Hello, dear reader.

It is now 10:49 PM on Sunday and I must get up in a little more than six hours. I have had an incredibly busy weekend, during which I traveled to my mother’s residence to help her with some things with which the elderly often need assistance. That is not the only endeavor I tackled, either. All of this to say that I regret that I will not be able to write a new post this week. I am so sorry, but my mental health is important to me, as I hope yours is to you.

Be well and have an excellent week.

I am going to perform a public service today. I’m going to write about scams that are going around.

Specifically, I am going to write about two different scams through which some unkind soul has attempted to defraud me. I am writing this as a warning so that you, dear reader, will be aware of these scams.

The most recent scam I have gotten is one in which I receive a phone call and do not answer (because I never answer any number I do not know), but the “caller” leaves a voicemail message. When I play the message, the first thing I always hear is the first few seconds of Chopin’s “Minute Waltz.” The music is then followed by a very robotic-sounding female voice saying, “This is Amazon. There has been a purchase on your Amazon account for $1,499 for an Apple MacBook Pro. If you did not authorize this charge, press 1 to speak to a customer service representative.”

Had I answered the call and pressed 1, I would have been connected to someone masquerading as a “customer service representative” who would have told me my Amazon account was hacked and that he/she needed all this information from me, such as my credit card number, bank account number, Social Security number, and who knows what else.

If you get this phone call, hang up. If a voicemail like the one I just described is left on your phone, delete it. In either case, check your Amazon account on the legitimate Amazon site. Chances are, the “fraudulent purchase” won’t be there.

The other recent scam I have gotten involves an email pretending to be from PayPal. It looks just like an invoice and says that you have spent a large amount of money on an expensive product. At the bottom, the “invoice” lists a phone number which you are supposed to call if you did not make this purchase.

The clues that the invoice is fake are that the invoice is poorly written in terms of grammar and punctuation and the phone number on it contains missing punctuation, such as 1800-555-5309 instead of 1-800-555-5309 (did you catch the missing hyphen?). If you are unfortunate enough to fall for the scam and call the number, you will be connected to a “customer service representative” who will ask to control your computer in order to “help” you. Never give anyone control of your computer. There are a lot of mean people out there in cyberspace, so please be vigilant.

If you are a copyeditor like I am, you know about style sheets and why they are important. (And if you are a copyeditor and you don’t know about them, immediately sign up for Lourdes Venard’s Copyediting: Beginning course through the Editorial Freelancers Association!)

Style sheets are somewhat difficult to explain. Basically, they serve as a memory aid, helping you remember the rules of working on a certain document. A dictionary and a style guide, such as APA or Chicago, lay down the rules, while a style sheet helps you remember them.

A style guide is already made, while a style sheet is something you make.

“What do you put on a style sheet?” you might ask.

For me, the most important thing on a style sheet is the hyphenation of a word or term. Hyphens are my nemesis, as I have probably said before. If I see a hyphenated term and have to look it up in Merriam-Webster or Collins Dictionary to see if it is really supposed to be hyphenated, the correct term (according to the dictionary) gets put on the style sheet. In this way, the next time I see that term in the document, I can look at my style sheet to see if it is correct. This saves me the pain of having to go back to the dictionary to look it up again (and saves my clients money).

Words that are new to me get added to the style sheet as well, so that the style sheet can tell me how to spell them. Abbreviations are also an important thing to put on a style sheet (along with the words for which they stand).

This past week, I edited a document which had quite a few medical and pharmacological terms and abbreviations. Each term went onto my style sheet. I cannot tell you how much time my style sheet saved me.

People say that my memory is very good; if I may brag a little, my memory is better than average. However, even a superior memory is no substitute for a well-kept style sheet. Don’t rely on your brain; trust your style sheet.

If you are a copyeditor, what kinds of terms do you always put on your style sheets?

As a professional editor, I love when I learn new things on the computer and master them. I even love when I am in the process of learning new things before I master them.

Lately, I have been learning how to edit with Adobe Acrobat DC. Specifically, how to edit PDFs (Portable Document Format files) with it. Can I just say I love it?

In my early years as a fledgling editor, I did not know how to work directly on PDFs. If I wanted to edit a furniture catalog which was given to me in PDF form, I had to create a Word document and list all the issues page by page, section by section:

“LOUNGE: Page 32: Please insert a comma after ‘table.’”

“DINING: Page 11: Please avoid hyphenating adverbial compounds containing -ly.”

Not fun. Very tedious. And, worst of all, inefficient.

Enter Acrobat DC.

I first heard of Acrobat near the end of graduate school when I was writing my master’s thesis. It was 1998 and student capstone papers were just starting to be stored on computers rather than as hard copies. Since I and the other graduate students in my department knew nothing about how to convert Word files to PDFs, Acrobat had to be used to do so, and the departmental computer guru had to do it for us. (In the present day, any computer worth its salt can make a PDF out of a Word file.) Back then, Acrobat seemed like a foreign concept to me. “I only work in Word,” I thought. “Acrobat must be what the big kids use!”

Apparently, I am growing up, because I have started to edit PDFs directly in Acrobat.

I do not know much yet about editing in Acrobat because I just started to do so. I have become good with the “sticky notes,” which is how one inserts comments in a PDF. I love navigating my tiny comment balloon to the exact place on the PDF with the offending typo or missing comma or grammatical mistake and clicking once to expand it to a balloon in which I can type, “Please insert a comma after ‘table,’” or “Please delete the hyphen in ‘lightly tinted’ and avoid hyphenating adverbial compounds containing -ly.”

The best thing about being able to do this is not, believe it or not, that it eliminates the tedium of using a Word document and having to click back and forth between it and the PDF (although getting rid of that is definitely a plus). The best thing is that using Acrobat is much more efficient. I am all about efficiency in my work and that is why I learned macros a year ago. It is also why I was thrilled when I discovered how to edit in Acrobat.

If you are an editor or writer, what tools make you more efficient?

My love of editing came from my love of writing.

And my love of writing came from my love of reading.

I have always loved to read.

My mother taught me to read when I was around three years old. She noticed my curiosity about the letters on my alphabet blocks and invested in a set of magnetic letters—the kind one places on the refrigerator—and a Fisher-Price miniature schoolhouse with a magnetic roof on which to place the letters. She then showed me how to form different words with the letters: CAT, SAT, HAT, MAT…or SET, GET, WET…and so on. I remember how much fun that was.

My mother also read to me a great deal when I was preschool-aged. We took frequent trips to the local library to check out books. As I recall, my favorite was Peter Rabbit. I have wonderful memories of my mother reading that Beatrix Potter masterpiece to me. My eyes still get misty when I see a can of Enfamil with the drawings of Peter Rabbit’s family on it. (I find it revolting that Hollywood made a hyperactive children’s movie out of that book that, to my understanding, had nothing to do with the story.)

My love of books extended into my elementary years, when there were times when I would go over to a friend’s house and, instead of playing with Barbie dolls like my friend wanted to do, I would pull a book off of her shelf and start reading it. (Great social skills, eh?)

Fast forward more than 40 years. I am currently reading The Power to Change by Craig Groeschel, Rising Sun by Michael Crichton, and various passages in the Bible, plus all of the work that I am editing. And I could not be happier about it.

What are some of your earliest memories of reading?