Wow! Amazing!

How else can I describe EFACON 2023 (also known as the 2023 Editorial Freelancers Association Conference in Alexandria, Virginia)?

I met so many cool people, many of whom I felt I already “knew” from the EFA Discussion List, but whose voices I had never heard before and whose faces I had never seen. The icebreaker games and the welcome reception the first night kicked off my getting to know people, and I clicked with quite a few of them (this is a big deal for me, given that I am an introvert). I also got to interact with fellow freelance editors at meals and before and after the keynote speeches and sessions. Many of these editors had substantial credentials and served as inspiration to me.

I volunteered at one of the sessions by assisting the speaker with my assigned room’s equipment. The training for this was very quick, and I was extremely thankful that the speaker in the room to which I was assigned was very tech-savvy and already knew how to connect her laptop to the PowerPoint projector. There was an issue with the “tricky” microphone, however, and I had to summon an employee from the event planning company to deal with this, but resolving the problem did not take long and did not delay the start of the session. God is good.

As for the other sessions I attended, they taught me an incredible amount of information. I learned about tools which detect plagiarism, the advantages and pitfalls of artificial intelligence (AI) in academic editing, different newsletters about academic editing to which I can (and will) subscribe, how volunteering can help me network, and lots of advice on how to run a business. I gave out my business card many times and received several cards in return; I have already written a “hello, it was great meeting you” email to each of the editors whose card I collected.

Would you believe that I am already getting busier? What a great sign!

A calendar is a tool that is essential for everybody. This is why I was taught how to use one in first grade.

Once I mastered the use of a standard month-to-month calendar, I fell in love with the concept. I loved knowing which day of week, month, and day it was. It seemed as if every day had its own name and personality. The days were like little people to me.

As I grew up, I learned to use calendars to plan ahead. The little squares (or big squares) could tell me when that important paper was due and how much time I had to work on it. I could break down the entire task into pieces and assign each piece to a square (i.e., day). Since I am a visual learner, using a calendar to do this made things much easier.

Now that I am an editor, I prefer using a weekly planner. You probably already know this, but a weekly planner is a calendar that shows each week on two pages. I like such planners because each day’s space gives me plenty of room to write—much more than a little square on a wall calendar. The more appointments and tasks I can write in a single day, the better.

I take (or try to remember to take) my planner to all my doctor’s appointments so that I can make a note of when the next one will be. I remember once being at the reception desk of one doctor’s office and jokingly referring to my planner as my “smartphone” (as in “Let me get out my smartphone.”) This was 2015, and I did not yet have an actual smartphone; I only had a basic flip phone. Would you believe that even though I own a smartphone and could use its calendar to enter appointments, I still use my paper planner? Old habits die hard. Besides, using the tiny alphanumeric “buttons” on a smartphone screen is difficult for a cerebral palsy patient—but I will keep my rants about systemic ableism to myself for now.

You can bet that my planner will be with me every moment of EFACON 2023, which begins this Thursday afternoon and runs until Saturday evening. Speaking of which, since I will be journeying home next Sunday, I will not be blogging next weekend. I hope that all of you, dear readers, enjoy the late summer, and I will be back here on August 27^th.

There are times, as editors, when we must tell our authors things about their writing that are not necessarily “nice.” By this, I mean we have to tell them what needs improvement, and then offer suggestions. However, when we point out what is lacking in an author’s writing, we must be diplomatic. That is part of being a good editor.

The Comments feature in MS Word can be an editor’s best friend…or their worst enemy. Here are a few helpful hints for commenting in Word.

• Use the word “please” liberally. For example, “Please delete the hyphen in ‘nonbinary’ because it is a closed compound” sounds gentler than “Delete the hyphen in ‘nonbinary’” or “’Nonbinary’ is a closed compound.” (Don’t you hate it when you are at the table and your annoying brother says, “Pass the salt,” and you just want to say, “What’s the magic word?” That’s how an author sometimes feels.)

