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| bio | website | textproof.com/stewart |
|---|---|---|
| location | Berlin, Germany | |
| age | 43 | |
| visits | member for | 2 years, 6 months |
| seen | May 6 at 9:39 | |
| stats | profile views | 22 |
Freelance scientific copy-editor.
You can read my irregular waffles at advogato.org/person/chalst/.
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Apr 4 |
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How to obtain a thoughtful critique of a job application cover letter? And every cover letter is custom-written for each job I'm interested in. - Do this even if you ignore everything else: form letters are really obvious. |
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Apr 4 |
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How credible is wikipedia? @Ralph: Google Scholar indexes a lot of papers that are not published online or are behind paywalls. I find Google Scholar absolutely essential: once you get the hang of it, I guess you will find it valuable too. |
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Apr 4 |
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Books to improve writing skills And get into the habit of summarising a decent proportion of what you read. |
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Apr 4 |
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Books to improve writing skills S&W does do some things well, motivates the idea of good style nicely, and is itself well-written, but it has some serious issues and there are better style books out there. I recommend Williams, 2011, 3rd. ed., Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing. |
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Feb 25 |
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Different kinds of editors This answer has received a downvote: I'd like to polish this answer, and I'd be grateful to know the objection to what I wrote. |
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Feb 25 |
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Different kinds of editors @Standback - You will find much disagreement about the exact definitions. Chicago (#15, I haven't looked at #16's chapter 2 yet) mostly avoids talking about copy-editing and proofreading because of the assumptions about publishing workflow that those terms make. I think this is a very valuable question for this site to have. |
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Feb 25 |
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Different kinds of editors [P]roofreader[s] [are] generally unpaid interns or people who are paid with a free copy - This made me smile, and yes, it is probably true most of the time. Of course if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys, and this valuable quality step won't work so well. I rather think the Harry Potter books got a higher class of treatment than this. |
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Feb 25 |
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Different kinds of editors Line editors [are] generally paid less than copy editors - It depends on the brief and the skill set. It makes economic sense, and is common in academic publishing, for the project editor to delegate a line edit to an editor with subject expertise, and leave it to a less highly skilled copy-editor to work with the author to get the final copy. |
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Jan 17 |
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What are the advantages of incorporation for a writer? @Dori: Thanks. It sounds like someone could count as independent even though the whole of their income in some year came from one client and they worked on that client's premises the whole time. |
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Jan 17 |
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What does active voice mean? The sentence emphasizes all the wrong parts of itself by being put in this order - Well, it depends. If earlier the police stated that Jill killed Mary, but then later Hercules Porrott turns up and figure out what really happened... |
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Jan 17 |
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Self Editing tips/tricks I've heard as long as six months for the advised wait before looking over a manuscript and revising it, in the context of scientific writing. |
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Jan 17 |
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How to overcome the fact that I can't write? @Sandeep: People differ in this: some writers work best if they can feel that everything they have written is just right and will not need much in the way of changes later. But I guess that Strix's advice is right for most people. |
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Jan 17 |
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What are the advantages of incorporation for a writer? @Dori: I should have said "in countries with social provision" - in Russia, say, it doesn't really matter either way. "civilized countries" - well, the US is civilized, it just has a different notion of civility... |
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Jan 17 |
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What are the advantages of incorporation for a writer? As writers, we ought to be pedantic about language, right? - No, not in conversational contexts. I'm tempted to make a question out of this, just to have a nice place to gather the pro- and contra- arguments... |
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Jan 17 |
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What are the advantages of incorporation for a writer? "Corporations these days are very leery of hiring freelancers who might appear to be employees" - There are very clear rules pretty much everywhere governing this. Britain has the rule that if more than 1/3rd of your income in a tax year comes from a particular company, then you count as a part-time employee. I haven't heard of anywhere that has a harsher rule than this. Germany is absurdly lax about this. Do talk to a tax advisor about this. |
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Jan 17 |
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What are the advantages of incorporation for a writer? In most countries, the social insurance advantages run the other way: here in Germany, I'm enrolled the "Künstlersozialkasse", which is a subsidised social insurance program for "creative" workers: it's easier to enroll if you are self-employed and run your accounts on a cashflow basis (i.e., not P&L). |
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Jan 9 |
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Should freelance writers keep their online business separate from offline? I understood the qn's online/offline dichotomy to be about where the writing appears, not about how the freelancer makes themself visible. |
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Jan 1 |
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Journal subscription secrecy @jae: Thanks for the link, I've edited it in. |
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Jan 1 |
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Journal subscription secrecy Right. E.g., Nature charges up to about 25x as much to libraries as it does to individual readers for some of its journals, and most decent journals are available free to members of one academic society or another. A point made in Darnton's article is that publishers and libraries negotiate for bundles of journals together. |
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Jan 1 |
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Journal subscription secrecy This is a little bit of a stretch, but it's submitted according to the premiss that information about how publishers get their money is always interesting to professional writers. |
