For Small-business Owners, Virtual Assistants, and Freelancers
Friday, 1 December 2023
Editorial (adj.): relating to the commissioning or preparing of material for publication.
For many reasons, most of which concern marketing, there is a demand for ‘fresh’ written content. As discussed in other posts, this ‘fresh’ content is often a rework (or blatant copy) of writing published elsewhere. Even when the writer makes the effort to do their own research, the publisher often limits the word count to such an extent that there’s no room for exploring a topic. Those six honest serving men of a story, sardined in succinct summary, can only say similar things.
There I was, scrolling aimlessly through the barrage of Tweets (pointlessly) telling me that Celebrity A, B, or C has done something or other with their (boyfriend/girlfriend, wife/husband, outfit, makeup, children, cat/car… )—and cheesy quotes from people I’ve never heard of or, even worse, eminent scientists who’d probably shudder at their words being used with such frivolous abandonment/inappropriateness—when I finally came across a Tweet that piqued my interest.
To some, Apostrophe is an album by Frank Zappa that contains sound advice about yellow snow. To others an apostrophe is a punctuation mark with more than one possible meaning. The following article is all about this second understanding. Apostrophe. (n.) A punctuation mark indicating possession, the omission of letters or numbers (in informal writing), […]
A typical dictionary definition will be along the lines of:
Ellipsis. (n.). Plural ellipses. A series of three full stops (…) used to signify that written matter has words missing.
However, such definitions leave a lot unanswered.
The ability to dash properly is a useful skill, when working with running text for instance. Still, I often see otherwise dashing material that’s been dashed by being dashed off with a wrong dash. It’s a dashed shame.
