Think before you write

Or at least review.

A cure for glowing skin

If you have glowing skin, this magazine has a cure for it.

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Consistency is key

As an editor, you don’t always need to be an expert to know that something is wrong.

The owl family

If a piece contains internal contradictions, query it.

Strigi- or Stringi- ?

Often you can just check public references to find the correct form.

The "Strigis" have it

“”Strix” was the Latin word for owl. Ironically, it comes from the Greek word “strinx,” or screecher.

Who’s shooting whom?

It’s important in technical documentation to be clear about who does what. It’s also important in news reporting. One of my pet peeves is this kind of headline from the Montreal Gazette:

The headline is ambiguous; but this is the first article about the crime, so you can read the first paragraph to find out that the police were the ones who fired carelessly into a public street and killed someone who was merely walking to work.

In later articles, the phrase “police shooting” will appear again and it will be harder to find out if the crime is shooting of police or by police. This kind of writing should be outlawed!

Say what?

Part of checking your work is reading it over one last time before it’s published—or you can get something like this!

Incoherent headline

“Whale knocks out 13-year-old Drew Hall fishing Australian boy with tail.” There’s a string of unorganized details here.  I’m not even sure whom the tail belongs to, grammatically.

This looks as if some text might have been dragged out of place by cursor. I always try to disable drag-and-drop text editing: it’s too easy to do by accident.

Lulled by the familiar

One of the pitfalls of editing is to use the wrong word because it’s familiar and so, to us, it looks right. This one leaped out at me right away.

List of films in Cosmic Cinema Film Series

So I checked the details….

A Carl Sagan film!

What’s wrong with that description?

For the answer, see below the fold.

Dear CBC: These are not the Vancouver Canucks

The folk on the street are not the team

The CBC took short-forming a little too far when it labelled a crowd of sports hooligans, some in Vancouver hockey jerseys, as “Vancouver Canucks.”

That’s “Vancouver Canucks fans,” if you please.