Editing

We have our first copy-editing and proofreading exam tomorrow, and instead of studying like I should (they call it “revising” here?), I’ve been furiously editing every piece of text that comes my way… including this blog.

It started when I realized that I had misspelled marshmallow in yesterday’s post. It is not spelled marshmellow. There is no such thing as marshmellow. I had somehow convinced myself that marshmallow was the plant, and that marshmellow was the sugary confection roasted over an open fire to make s’mores. This is not the case. It’s not even remotely true. I don’t where I got that idea, and I owe someone from college an apology, because I was wrong about the marshmallow.

So I went through the past 20 entries or so and did some light editing. I didn’t change any of the underlying meaning, but I fixed sentences that ended with prepositions and capitalized Lent. Little things like that have had my attention all day, and I hope it was adequate preparation for the exam tomorrow.

Ethical Editing

Two stories that broke today got me thinking about literature and publishing.

First, Jonah Lehrer resigned from The New Yorker after Tablet Magazine called out the fabricated Bob Dylan quotes used in his book Imagine, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in March 2012.

Then #countriesbyvoguewriters began trending on Twitter in response to the Newsweek article by Joan Juliet Buck that told her side of the story surrounding the glowing March 2011 Vogue profile of Asma al-Assad, the first lady of Syria.

All of which led me to ask:

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