Roberta Basarbolieva's
Compelling Edits

Once you have developed and structured your manuscript and are satisfied with its shape, it is time to bring in a copy editor. The copy editor goes down to the sentence level of your prose and focuses on grammatical and spelling errors, inconsistencies, and syntactic mishaps that reduce readability. The main concern here is mechanical correctness, consistency and language flow. Some of the things editors look at include:​ Punctuation Hyphenation Capitalization Spelling Gramma

The proof is the finalized draft of a text. After you have written and edited your text for factual correctness, structural integrity, grammatical accuracy and getting the correct message across, there is one last step before sharing it with an audience: proofreading. ​ Proofreading is the minute examination and correction of your text for typographic, grammatical and formatting errors. It also focuses on consistency in style, layout and typography. Proofreaders review the ge

What comes to mind when you read the verb ‘to dust’? If it is something along the lines of ‘I hate dusting the cupboards – it’s a thankless chore!’ I wholeheartedly agree with you. Or maybe you thought of ‘Dust the cake with powdered sugar before serving’? If you look at the two sentences together, you would notice that the verb ‘dust’ means two different things: in the first sentence ‘to dust’ means ‘to remove dust’, while in the second sentence it means to add powder/dust t

What do all of the below phrases have in common? Fruit’s and Vegetable’s Cheap potato’s Who’s sandwich is this? Gift’s for Teacher’s You are correct – they are all misusing the poor apostrophe! The apostrophe is one of the most widely abused punctuation marks in the English language. It is a little comma placed above the line of writing (like this: ’ ), which can be correctly used for three purposes: 1. Possessives: When you want to express the idea of a person of obj

One thing that I always notice when reading British and American novels one after the other is the difference in their use of the Present Perfect tense. As any fellow English language teacher would be able to corroborate, teaching the Present Perfect is the bane of the English as a Foreign Language classroom. It is a nightmare tense for most foreign speakers, and one of its definitions immediately shows why: “actions completed in the past with an effect on the present”. But i

A widely debated point in writing both fiction and non-fiction is the use of clichés: phrases or expressions that are overused; so commonplace that they are boring and predictable. Let’s take a look at why it’s not advisable to use them, especially in writing: Clichés are not stimulating for the reader. They lack originality, displaying laziness on the part of the author. Some use obsolete images that are unclear or absurd in a modern context. Clichés can be replaced by rich

What is the first thing you think of when you hear the word ‘weasel’? Fast, sleek, always able to escape? Weasel words fit two of those three adjectives – their speakers use ambiguous words that make them sleek and able to escape responsibility for their statements. Who can you think of that uses such language? That’s right – political figures spend a lot of time in front of the microphone sharing what seem at first to be profound statements and specific facts, whereas, when

Do you have spellchecker on your computer? For years now, Microsoft Word has been checking that the subject of a sentence matches its verb, there are no word repetitions, and commas are in all the right places. In that case, surely all of your writing is correctly spelled and punctuated already, so why would you need an editor? For one, a spellchecker is a programmed tool which corrects only what it recognises as an error. Yew wood not no if your using the write word, especia

How do you start your business emails? Is it 'Dear Sir/Madam'? Or 'Antoine, we need to talk'?