• Use more dos than don’ts. Don’ts are negative and nobody wants to hear them, especially the author of the document you are editing. If you must tell an author to refrain from doing something, use the word “avoid” (as in “Please DO avoid…”). Which of these would you rather hear: “Please avoid the use of slang,” or “Please don’t use slang”? If I were an author, I would much rather hear the former because it sounds positive rather than negative (DO avoid slang rather than DON’T use slang).

• When correcting an error that is contrary to the style guide being used, cite the style guide and the section having to do with that error. For example, “Chemical compounds are open in both noun and adjective form (The Chicago Manual of Style 17^th ed., 7.89).” This will, of course, tell the author you know what you are doing as an editor.

The basic thing to keep in mind is, “If I were writing this, would I like it if an editor said that to me in those words?”

If you are an editor, what tips do you have regarding comments?

Let me preface this post by saying that I’m not the only reader who does the following.

When I read fiction, I like to “cast” the book in my mind. That is, I like to assign the character roles, sometimes to people I know who seem to fit the physical descriptions of the characters, and sometimes to professional actors.

For me, this makes reading fiction even more fun than it is to begin with.

Take the Harry Potter series, for example. The real-life eleven-year-old daughter of one of my best friends has long, thick, fiery red hair and a cute face. When I was reading the adventures of Harry and his friends, I assigned my friend’s daughter the role of—you guessed it—Ginny Weasley.

Or take Michael Crichton’s Sphere, which I read many years ago without having seen the movie adaptation. The role of Beth was given by me to one of my biology professors from college. The two just seemed to have the same personality, so why couldn’t they have the same looks? Certainly Beth did not look like Sharon Stone (who played that role on the big screen) in my imagination.

I once read a fiction piece for an online class. I don’t know if the piece was ever published, but it was definitely an interesting story about two stepsisters struggling to make it. The younger stepsister was definitely Kellie Martin in my mind.

What I despise is when a novel is made into a movie and the book cover is replaced with a new one featuring the actors. This takes away the fun of casting the book myself. Crichton’s Disclosure was made into a film which featured Michael Douglas and Demi Moore, and the new book cover featured recognizable images of those actors. I never saw the movie, but I read the novel after it had been released and the cover replaced. Instead of my imagination cooking up appearances for the two lead characters, I pictured Douglas and Moore doing the things that the characters were doing. No fun.

How about you? When you read fiction, do you “cast” the book in your imagination?

If there is one thing editors dislike entirely, it is being distracted while they are trying to work. For editors who work at home like me, distractions can abound more so than at an office. A few weeks ago, I blogged about the vent on the wall right above my desk that rattles and makes white noise. I wish it were the only distraction at home that I must fight.

I never do laundry during the workday. The washer, a modern front-loader, is a blessing to my husband and me for getting our clothes, sheets, and towels clean, but it sits in a utility closet which is right across from the small bedroom that we have turned into our office (i.e., where I work). I can hear it well whether it is filling up with water (loud) or draining (also loud). And the thing can be near deafening during the final spin, depending on how the laundry inside has fallen. Thankfully, it is quiet when it is tumbling. But the sounds tend to make me anxious, no matter how normal they are for the machine.  When I am editing, I do not need extra anxiety.

I also never run the dishwasher during the workday. The dishwasher is another blessing to my husband and me, and unlike the clothes washer, it runs quietly—no louder than our refrigerator. So why does it distract me? Because even while I am editing, the very back of my mind hears the soft cadence of its water swishing and the sucking sounds it makes while it is draining. If any of these noises suddenly start to sound abnormal, I panic, for it must mean that something is wrong with the dishwasher. And then I need to stop my Toggl timer before running out to the kitchen—and Heaven help me if I forget to stop the timer. (The dishwasher—though it is a blessing—was installed incorrectly in 2018 and we did not learn of this until 2021. If I step too hard on the floor near it, it sometimes stops in midcycle.)

If you work at home, what are some of your biggest distractions?

For three days, my husband and I could not breathe, eat, or drink.

That is an exaggeration. What happened was that we did not have internet (lowercase “i” according to The Chicago Manual of Style) service for three days.

