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.Â
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!Â
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. Â
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:Â
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.Â
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.
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