Browsing:

Tag: English

The Power of Mentorship

Editors Canada’s John Eerkes-Medrano Mentorship Program off to a great start Throughout my life, people have generously shared their insights and tips with me. Some were small and similar to household hints. Others were transformative. All were important and helpful in some way. Just recently, someone helped me with the Read more…


Audio Description: Making the Language of Pop Culture Accessible

Unless you’re viewing a silent film, movies and television are mediums that rely on us being able to consume them with both our eyes and our ears. Closed captioning and subtitles bridged the gap for people who are deaf, deafened or hard of hearing, but tools to assist people who are Read more…


A Matriarch of Canadian Editing: Lee d’Anjou

Lee d'Anjou

The path to becoming an editor is rarely straightforward, and Lenore (Lee) d’Anjou’s start was no exception. Widely considered a matriarch of the Canadian editing community, in her early days d’Anjou flipped between a career as an editor and a career in theatre; in the end, however, pragmatic considerations ruled Read more…


Navigating Burnout Culture in the Publishing Industry

When I first expressed interest during university about entering the publishing industry as a book editor, my wonderful mentors at the time were all busy, passionate people. They held multiple jobs, ran side hustles, offered volunteer work, sat on committees, and attended every book launch and literary soirée. They encouraged Read more…


Poet Potter

Pottery hands; Courtesy Pixabay

words arejumbled cells of clayin the poet potter’s hand the wheel spins round and roundmere clay in the potter’s handsmere words in the poet’s mind the neck wobbles   collapsessinks to the bottom the potter remodels words spintaking a shape of their own till the finished piece is ready for the Read more…


Proactive Editing: Teaching Plain Language to Staff Writers

This is a very brief summary of a conference presentation I gave at the 2018 Editors Canada conference in Saskatoon. The challenge most in-house editors face is that by the time documents get to them, their ability to influence is limited. If a project has structural flaws, there’s rarely sufficient Read more…


Misdial

The moment he stepped through the portal, Eric realized he must have punched in the wrong code. He whirled around, reaching for the keypad to try again, but there was no keypad, and no portal. He was standing on the shore of a lake, nothing in front of him except Read more…


Crossword

Click the image below to download a printable PDF of the blank puzzle. The solution will be posted here on July 2, 2019. Send your completed puzzle to activevoice@editors.ca by June 30, 2019, to be entered in a draw for a fun prize!


A Fortunate Life: Interview with Rosemary Tanner

Rosemary Tanner

As we had planned, Rosemary Tanner and I had lunch together in Floradale, a small village west of Elmira, Ontario, at Bonnie Lou’s Café in what was once Ruggle’s General Store and Post Office (1883). It’s a quaint place that kept the existing shelving and old tables—our table was the Read more…


Tales from the Jurassic Period: Ramblings from a Dinosaur

Newspaper photo of most of the presidents of the FEAC at the AGM in April 1990

Five or six of us sat around a table in some seedy downtown Ottawa hotel in late 1985 or ’86. It was my first time at a FEAC [Freelance Editors’ Association of Canada] meeting. I had recently started freelancing after five years as in‑house editor, typesetter, layout person, telephone answerer, Read more…