![]() I’m fortunate enough to say I love my job and the freedom it gives me. And it really has been a blur because it truly has been fun. But on the whole, I was good at structuring my days and keeping my nose to the grindstone when I needed to – my new life depended on it.Īnd so the days went by, then the weeks, then the months, then the years – two of them. Sure, I had days when procrastination took over and I suddenly found I’d spent half an hour staring open-mouthed at a story online that didn’t even interest me very much. A lot of people say to me they could never work freelance as they would end up sitting on Twitter/Facebook/ all day. I had skills that I was simply burning to put to use. It might have been born out of desperation, but it was determination all the same. Okay, so I wasn’t an entrepreneur as such, but I had determination. I’d be sitting at the local supermarket checkout in a few weeks’ time mournfully pointing out spelling errors in the signage to anyone who’d listen. I worried that this lifestyle wasn’t sustainable, that things would dry up after the first few jobs, that I would have to tell everyone I’d gleefully told I was “going freelance” that it didn’t work out. Who was I kidding? I was no bright young entrepreneur bursting with the latest marketing techniques and unwavering self-belief. The defeatist in me told me I would fail. Having handed in my notice at my day job a month before, I was now free to embark on what I had aspired to do for so long: working for myself full-time as a freelance editor, proofreader, and writer. That’s why I can’t believe it was exactly two years ago today that I woke up on a Monday morning to begin my new freelance life. Posted in: Copyediting, Copywriting, Grammar, Proofreading by Sally Evans-Darby on 22 October 2014 | 5 Comments I know there are dozens of other quick-fixes out there – care to add your own? If an author much preferred ‘due to the fact that’ to ‘because’, it would have to remain… as much as that would pain me! Of course, as with all aspects of editing, it goes without saying that these quick-fixes should all be used with judgement, and never applied thoughtlessly without reading the text carefully and being sensitive to the author/publisher’s requirements. ![]() I will generally change ‘firstly’ to ‘first’, ‘secondly’ to ‘second’, etc. ‘Firstly’ is an old favourite in scientific writing to introduce lists, but the suffix ‘ly’ really adds nothing of value and always appears to me a little fussy. ‘Use’ does the job just as well and cuts three syllables down to one. However, in the majority of cases it’s used unnecessarily, as in the sentence ‘I utilize public transport to get to work’. Occasionally ‘utilize’ can impart a more specific meaning than ‘use’ and should be left as is. ‘Due to the fact that I was trying on a new dress, I was happy’, which I would (with great glee) change to: ‘Because I was trying on a new dress, I was happy’. I see this very often at the start of a sentence, e.g. due to the fact that –> becauseĪgain, this is one where using the word ‘because’ changes nothing in the meaning – and has the added bonus of cleanly swapping five words for one. Every now and then I stet ‘in order to’ if removing it changes some necessary rhythm of the sentence, but that’s once in a blue moon. In almost every case where ‘in order to’ appears, it can be replaced simply with ‘to’ and retain exactly the same meaning. I’ve compiled a short list of these, so in the hope they might come in useful for fellow editors and writers, here they are in all their glory: in order to –> to Yet there are some clunky turns of phrase that crop up again and again, and they’re among the first things I iron out on my first read through. Posted in: Copyediting, Grammar by Sally Evans-Darby on 7 October 2015 | 2 CommentsĮvery piece of text I edit is different, whether a textbook on corpus linguistics, web copy translated from Finnish into English, or a journal article on spondylolysis.
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