This article was originally published in Active Voice , the magazine of the Editors’ Association of Canada .

This is the first in a series of articles on technology as it relates to editing.

Rating: 4/5 Scott Norton, Developmental Editing: A Handbook for Freelancers, Authors, and Publishers (University of Chicago Press, 2009). I’ve never read a book on developmental editing before, so I can’t speak to how it compares to others. I always find it interesting to watch other editors work, though. It’s one of...

Just to clarify, this rant is intended for people interested in professional document production. My new life’s mission is to convince the publishing world to move to a plain-text-based, XML workflow. Here’s the dirty little secret: InDesign (and even, *sighs*, QuarkXpress ) is no harder to learn than Word . In many...

Rating: 5/5 University of Chicago Press, The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed. (University of Chicago: 2010). It’s unusual to “review” reference works, perhaps, but the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS, or the “orange bible” [don’t let the dust cover fool you, the book is actually bright orange]) is too exceptional to not...

Rating: 4/5 Barbara Gibbs Ostmann and Jane L. Baker, The Recipe Writer’s Handbook: Revised and Expanded (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001). Well this is a book for editors. What it is is a style guide specifically for cookbooks. Should you use “green onions” or “scallions”? “Red pepper” or “red bell pepper”? What are...