (full stops) in Rev. and Prof. because these abbreviations are short for Reverend (“v” is not the last letter of reverend) and Professor (“f” is not the last letter of professor.) We refrain from adding a period (full stop) from Mrs as this abbreviation ends in the same letter as the spelled-out word (mistress).
There’s a Bird in Your Hands! is a story of two magical creatures who teach kids how to keep germs away through an imaginative handwashing method. It teaches children to turn their hands into the shape of a bird by placing their thumbs together and laying their fingers out like wings. The story then walks children through the process of thoroughly washing the “bird” in a memorable and magical way that kids love. The whimsical rhymes make this an engaging read aloud story that is colorful, entertaining, and educational!
Project Gutenberg is a website dedicated to making out-of-print, non-copyrighted books available again to the public via e-books—and completely free! Currently there are over sixty thousand e-books available on the site.
Project Gutenberg is run entirely by volunteers. Once volunteers hunt down old books, they’re scanned in and converted into e-books. Before the books are turned into e-books for the public, Project Gutenberg relies on Distributed Proofreaders to help proofread the text.
I volunteer time to this worthy project in order to build additional proofreading experience.
Check out this organization! It’s a great resource for book lovers.
Metalinguistic awareness—the fancy term for a person’s ability to consciously reflect on the nature of language—is essential to those of us who work with words. Wordsmiths should always be learning. It takes a posture of humility, active engagement, and plenty of practice to master skills. That’s why specialized training, ongoing education, and shiny new certificates are a few of my favorite things.
I’ve taken two courses this year to sharpen my editing skills that I’m quite pleased with.
The first was a course in General Proofreading from Proofread Anywhere. This course offered hands-on practice in the major types of errors that proofreaders need to catch, including capitalization, apostrophes, hyphens, semicolons, commas, subject/verb agreement, question marks, italics, noun/pronoun agreement, numbers, commonly misused words, and American vs. British spelling variations.
As part of this training, I proofed fifty practice essays in different genres on a variety of topics. I completed additional practice workouts offered by the Chicago Manual of Style to deepen my familiarity with this style guide. It was an excellent investment and has been a source of networking and industry knowledge, to boot. To earn my certificate, a 90% or above on the course exam was required.
Behold, my beautiful certificate.
The second worthwhile course I took this year was Grammar Lion’s Grammar Refresher. Deepening my knowledge of grammar behooves me as an editor and a teacher of English. This course covers:
parts of speech
mixed up words
contractions and possessives
subjects and predicates
sentence fragments
run-on sentences
standard verb forms
pronouns
agreement
shifts in person, tense and structure
clarity, concision, diction and logic
capitalization and punctuation
I really appreciated instructor Ellen Feld’s accessible way of presenting these concepts with clarity.
I recommend both of these courses for writers and editors.
Have you taken any good courses lately? I’d love to hear about them.
Recent Comments