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Channel: editing process – AMA Style Insider
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Statistical Rounding and the (Mis)Leading Zero

Sometimes editors (not you or I, of course) obey the rules of their institution’s preferred style manual without fully understanding, or really thinking about, why some of these rules exist. For...

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Jarring Jargon

Theodore M. Bernstein, in The Careful Writer: A Modern Guide to English Usage, describes jargon as “meaningless, unintelligible speech,” which is how some people might describe their last conversation...

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Purposely, Purposefully

These words sound similar, and over time their meanings have come to overlap somewhat. Generally, however, they are regarded as having different meanings and uses—although the differences are...

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Masterful, Masterly

Writers are often taught that masterful and masterly mean different things and to ensure that they are used correctly. Masterful, so such thinking goes, is taken to mean “suggestive of a domineering...

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Ode to the Style Manual

(A poem from a hardcore user of the AMA Manual.) (No, not the cat.) I study the Manual each day and each night Coming away with equal questions and answers Seeking all ways to be right Are you a...

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Envy, Jealousy

Words that convey similar meanings sometimes come to be used interchangeably. In the case of envy/envious and jealousy/jealous, though, the move seems to have been in one direction only; jealousy is...

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The “Asterisk Solution,” or Group Authorship Is Still Authorship

Authors may come alone or in pairs or trios. Or more. Today, more and more frequently, they come as part of a group. There is nothing wrong with group authorship—groups can accomplish great things. But...

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Top 10 Mistakes Authors Make

Publishing a style manual, particularly a lengthy, detailed manual that covers a ridiculous amount of technical material (Hello, AMA Manual of Style!), is a grueling process. In our case, it involved...

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Quiz Bowl: Author-Editor Relationship

There have been some famous, even notorious, author-editor relationships: Charles Dickens and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish. This month’s quiz takes...

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Quiz Bowl: Editorial Processing and Assessment

So, what happens to my manuscript once it has been submitted for publication? Who reads it? Who decides its fate? If it is accepted, what happens next? Help! Many authors are perplexed by the editorial...

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Steal This Article

Today we shine a light on a fascinating blog on plagiarism and scientific misconduct, Copy, Shake, and Paste (dig that serial comma!), written by Debora Weber-Wulff. Do any of you work with...

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Raising (Rearing?) Hell

Besides the dropping energy levels and unsightly wrinkles that daily remind me of my advancing age, I never expected an Associated Press style rule—beaten into me as a young reporter—to deliver the...

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Ding Dong: the Death Dagger Is Dead

AMA Manual of Style, section 2.3.2, has an ominous subheading: “Death.” I’ve quoted it below: Death. If an author of an article has died before the article goes to press or is posted online, a death...

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Readability

A common assumption about those of us who copy edit science papers is that we have a science background. Some of us do, but by no means all. After [mumble-number] years in the medical publishing field,...

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The Use of Cause-and-Effect Language in the JAMA Network Journals

As a manuscript editor and freelance manuscript editing coordinator for the JAMA specialty journals, I am constantly having to edit out cause-and-effect language from observational studies that are not...

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People-First Language

In the new Netflix series Atypical, a father attends a support group meeting for parents of children with autism. As he begins to describe how well his son has been doing lately as an “autistic...

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Discard the Rest

For several years, I have had a healthy curiosity with minimalism. I’ve listened to TED talks and watched documentaries about the topic and pared down my items accordingly. Last year, I read The...

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