I don’t usually talk about popular culture on this website, but The Sheep Detectives just did one of the most original takes on neurodivergence I’ve seen in fiction. For background, the movie is about a group of sheep who take it upon themselves to solve the murder of their beloved Read more…
This year, I decided to earn some of my BELS maintenance points by brute force: An epic reread of the AMA Manual of Style. For my hiking readers, this is like doing an AT Northbound but with copyright law and specialized punctuation rules instead of Springer, Washington, and Katahdin. Like Read more…
Live editors can find the gold test stone. Right now, LLM AI can’t. Much of my time as a scientific editor and proofreader has focused on authors who speak English as a subsequent language.* Given that the people who hire proofreaders are usually the ones who need them, I often Read more…
I just saw a posting for scientific editing that offered US$18/hour. It called for a PhD. It’s no longer accepting applications, and I dearly hope it’s because they’ve figured out what was wrong with their request. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen something like this. I once went through Read more…
Academic writing in the hard sciences values clarity over poetry, even in contexts in which most other forms of English writing do not. This means that not all common writing advice applies. A middle school teacher once told a young me not to use the same verb in three sentences Read more…