I recently was part of a small group affiliated with my church that read The Power to Change by Craig Groeschel, which was published earlier this year.

I had been intrigued by the title of the book because I am one of those people who keep trying to change their undesirable habits and traits but never seem to succeed. In fact, for a while I gave up on changing the off-putting parts of myself, giving the excuse, “I can’t remake myself. Why should I try? God loves me just the way I am and I accept myself for who I am.”

Those are lame excuses.

Craig Groeschel, a pastor from Oklahoma, writes in a very clear, down-to-earth way that makes his book actually fun to read. He often throws in a story about, for example, his adventures or misadventures at the gym, or a news account of a Kansas woman who sat on a toilet for two years. Groeschel avoids using fancy “SAT words” in his writing, opting instead for language most people can understand.

He gives the reader a ton of information and ideas, so for the rest of this post, I will focus on the points I took home.

Why do I do what I do? asks Groeschel. Because of who I am. If I want to get rid of a bad habit or start a new, good habit, I have to look at myself and my own personality and figure out why I do what I’ve been doing for a long time.

Changing requires discipline, which no one seems to like. However, according to Groeschel, I should look at it this way: Discipline is choosing what you want most over what you want now. For example, let’s say I want to get in shape by going to the gym every morning. However, when my alarm goes off at 5:00 am, I want to hit snooze and get some extra sleep. The extra sleep is what I want now. But what I want most is to get in shape. If I go to the gym and deny myself the extra sleep, I am practicing discipline.

To get rid of a bad habit, I have to remove the cues—the things that start me doing it. This was probably the most challenging part of the book for me. I am still figuring out how to remove certain cues that make me fall into a bad habit. I have a bad habit of yelling that I hate everyone when I am angry. (I do this as a substitute for cursing. I don’t curse. The habit is still bad, though.) But which cues do I remove? I cannot avoid anger in my life, just as nobody can.

I definitely would recommend this book, even to people who don’t think they have to change. It is helpful, yet very entertaining.

Would you care to share what you have been reading lately?

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?

Hello, dear reader.

Tonight, I spent a good hour crafting a post for you. Then I read it and decided that (A) it would most likely bore you to death, (B) it may have violated copyright laws, and (C) I just plain didn’t like it.

Therefore, since it is very late at night, I have much work to do this week, and I am dealing with a personal issue, I regret to inform you that there will be no blog post this week. I plan to return a week from now.

In the meantime, I wish you a good and safe week.

When I was a senior in high school back in the early 1990s, my family did not have a personal computer. Many families did not. I attended a rather wealthy school and some of the students did have computers in their homes. These students wrote their assigned papers on word processing platforms that seem primitive today: WordPerfect and WordStar, to name two.

So what did I do?

I wrote my papers on a Smith Corona electronic typewriter with which my parents gifted me the summer before my senior year. And, more than 30 years later, I am highly grateful to them for doing so.

I loved my typewriter. It hammered the characters on the paper in what was then called Pica type (similar to what Courier New is on MS Word today). I could set it to either single space or double space the lines. The ribbon cartridge was easy enough to replace that my all-thumbs self could do it. And—this was the best part—I could correct errors on a line by pressing a key which activated a correction feature (best described as a hammer striking a character though a whiteout ribbon), so that as long as I kept my eyes on what was forming on the paper, I could use that feature to erase my mistakes.

I remember typing not only papers for my high school English and psychology classes with the typewriter, but also my college applications and, years later, my graduate school applications. Oh, how I hated having to perfectly line up the paper so that my characters did not go uphill or downhill on the application lines. However, I managed to do it right.

I even typed a few of my job applications. Of course, by the time I was in the “real world,” I filled out applications online most of the time, but there were some times when an application was a hard copy and would read, “PLEASE PRINT OR TYPE.” Handwrite a job application? Certainly not I!

The last time I used the typewriter was in 2017, when I filled out a job application which was a hard copy, and I did not even think twice about typing it. I was one of six applicants who got an interview, out of more than 20. I later learned that many of the applicants had handwritten their applications.

I still have the typewriter and it sits on a shelf in my office. I refuse to part with it until it needs a new ribbon cartridge; those are no longer made or sold.

Do you have an “old,” treasured piece of equipment that you used in your writing or editing?

As I mentioned in last week’s post, graduate school is often extremely stressful for a master’s or PhD candidate. It was for me when I was working on my master’s degree in biochemistry. The experiments, while highly interesting, were often grueling. I recall one in which I measured the growth of baker’s yeast over a twelve-hour period, which involved taking measurements every hour or so for twelve hours. Yes, that meant I slept at my desk in the lab between measurements and had an alarm next to me.

But I digress. For many graduate students, the most difficult part of the road is the writing of their thesis or dissertation. For some students, English is a foreign language and they have some difficulty with it. For others, writing in general has always been a struggle.

This is why scientific theses and dissertations are among the things that I edit. If you clicked on the “About” tab on my website, you know that writing my thesis was my favorite part of my master’s project. And I loved editing my own writing when I was working on it. It goes without saying that I love editing the writing of others as well.

My first client whom I did not know personally was a master’s candidate at a well-known research university. Her project was fascinating, but her English needed some help, as it was not her first language. I edited her thesis and got high accolades from both the student and her faculty adviser. The student successfully defended her thesis and earned her master’s degree.

The most important thing to do right after a student contacts you is ask for their adviser’s name and email address, and then get a written document saying that the student has the adviser’s permission to have the thesis or dissertation edited. If a student does not have such permission and you are a party to editing their paper, everyone involved will be in trouble, including you.

Graduate students in the sciences are the next generation of researchers and professors, and it is good to look at them as such. If you are aiding the next generation, it rather makes you feel good.

I don’t often post about current events here, but the August 28 shooting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill really struck me.

Having heard about it only on TV and the internet, I cannot even say that I am very educated about it. I know that second-year graduate student Tailei Qi shot his faculty adviser, Zijie Yan, and that the hand gun Qi used has yet to be found. I also know that Yan, who was married with at least one child, did not survive, and that Qi has appeared in court and is in jail.

Sadly, I also know that students and faculty had to shelter in place for hours that dreadful Monday. I read the many texts that were on the front page of The Daily Tar Heel which bared their terror and fear.

I believe Qi should receive the maximum sentence allowable.

I was a graduate student in the hard sciences back in the 1990s and I know how difficult such a life is. Graduate school is very stressful and can be cutthroat for many students. It can also often be very discouraging. But these are not excuses for getting a gun from who-knows-where and committing a horrific crime.

Could Qi have handled the situation—whatever it exactly was—differently? Of course.

If he was struggling in his program (and I’m not saying he was), he could have gone to the chair of his department and discussed what was going on, and hopefully the department chair would help him make arrangements that would create a more favorable situation for him.

If the chair was not willing to do this, Qi could have just done the best he could. Sometimes that is what one has to do. When I was in graduate school, I did the best I could and let the chips fall where they did. This is why I ended up scoring high enough on my comprehensive exams (given at the end of the first year in the program I was in) to continue as a master’s candidate, but not a doctoral candidate. In the end, a master’s degree was better for me personally.

Of course, guns could be made less accessible and controlled more, but I will not get into my feelings about that.