Contents for Stet Again! More Tricks of the Trade for Publications People

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Preface

1. The Art of Writing

• Infected Prose
• The Right Word: specialty/speciality
• When Less Is More: Avoiding Repetitious Writing
• Test Yourself: Breaking the Wordiness Habit
• The Right Word: percent/percentage
• Eight Problems of Logic in Writing
• Verbless Sentences: Fresh or Just Fragments?
• When Writers Have Trouble Getting Started
• The Right Word: while/whereas
• Handpicked Descriptive Words
• Getting Print-Worthy Quotes from Interviews
• Writing Spoken Comments
• Test Yourself: Misplaced Modifiers
• Writing "Behind the Scenes": The Art of Ghostwriting
• Five Nonfiction Writing Ailments
• Six Elements of Good Technical Writing
• Five Rules for Writing User-Friendly Technical Manuals
• Scare Tactics
• The Right Word: prone/prostrate/supine
• Promotional Writing That People Will Believe
• Test Yourself: Shifts in Construction
• Humor Your Readers: The Uses of Wit
• Writing Short without Cutting Essentials
• On Kindly Teachers and the Generic He
• Honoring Diversity in Business Writing
• The Grooves of Academe
• The Struggle for Gender-Free Language: Is It Over Yet?

2. The Craft of Editing

• Why Edit?
• Not by Intuition Alone: Taking Stock of Editing Habits
• English as She Is Spoke
• Keeping Things Consistent When You're the "Guest" Editor
• How to Edit Long Documents Online
• Some Ways to Make Online Editing Less Wearing
• The Considerate Editor: The Art of Criticizing Colleagues
• Do unto Authors...
• How to Query Authors Effectively
• Editing a Moving Target
• Communicating Story Ideas to Writers
• The Right Word: gibe/jibe
• Do Scholars Need Editing?
• How to Edit Instructions
• The Right Word: as bad as ... or worse than
• Getting Ducks in a Row: The Rules for Displayed Lists
• Singin' the Blues
• Test Yourself: Pin Down Vague Terms of Measurement
• Where Do Errors Lurk?
• Substantive Editing: The Words-Upward Approach
• Rules for Substantive Editing
• How Careful Should Editors Be?
• Are Editors on Their Way Out?
• One Last Look: The Final Quality Control Review

3. Usage and Grammar

• Changing American English in Times of Change
• Passing Whose Test of Time?
• The Right Word: abbreviation/acronym/initialism
• Skirting the Generic He
• Of Hyphenated Americans and Editorial Rigidity
• The Right Word: compare with/compare to
• Maintaining Distinctions with a Difference
• On Naming the Problem
• The Right Word: gamut/gantlet/gauntlet
• Test Yourself: Precision in the Choice of Words
• Cracking the Code: Making Verbs Agree with Collective Nouns
• Making Verbs Agree with Fractions and Percentages
• Test Yourself: Subject-Verb Agreement
• Split Infinitives: Yes or No?
• Using the Correct Tense with Infinitives
• Test Yourself: Feeling Tense and Moody
• Bite-Size Morsels and Long-Horned Cattle
• The Right Word: comprise/compose
• Not Enough of That
• That vs. Which: Is the Distinction Useful?
• Rules for Using That vs. Which and Who
• Test Yourself: That vs. Which and Who
• Two Possessive Constructions in Search of Approval
• The Right Word: prolific/prodigious
• Test Yourself: The Right Preposition
• The Right Word: classic/classical; historic/historical
• Two Views on Usage and Why Each Needs the Other

4. Style and Punctuation Perennials

• How (and Why) to Create an In-House Style Manual
• Who Said That? On Handling Quotations
• Can You Edit a Direct Quotation?
• Test Yourself: Punctuation with Quotation Marks
• Numbers: To Spell Out or Not?
• Test Yourself: Punctuating Restrictive/Nonrestrictive Elements
• The Acrobatic Apostrophe
• Test Yourself: Commas, Colons, and Semicolons
• Test Yourself: Help Stop Comma Litter
• Compound Adjectives: To Glue or Not to Glue?
• Test Yourself: Hyphenated Compounds
• Self-ishness: Capitalization with Compounds
• Rules for Commas with Modifiers
• Test Yourself: Commas with Compound Adjectives
• Spelling Out Abbreviations
• Test Yourself: Em Dashes, Parentheses, or Commas — How to Choose?
• Test Yourself: Punctuation with Conjunctions
• The Right Word: anyone ... their/anybody ... their
• Test Yourself: Dashes
• The Right Word: more than/over

5. Design and Typography

• The Music Is Not in the Violin
• Six Rules for Jumping Newsletter Stories
• On Breeding Hardy Hybrids
• A Design Primer for Editors
• The Right Word: if/whether
• Choosing a Designer
• Editors and Designers: Talking the Same Language
• "Doing Art" before You've Learned How
• Can One Picture Be Worth More Than a Thousand Words?
• Pull Quotes Enhance Newsletter Layout
• Editing a Table
• Editing a Word Table for Less Space and More Sense
• Orphans and Widows
• What Editors Need to Know about Desktop Publishing
• It's All in the Links: Readying Publications for the Web
• Using Graphics on the Web

6. Publications Management and Trends

• Estimating Editorial Tasks: A Five-Step Method
• Managing Collaborative Writing Projects
• How to Prioritize When Everything Is Urgent
• Taking a Team Approach to Publishing
• The Editor's Authority
• Defending Your Staff When Things Go Wrong
• Testing for Editorial Skills
• How One Company Handles Editorial Testing
• What's in a Name? Plenty, if It's a Job Title
• Working with Vendors
• Delegating without Getting Burned
• Managerial Burnout — Is There a Cure?
• Making Sure That Big, Important Rush Project Gets Done Poorly
• Taming the Beast: Lessons for Managing Large Projects
• Steps for Reviewing an Index
• Crossing a Bridge of Shyness: Public Speaking for Communicators
• Proofreading in the Computer Age
• "Endurance Training" for Electronic Publishing Specialists
• Surviving the Transition to a New Electronic Publishing System
• Electronic Copyright: We'll Be Spending the Next 10 Years Figuring It Out
• Will Web Publishing Change the Way We Edit?
• Multimedia Storyboarding for Technical Writers

Contributors

Index

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