A feeling of anticipatory relish that comes with making a fresh new style sheet for a new client

god I am such a tragic nerd

#AcademicEditing

Ah, I’ve just finished doing really badly at really basic #Duolingo #Italian and needing several rounds of practice to replenish my ‘hearts’ just to flounder through a lesson

Now, time to fussily correct the English grammar of an Italian-born PhD candidate writing complex philosophical arguments in his second language!

#AcademicEditing

ah, nothing says 'a wild Friday night' like sending a senior games-studies academic a pedantry email about citation styles in game studies

Sometimes I feel like it's both my superpower and my most abject, embarrassing weakness that 'getting citation right' matters so much to me

#AcademicEditing

New video: Building LaTeX Tables from Spreadsheet — https://www.wordsbywes.ink/articles/tools/building-latex-tables-from-spreadsheets/

Sometimes it's helpful to build a LaTeX table from data residing in a spreadsheet like Excel or Google Sheets. This video walks through an example of how I do that.

#TeXLaTeX #Editing #AcademicEditing #AcademicWriting

Because I think citation management software is garbage that introduces extra data-entry errors and unwanted background code into your work, I have only just learned of the existence of #CiteULike, a free service that allowed people to share their academic reference lists like other social bookmarking sites

It used bookmarklets to automatically pull metadata from the most common databases

It shut down in 2019 because it was free and independent of any owner or publisher

Apparently the URL is some trash gambling site now

I found out about it while trying to add missing bibliographic details to my client's reference list by following a URL they had listed, which was a CiteULike URL

#AcademicEditing

Another coup of #AcademicEditing! The author has once again failed to write down the page range of the book chapter they are citing, and I can't find a contents page with page numbers listed anywhere online.

However, WorldCat does give me a list of all the chapters in order, while Google Books' snippet view allows me to search phrases within the book

So I search for the chapter I want, get the page it starts on from Google Books, then search the next chapter, get the page that starts on,

et voilà, c'est le discours!

au moins selon Michel Foucault, le livre dont je n'ai pas trouvé les numéros de page

Can I just say I'm a fkn warrior of academic referencing for figuring out how to find a stable permalink and publication date for an individual Quora answer so I can include it in a citation

only to learn the author put it in their reference list without ever actually mentioning it in the text

#AcademicEditing

So many of the problems I have to fix in people's references are due to human error in bibliographic data entry – either by librarians or journal publishers inputting incorrect metadata when they add works to databases, or by authors not filling in all the right fields of their citation management software

e.g. Right now I'm looking at a citation for an online media article – super straightforward, but the academic has not included the name of the media outlet or the day and month the story was published, and the title of the article is italicised rather than in quote marks (which to me shows the academic has put it in the wrong field in their citation software)

This is a basic, basic academic skill and while I guess it's good for me as an academic editor that people are so bad at it, in another way it's a bit of a worry

#AcademicEditing

The next issue of my Notes on Editing newsletter goes out Monday with an update on my LaTeX for Academic Editors course and an overview of changing text size in Overleaf’s editor. Here’s the sign-up link if you want in: https://signup.wordsbywes.ink/notes-on-editing

#TeXLaTeX #Editing #AcademicEditing

The next issue of my Notes on Editing newsletter goes out Monday with an update on my LaTeX for Academic Editors course and an overview of changing text size in Overleaf’s editor. Here’s the sign-up link if you want in: https://signup.wordsbywes.ink/notes-on-editing

#TeXLaTeX #Editing #AcademicEditing @edibuddies

Holy shit, #UQ already has a #ChatGPT #citation protocol in place, which I stumbled across just now

In addition to this master page, each style guide they publish mentions how to integrate ChatGPT outputs and makes it super clear that you have to clear your use of ChatGPT with your lecturer

#AcademicWriting #AcademicEditing

https://guides.library.uq.edu.au/referencing/chatgpt-and-generative-ai-tools

sometimes I feel a little sad for the lowly co-authors way, way down the list who never get their names mentioned in citations

I can call you Ibid
And Ibid when you call me
You can call me Et Al.

#StupidAcademicSongs
#AcademicEditing

I have converted my standard Editing Style Notes document that I produce for my #editing clients into a Google Doc (it used to be a rich text file)

I don’t know why I didn’t do this earlier; maybe I was worried that not everyone uses Google Docs so it wasn’t as accessible. But then the client does not need to edit this doc; they just need to view it.

Having it online allows me to create a navigable index on the left as the document outline, plus internal links to cross-reference between sections (“see Figures and Tables”)

Plus it’s super easy for me to update at any time so the client always has the latest version

Ah well. As we academic editors say, “every day’s a school day”

#AcademicEditing

The first issue of my new newsletter, Notes on Editing, goes out Monday morning. It has an update on my upcoming LaTeX for Academic Editors course and an overview of how I use PerfectIt for LaTeX manuscripts. Sign up here if you’d like to get it: https://signup.wordsbywes.ink/notes-on-editing

#AcademicEditing #PerfectIt #TexLaTeX #LaTeX #NoTheOtherLatex @edibuddies

Thanks to everyone who shared and was present, and to the organisers!

@EditorsCanada @edibuddies @editors

#AmEditing #AcademicEditing #rates

Am behind several weeks on #writing even though it's just for my #blog due to illness. It's very frustrating. Am trying to get everything in line in order to launch into #academicediting as a #freelance agent but I could barely get out of bed for more than six hours per day this week.

Husband and I have joked that #chronicillness / #chronicfatigue is a #curse without known origin in the dastardly plans of some wizard. I'm sick of the damsel role, plz someone get my archnemesis to quit it.

Important reading on use of the phrase 'sub-Saharan Africa'. Coming to this rather late, but it's bugged me a lot and now I know why. #AcWri and #AcademicEditing can do better.

Geographically inaccurate and confusing: https://qz.com/africa/770350/why-do-we-still-say-subsaharan-africa

Rooted in divisive, racist thought: https://www.africanexponent.com/bpost/rethinking-the-term-sub-saharan-africa-36

H/t @BettyTekola
#AmEditing
#ConsciousLanguage

Important reading on use of the phrase 'sub-Saharan Africa'. Coming to this rather late, but it's bugged me a lot and now I know why. #AcWri and #AcademicEditing can do better.

Geographically inaccurate and confusing: https://qz.com/africa/770350/why-do-we-still-say-subsaharan-africa

Rooted in divisive, racist thought: https://www.africanexponent.com/bpost/rethinking-the-term-sub-saharan-africa-36

H/t @BettyTekola
#AmEditing
#ConsciousLanguage

Important reading on use of the phrase 'sub-Saharan Africa'. Coming to this rather late, but it's bugged me a lot and now I know why. #AcWri and #AcademicEditing can do better.

Geographically inaccurate and confusing: https://qz.com/africa/770350/why-do-we-still-say-subsaharan-africa

Rooted in divisive, racist thought: https://www.africanexponent.com/bpost/rethinking-the-term-sub-saharan-africa-36

H/t @BettyTekola
#AmEditing

I wish publishers would as a matter of course provide online tables of contents for all their edited books that include page ranges, for tired copyeditors who have to research this stuff because the page range is missing from the reference list

Some publishers do this and they are legends! Others do not. Whether this stuff is in library catalogues is kind of up to whether a librarian felt like they could be bothered on the day

#AcademicEditing #Bibliography #ResearchSkills