Carla DeSantis Editing
  • Home
  • About
    • Qualifications
  • Services
    • Editing
    • Indexing
    • Proofreading
    • Translation
  • Disciplines & Genres
  • Projects
  • Testimonials
  • Contact
  • Blog

Parchment to PDF

Tenth Anniversary of My Editorial Business

29/9/2021

2 Comments

 
Lit candles on birthday cake
Photo: Joey Gannon from Pittsburgh, PA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
​September 2021 marks ten years of Carla DeSantis Editing! After ten years, I still relish the feeling of digging into a new manuscript, always learning something new in the process. To mark this occasion, I did some reflecting on where my numbers stand, where I started, where I am now, and what I have learned over the years.

Read More
2 Comments

Loaded Language: Writing and Editing Controversial Content for Professional or Scholarly Publication

13/7/2021

0 Comments

 
Line of protestors with signs in black silhouette
Photo: OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay
It’s been a tough year. Civic and political unrest in the United States, Brexit, a worldwide pandemic, military rule in Myanmar, religious and political extremism, among others. While you may wish to express your opinion on such issues in personal social media accounts, examining both current and historical issues in a professional or scholarly context intended for publication requires a different approach.

Read More
0 Comments

What’s Wrong with the Abbreviation Xmas? It Has Noble Origins

12/12/2020

0 Comments

 
Scrabble pieces spelling Xmas
​Christmas or Xmas?
​Some years ago when I was working on my children’s school council, one of the communications volunteers received a complaint from some parents after a brief communication went out asking for volunteers for a “Xmas” event. The complaint? That the use of Xmas was “taking the Christ out of Christmas.” In fact, in recent years, there seems to have been some backlash in North America over the use of Xmas as a shortened version for Christmas, claiming that the use of the abbreviation is an attempt to secularize Christmas.

Read More
0 Comments

Reading on a Deadline

30/5/2020

0 Comments

 
Open book page against background of blue sky, clouds, and a lake
Photo: Carla DeSantis
*A version of this blog post was originally published by Editors' Weekly, the offical blog of Editors Canada, 26 May 2020.
​I still yearn for my “Summer of Reading.” It was the summer after grade 8—that awkward age when you are too young for a job, too old for some camps—and I had the now-longed-for luxury of time. I consumed a large number of books, lying on my bed reading V.C. Andrews’s creepy Flowers in the Attic and afterwards racing to the store with my friend to get the second book in the trilogy, to quench our thirst for more. Lounging in my screened-in porch, I dug into S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and devoured To Kill a Mockingbird while sitting under a tree. Not all of them were classics but popular YA choices from a certain decade. It was glorious.

Read More
0 Comments

Self-Editing: A Resolution to Edit Yourself

21/1/2020

2 Comments

 
Scrabble pieces spelling Resolutions on black background
​It’s a new year, and many people make resolutions to edit their lives, so to speak: exercise more, eat or drink less, get their homes in order by editing out unneeded objects.
​What about editing yourself, as in your words?

Read More
2 Comments

The Puzzle of Medieval Manuscripts, Niche Editing, and Modern Copyediting

28/7/2019

2 Comments

 
White puzzle pieces piled on white table
This week I began a lengthy editing project, copyediting a critical edition of a medieval Latin text, accompanied by its English translation—a completely satisfying, challenging, and enjoyable job that is reminding me of my previous experience with medieval manuscripts (see my previous blog) and writing my own critical edition. This work makes me ponder, once again, the connections between copyediting and manuscript editing, which consists of transcribing the ancient script; choosing, eliminating, or editing the readings of various manuscript witnesses; and finding the sources on which the text may have drawn, in order to bring the text into readable form for the modern reader. What are some of the skills necessary for editing medieval Latin manuscripts and how have they informed what I do today when copyediting academic materials and bringing these texts into more readable form for my clients?

Read More
2 Comments

Editing Your Private Library: Do Books Need to "Spark Joy"?

26/2/2019

2 Comments

 
Close up of a lit sparkler
​My husband’s quest for a minimalist home is futile. He longs for clean lines, mostly empty white shelves, while I feel panicked and see the house as soulless if those shelves are bare of my books. While I do continually purge my collection, the liberated spaces are quickly filled by new acquisitions.
Having watched a few episodes of “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo” on Netflix together didn’t help matters. “See? You just hold the book in your hand and see if it sparks joy or not!” While I can see that working with socks or spatulas, my relationship with books is much more involved and complicated for disposal to be reduced to such simplicity.