Years ago, when I had a Facebook account, I read the following meme in my feed: Our generation is better prepared for a zombie apocalypse than an hour without electricity. This meme is terribly true and would have been even truer had its ending read …an hour without electricity or internet service.

No internet means no email. Email is my favorite method of communication. Yes, I also text and make the occasional telephone call, but since I love to write, I prefer to email. Often, my emails to my friends are extremely long, and I wonder if any of them are thinking, “TL;DR.” (“Too long; didn’t read” for those unfamiliar with social media acronyms.) But I love to write emails, for it is that mode of contact that lets me express myself the most eloquently.

No internet also means no YouTube. I know that YouTube is the video sharing platform of our grandparents and that I “should” be using TikTok, but YouTube contains many wonderful music mixes which I love to put on when I do household chores on the weekends. Not to mention that YouTube also has many of my beloved commercials from the past, like the 2003 Miller Beer ad where the people are falling like dominoes.

And, of course, no internet means no getting information. I needed a certain phone number last Friday that I could only obtain from the company’s website. Needless to say that I couldn’t get the phone number. Sigh.

So who was the culprit who stole our internet service?

At first the phone agent at our cable company thought it was the modem that had died, but we reached out to a tech-savvy friend of ours who came over, ran a diagnostic, and said it was the router that was dead. The last three days included two trips to the electronics store, three long calls with our cable company, and two calls to product manufacturers.

But…lo and behold, we have internet service again. Hooray!

What is the longest you have been without internet service? What did you do to get by during that time?

Let’s hear it for white noise!

I am being sarcastic.

If you are not familiar with the term “white noise,” here is the “b” definition from the free online version of Merriam-Webster: “a constant background noise, especially one that drowns out other sounds.”

I often have white noise in my office—and not by choice. It is in the form of a heat/air conditioning vent which is in the wall some four feet directly above my work desk. Unlike the other vents in my condo, which blow air quietly, this one is so loud that it can be heard from my living room.

This vent also rattles as it blows air. It has done so since before my husband and I moved here. It is doing so at the very moment that I type these words. I am very glad that we made this room an office and not a guest bedroom.

Since I have to edit and do other work right below this noisy thing, you might be asking how I deal with it. Well, I have a few methods.

First, when the heat or AC starts and the vent starts blowing and rattling, I quickly remind myself that white noise is not the worst sound in the world. I would much rather hear it than, for example, a baby crying, a dog barking, a blender whirring, or (gulp) my smoke alarm screaming. Right after I give myself this reminder, I can quickly focus on work again.

Second, I emphasize the positive. The white noise drowns out other, more unnerving sounds that I often hear while I am home, such as the grounds crew using their leaf blowers or the three young children shrieking in the one unit near ours. (The latter should be the subject of another whole post.)

When I am home alone at night, I hear the white noise even when I am not working, and this is when I find it creepy. This brings me to the third method of dealing with the noise. I imagine that it is the ocean. It does somewhat sound like the waves. I love the ocean and the beach, so this is very therapeutic.

Some people love white noise and cannot work or sleep without it. How about you? Do you love or hate white noise?

When it comes to commands on Word, some prefer to hit keys on their keyboard, such as Ctrl + S to save a document. Others prefer to move the mouse pointer to an icon on their toolbar and click.

I am one of the latter, but I am becoming one of the former.

Using keyboard shortcuts undoubtedly saves time and is more efficient, and what editor does not want to be more efficient in their work? I have gotten into the habit of pressing Ctrl + S when I want to save a document and Ctrl + N when I want to start a new document, for example. Standard built-in Word commands are also incredibly helpful for placing text in bold, italic, and underline, and especially for copying (or cutting) and pasting. (I won’t bore you by listing all of keyboard shortcuts for those actions. Besides, you probably know them all.)

The habit I am trying to break involves using my mouse to navigate the pointer to the command icon and then clicking on the left button on the mouse. This is a habit worth breaking because it uses more time and is hard on the wrist. I have heard of people developing wrist pain from using a mouse over time. I am in no way saying that a mouse should never be used; it is a very necessary tool. (Unless you are using the touchpad on your laptop and if you are, I say, “Better you than me.”)

