Copyediting : Improve your copyediting skills

Wendalyn Nichols

Wendalyn Nichols is the editor of Copyediting (formerly Copy Editor). She was a teacher of remedial English, ESL, and composition for twelve years before entering publishing. She began as a freelance researcher, writer, and editor, then became a lexicographer and editor with the Longman Group. For four years she was the editorial director of Random House Reference and Information Publishing. Wendalyn has been interviewed about language on The Today Show, CNN, The Joy of Lex (The Discovery Channel), and dozens of radio programs, including Public Radio International's The Next Big Thing and NPR's Talk of the Nation. She was a regular contributor to The Mavens' Word of the Day Web site, answering questions about word origins and usage. In her career she has edited a variety of texts, including novels, nonfiction works, scholarly articles, textbooks, dictionaries, children's books, sales materials, corporate communications—and of course, newsletter articles.

Barbara Wallraff

Copyediting (formerly Copy Editor) editor emeritus Barbara Wallraff is the author of In Your Own Words and the nationally best-selling book Word Court. She is also a senior editor of The Atlantic Monthly, for which she writes the "Word Court" and "Word Fugitives" columns, and a syndicated columnist for King Features Syndicates. Barbara has served as a consultant to publishers, written dictionary usage notes and taught manuscript editing as a graduate-level seminar. For the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, National Public Radio's Morning Edition commissioned her to copyedit the Constitution.

Patricia M. Godfrey

Patricia Godfrey is a contributing editor at Copyediting and a freelance copyeditor, editor and writer doing business as P and Q Editorial Services. She is the author of Grammatical Gleanings, a compilation of essays on grammar, syntax and usage published by the Editorial Freelancers Association. Patricia has more than 30 years of experience in book and periodical publishing, having copyedited books for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Reader's Digest General Books, Columbia University Press and other publishers. She lives in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J.

Linda Lowenthal

Linda Lowenthal is a contributing editor at Copyediting and is the copy chief at Technology Review (America's oldest technology magazine, published by MIT since 1899). Previously she was a copyeditor at The Atlantic Monthly, before which she supervised copyediting at The Boston Phoenix, where she was in no way responsible for the personal ads. She lives in Boston, in the shadow of Fenway Park.

Norm G. Goldstein

Norm Goldstein is a columnist at Copyediting. The editor emeritus of The Associated Press Stylebook, Norm worked for the A.P. as a reporter, editor and author for more than 30 years. Besides editing the Stylebook, Norm directed the A.P.'s Special Projects division and was supervising editor of the news service's Special Features department. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Erin McKean

Erin McKean a contributing editor at Copyediting. She’s also the editor in chief of American dictionaries for Oxford University Press, and the editor of VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly. NPR’s Neil Conan calls her “America's Lexicographical Sweetheart,” and MSNBC.com calls her “the queen and rock star among lexicographers.” She is the author of Weird and Wonderful Words, More Weird and Wonderful Words, Totally Weird and Wonderful Words, and That’s Amore (also about words—do we detect a theme here?).

Erin lives in Chicago with her husband and young son. She rants about dresses on her blog A Dress A Day (www.dressaday.com) and about dictionaries at www.dictionaryevangelist.com, and is actually really bad at Scrabble. She likes to sew and rollerskate, but not at the same time. She also has a nifty collection of funky eyeglasses.

Sage Stossel

Sage Stossel is the creator of the political-cartoon feature "Sage, Ink," which since 1996 has appeared regularly on The Atlantic Monthly's Web site. Her cartoons, which have been highlighted by the Go Network and Google as among the best on the Web, are reprinted in Editorial Humor, and some have appeared in The Palm Beach Post and other publications.

Paul R. Martin

Paul Martin is a columnist at Copyediting and a member of Copyediting's editorial advisory board. He is an assistant managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, the editor of The Wall Street Journal Stylebook, and the editor of Style & Substance, the Journal's in-house bulletin on copyediting and style matters. He received the 2000 Elliott V. Bell Award of the New York Financial Writers Association, presented to the person it deems has made a significant, long-term contribution to the profession of financial journalism.

Bill Walsh

Bill Walsh has been a newspaper journalist for more than two decades and is now the chief copy editor for national news at The Washington Post. He is the author of two books on usage and style, Lapsing Into a Comma (2000) and The Elephants of Style (2004), and has run The Slot: A Spot for Copy Editors (www.theslot.com) on the World Wide Web since 1995. A 1984 graduate of the University of Arizona journalism program, Walsh began his career as a reporter at The Phoenix Gazette and has held a variety of copyediting and design positions at the Gazette, The Washington Times, and the Post. He is a regular speaker at American Copy Editors Society conferences and is a member of Copyediting's editorial advisory board. Bill defends the spelling "copy editor" with passion, so we daren't defy that in this bio.

Marilyn Schwartz

Marilyn Schwartz has been Managing Editor of the University of California Press since 1983. She entered publishing quite by accident: six months after receiving a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Davis, in 1976, she accepted an internship at UC Press that serendipitously became a career. She now heads a department of 16 full- and part-time project editors and support staff, who together are responsible for the editorial production of approximately 180 new book titles annually, ranging from highly specialized scholarship to high-profile general interest books. For over twenty years she has taught copyediting courses in the University of California Extension's Program in Publishing. From 1987 to 1993 she headed the Task Force on Bias-Free Language for the Association of American University Presses, and she is the author of Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

Charles M. Levine

Charles M. Levine has over three decades of professional experience as an editor and publisher, especially in the areas of general reference, business, and science, including executive positions at John Wiley, Simon & Schuster, and Random House. During the 2003–2007 academic years, he taught editing in the publishing studies program at Hofstra University. He is currently the editor of LOGOS (www.logos-journal.org), a forum of the world book publishing community, and regularly consults for Dictionary.com and KDictionaries.com. He has an MA in the history and philosophy of science from Indiana University. [Photo: Charmaine Delmatier]