Hi, and welcome to this month’s Notes on Editing.

In the last month, I’ve relaunched my website, including a new section for articles and a landing page for the LaTeX for Academic Editors course.

I’m changing up the format of this newsletter. Rather than a long article sent by email, I’m going to include summaries of articles I’ve posted on my new blog since the last newsletter. This means a shorter newsletter in your mail with pointers to more content on my site. If you have thoughts about the new format, please let me know.

I’m on track to soft-launch the LaTeX for Academic Editors course on June 26th. I’ll be continuing to build out the course over the rest of the year, dropping new lessons every week.

Since the last newsletter went out the door, I’ve posted four new articles: two sets of confusibles, a Google Docs editing tip, and an explainer on when to use hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes in various styles. Check them out:

Premise vs. Premises

The words premise and premises are often confused, especially in the phrase on premises. Part of that confusion, I think, is that premises is the plural of premise, but it also has a different meaning that’s only seen in the plural form.

Palet vs. Pallet vs. Palate vs. Palette

In this post, I have a four-way confusable: palet, pallet, palate, and palette all mean different things, and they’re easily typoed into each other. Read on for some notes on picking the right spelling.

Cleanup Tips for Google Docs Manuscripts

Have you ever written or received a Google Docs file that is full of extra spaces, double punctuation, and similar issues? This post will show several search strings to help find and clean up those issues in Google Docs.

Hyphens, En Dashes, and Em Dashes: What Are They and When Do We Use Which?

Hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes are similar looking, but have different uses. This guide summarizes what they are and how to use them depending on the style guide being followed.

This post from CIEP on the problems with the terms “native speaker” and “non-native speaker” is a couple of years old, but it came across my feed again recently: ‘Non-native’ and ‘native’: Why the CIEP is no longer using those terms

The phrases ‘native speaker’ and ‘non-native speaker’ are still common in our field and related areas such as translation and ESL teaching. But there’s a strong argument that they are unhelpful at best and that at worst they perpetuate assumptions about language competence that have an exclusionary effect.

It ties in with something I heard Katharine O’Moore-Klopf say on a webinar recently — that she’d moved away from using the term ESL to describe authors whose first language isn’t English. Instead, she’s using “multilingual author,“ a practice I’ve started following as well. To me, it emphasis the fact that these authors write in more than one language rather than that they didn’t grow up speaking a specific dialect of English.

Much shorter — I think I like this new format. Do you?

Thank you for reading. If you received this newsletter from a colleague, you’re welcome to subscribe — it’s free. And please pass this letter on to anyone you think may be interested. If you want to catch up on previous issues, you can find them here.

If you’re interested in booking my editing services, you can reach me at wes@wordsbywes.ink or fill out my project information form to let me know what you need.

Now, I’m back to writing video scripts. Till next time!

Wes