One of the many reasons why I took the EFA’s class in macros last year is so that I could learn keyboard shortcut commands for different actions in Word. These keyboard shortcuts have proven to be wonderfully useful. For example, I can change the words “two hundred” to the numeral “200” simply by placing the cursor anywhere before “two hundred” and pressing Ctrl + Alt + T. I can also place the article “the” before a word by placing the cursor in the word and pressing Ctrl + Alt + A. Can you imagine how much I would have to move the mouse around in order to perform these actions?

Are you a mouse person or a keyboard person? Why?

I put away my flip phone and obtained my very first smartphone, a refurbished iPhone 4, in March 2015. I was a latecomer to the party, as the vast majority of people I knew had smartphones by then. I instantly fell in love, and the more features I discovered, the more I adored my phone.

Fast forward to today. I am on my third smartphone, an iPhone 13 mini, and I cannot imagine not having it. I cannot imagine not being able to text, for example. People do not speak on the phone anymore; they text. (That is not entirely true. I voice call my mother much more than I text her, but that makes her more comfortable.) I am addicted to my email and love having it at my fingertips. And I am spoiled enough to loathe the thought of turning on the TV and waiting for the weather forecast rather than just asking Siri, “What is the temperature in Frederick, Maryland?”

I also love being able to take my music MP3s wherever I go (though I wish our cars had Bluetooth so that my phone could pair with their speakers and I could listen to my tunes while I drive) and I adore being able to look at YouTube videos while stuck in a long checkout line at the supermarket.

However, all good things have a down side.

I have mild cerebral palsy (CP) and, due to my age, cannot see my phone screen well without my reading glasses. This means that filling out forms on my phone can be problematic. I realized this back in 2021 when I was trying to register for my second primary COVID-19 vaccination. After I scanned the QR code with which I had been provided, the form came up in tiny letters. Whenever the virtual keyboard appeared, I had to struggle to see each letter before pressing it. The CP makes it nearly impossible to text quickly with both of my thumbs; I must do the hunt-and-peck with my forefinger. (I feel the need to say that this is not the way I type on a regular computer keyboard. I can type at high speed on one of those.)

Still, I cherish my phone.

What kinds of things do you regularly do on your smartphone?

As many of you probably remember, last summer I took an online class on Paul Beverley’s Word macros. May I say that Mr. Beverley is a genius in my opinion? I downloaded and learned so many keyboard shortcuts to make my editing more efficient. And isn’t efficiency something for which we should all strive in our work?

My list of macros resides on the bulletin board above my computer desk. I haven’t counted them, but there are probably about 30 or so. I have a few macros which are especially near and dear to me. Please allow me to gush about them like the geek that I am…

BibleGatewayFetch is extremely helpful in the work I do for my church. The church’s weekly programs always contain an outline of Scripture citations, each of which must be verified. Before I downloaded this macro, I had to remember which book, chapter, and verse were in each citation before pulling up the Bible Gateway website and manually typing them in so that the website would display them. With the BibleGatewayFetch macro, however, I only need to highlight the Bible citation in Word, then press Ctrl+Alt+B. Presto! The verse appears on my screen.

GoogleFetch is another internet macro that I love. If I highlight a word, name, or phrase in a Word document and press Ctrl+Alt+G, Google quickly runs a search on the highlighted word and shows the results. MerriamFetch is similar, except that it searches for a highlighted word in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary and displays its definition. Just today, I used MerriamFetch to find out the definition of “succulent” (as a noun).

There are also macros that replace one word or item with another. NumberToText and TextToNumber are highly useful in the editing of research manuscripts. For example, some authors are not aware of the style rule that one must never begin a sentence with a numeral. If I see a sentence that begins, “2000 years ago…” I can place my cursor on “2000,” press Ctrl+Alt+N, and boom, the phrase changes to “Two thousand years ago…” In order to perform the reverse function, I can also place my cursor on “seven hundred,” press Ctrl+Alt+T, and get “700.”

If you use Word macros, what are a few of your favorites?