Read More
2 Comments

Why Is History Important? Out of the Mouths of Babes

27/11/2018

4 Comments

 
Little girl in pink dress and taller boy in white shirt and red cap looking at the portale of the Chiesa di San Francesco d'Assisi, Gerace, Calabria
Photo: Carla DeSantis
​A couple of weeks ago, my daughter came home with a less-than-stellar grade on her history test. When I asked about it, her reply came as a shock to me: “Why do we even need to learn history? We need to look to the future instead of the past.”
​Now, I am all for forward thinking, but as someone who has spent most of her life thinking and learning about what past cultures have done, thought, and written – mainly in the context of language and literature – and how this has impacted and influenced modern thought, language, and literature, I had to stop and really think about what her reply means.

Read More
4 Comments

Writing with Style: Why You Need a Guide

4/10/2018

0 Comments

 
Woman wearing sunglasses and with shopping bags hanging from arms looking up in the Galleria of Milan
​What is your style guide? Armani? American Eagle? Ralph Lauren?
 
Maybe when it comes to your fashion choices, but when writing for publication, business, or academic purposes, you need a set of guiding standards to ensure that your important work is presented in a consistent way, so that your reader can focus on your crucial message and is not distracted by the fact that “New York Times” appears within quotation marks on page 4 and in italics as New York Times on page 120. (Are you referring to two different publications, the reader may ask herself?) If you cite (Brown 2001, 120) on page 45 and (Brown, 66) on page 56, is it the same reference? And minor variations like “the United States Government” in one place and “the US government” in another will simply irritate your reader.

Read More
0 Comments

Words, Parents, and Kids Heading to University: Treasures from the First Week Away

1/9/2018

0 Comments

 
Boy in white shirt and shorts bending down to pick up soccer ball in schoolyard with another boy in a red jacket and another boy in an orange short walking up to him
Photo: Justine McVeigh
​The other day a friend of mine – on the verge of sending her youngest child off to university and probably feeling nostalgic – sent me a picture of our now-21-year-old boys playing ball in the schoolyard at age 9. She and her husband are soon to become what are known as “empty nesters.”
 
The Drop Off

This week thousands of parents will be dropping off their kids at college and university – some for the very first time, some for their last time. But in every case, whether it is your first, middle, or last child going, this experience of dropping off your child for the first time – or being dropped off for the first time – is a monumental moment, among the most emotional and memorable in both parents’ and children’s lives.

Read More
0 Comments

Parchment to PDF, or Confessions of a Freelance Academic Editor

27/8/2018

2 Comments

 
Woman's hand on computer mouse with a pen between her fingers and the corner of a computer screen and keyboard in the background
​"Click. Add note to replace text. Add text box with notation for typesetting. Strike through text. Insert correct source at cursor." I am working in Adobe Acrobat on page proofs, preparing them for publication with a university press. I have been invested in this project from:
  • the original manuscript submitted by the author to the press
  • copyediting the entire manuscript
  • sending it back to the author for review
  • cleaning up the reviewed manuscript by incorporating my many edits, suggestions, queries, and the author’s corrections
  • connecting directly with the author on any queries or points for clarification
  • preparing the manuscript for final submission to production
  • to now proofhandling the proofread printed pages and copyediting the index keyed to those pages.

A Different Kind of Manuscript
 
Twenty years ago, however, you would have found me in the venerable Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan or Biblioteca Statale of Cremona in Italy, perusing a different kind of manuscript – ones written by hand on vellum or parchment paper in the late Middle Ages. I imagined a life of research, studying the written treasures hidden within the pages of such medieval manuscripts – accessible only to those trained to read the cryptic script and qualified to handle the fragile pages – and teaching Latin to university students. How did I end up working on modern books, on digital platforms, for other scholars?

Read More
2 Comments

      Follow Carla's blog via email notices
      Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Follow

    Follow Me


    Picture
    About Me
    Contact Me

    Author

    I am Carla DeSantis, and welcome to my blog! I love language and words and books, and have turned this love into a business, helping others to perfect their written message.

    I am an editor who specializes in scholarly and academic works, and I help professors, scholars, authors, and publishers polish their work for publication. I focus on the details so you don't have to!

    Because of my experience in academia, research, and publishing, I can confidently handle scholarly apparatus and complex works with the expert care that academic authors need.

    Archives

    September 2021
    July 2021
    December 2020
    May 2020
    January 2020
    July 2019
    February 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018

    Categories

    All
    Abbreviations
    APA
    Authors
    Bibliography
    Chicago Manual
    CINDEX
    Copyediting
    Dictionaries
    Digital Editing
    Editing
    Editing Blogs
    Editing Specialization
    Editors Canada
    Freelance Editing
    History
    Indexing
    Italy
    Libraries
    Manuscripts
    MLA
    Parenting
    PerfectIt
    Professional Associations
    Proofreading
    Publications
    Reading
    Research
    Style Guides
    Typesetting
    University Teaching
    Writing

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • About
    • Qualifications
  • Services
    • Editing
    • Indexing
    • Proofreading
    • Translation
  • Disciplines & Genres
  • Projects
  • Testimonials
  • Contact
  • Blog