drupagliassotti @ March 3, 2010 # One Comment
When a colleague told me our building was on fire this afternoon, I grabbed my purse, laptop, library book, and the page proofs for Boys’ Love Manga, so that I wouldn’t lose any of my penciled-in edits if the building burned down! Turned out it was a burning lightbulb’s smoke being sucked into the ventilation [...]
drupagliassotti @ January 25, 2010 # No Comment Yet
I can revise a novel over and over and over again on-screen, and it never makes any difference. When I finally print it out, around revision two or three, and go over it on paper, I invariably see dozens of places on each page where I can tighten prose, fix dialog, and clarify points. I’m [...]
drupagliassotti @ June 30, 2009 # No Comment Yet
Today was my “could you try to get your final edit back to me by the end of the month?” deadline for our book on boys’ love manga, Girls Doing Boys Doing Boys, and sure enough I have most of the manuscripts back now. I’ve been glancing through them for formatting and then passing them [...]
drupagliassotti @ February 15, 2009 # No Comment Yet
Turnaround is a noun or an adjective, not a verb, so its use in the phrase “plan to turnaround their troubled companies” is incorrect. Turn around, with a space between the words, is correct when seeking to use the verb form of the phrase. The sentence should read, “plan to turn around their troubled companies….” [...]
drupagliassotti @ January 28, 2009 # 3 Comments
Due to some delays in receiving and reading through the manuscripts, my coauthors and I have requested and received a deadline extension for Girls Doing Boys Doing Boys: Japanese Boys’ Love Anime and Manga in a Globalized World. Our original deadline to return the completed and edited manuscript back to the publisher was March — [...]
drupagliassotti @ January 15, 2009 # No Comment Yet
“Your writing should be clear, concise, and consistent,” I tell the students in my journalism course. “By ‘consistent,’” I joke, “I mean that if you make a mistake, make sure you make it the same way throughout your article.” Today’s example from CNN.com is a well-written lead that fails the consistency test. If this were [...]
drupagliassotti @ December 22, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Today I heard an ad for Royal Caribbean’s ship Mariner of the Seas that inspired me to make this post. Get it? Mariner of the Seas. Of the Seas. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary: Marine (adj.) c.1420, from M.Fr. marin (fem. marine), from O.Fr. marin, from L. marinus (fem. marina) “of the sea,” from [...]
drupagliassotti @ December 7, 2008 # No Comment Yet
CNN’s usage of “begging the question” in this paragraph is incorrect. “Begging the question” is not a fancy way of saying “raising the question.” To beg the question is to put forward an argument that uses faulty premises and/or circular reasoning as “support.” For example, let’s take this argument: Because about two-thirds of the U.S. [...]
drupagliassotti @ November 16, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Quotation marks are primarily used to indicate that what lies between them are somebody’s exact words, either spoken or written — which is why we use the marks to indicate spoken dialog in journalism or fiction, or to indicate precisely reproduced written words in a scholarly paper. The Associated Press style guide, used by U.S. [...]
drupagliassotti @ November 3, 2008 # No Comment Yet
“The winner’s immediate priority should be to try and unify the nation. The signals the president-elect sends in the first few days could go a long way toward reminding Americans, no mater how they may have voted, that we’re all apart of something larger than ourselves.” (Time Magazine) I ran across these two sentences on [...]