Carla DeSantis, Editing & Language Services

02/18/2025

In addition to my posts on LinkedIn, you can now follow me on Bluesky: .bsky.social

I have a new blog post coming out on March 5, hosted by an editing association! The link will be posted on LI and Bluesky, as this account will now remain dormant.

I hope to see some of you over there!

01/21/2025

Due to Meta's recent policy changes, I have chosen to limit my personal engagement on FB.

I am still unclear what that means for my business-related activity on FB, but for now I suspect it will also be relatively limited.

In the meantime, I invite you to continue following my content on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/carladesantis/), where I will be posting links to some upcoming blog posts to be published on other editorial platforms within the next month!

Thank you for your continued support.

Precise and thorough copy editor and line/stylistic editor, translator, authenticity reader, and indexer, specializing in (but not limited to) scholarly and academic materials in humanities, social sciences, and business, including complex documentation and multilingual texts (English, Italian, Span...

12/18/2024

12/11/2024

This is why I do what I do, in a nutshell.

I just received this feedback from a professor publishing a joint research article in the social sciences.

A message like this confirms to me that my work is valuable, because my only aim is to improve an author's written scholarly work to become as complete, correct, and consistent as possible, so that readers can focus on the important message in that writing and not be distracted by other errors or inconsistencies.

I love that my work improved their manuscript before publication. And when you know that your work is valuable, it is so satisfying!

12/03/2024

I am spending hours re-editing a bibliography that was clearly created in Zotero or some other citation generator.

The main issue is with names (not to mention that the citations do not actually adhere to the prescribed Chicago style):

1) In some cases, the first name has been substituted for the surname, and the surname replaced with an initial; e.g., instead of citing Athanasiadou, Maria, the author is cited as Maria, A.

2) In many cases, in a two-part Spanish surname, the first part of the surname has been rendered as a middle initial, with the second part of the surname used as the surname; e.g., instead of styling correctly as Rodríguez Solís, G., the name is cited as Solís, G. R.

If such a bibliography were left as is and published without proper editing, there would be serious issues with accessibility to sources cited, if one were to search for a title by an author name that doesn't actually exist.

So, my advice to scholars and researchers: although such citation and bibliography generators may seem handy, they must be used with the extreme caveat of knowing that they must be carefully edited and vetted after generation, before publication.

What do you think? Would it be less time consuming to simply create the bibliography properly on your own the first time, or do people still think it's worth it to generate and then backtrack to find all of the proper information and correct accordingly? I am leaning toward the former.

Another case where AI falls short and human editors save the day.

11/21/2024

Yesterday I turned down a request from a publisher for authenticity reading.

It was for a novel with Spanish content, which takes place at a resort. My instinct was that this would therefore involve colloquial Spanish.

While I have an excellent command of written Spanish, which enables me to accurately copyedit (usually scholarly or literary) Spanish text and translate from Spanish into English, I don't feel equipped to deal with localized colloquial Spanish, as I have never "lived" in Spanish. I recommended that the publisher engage someone whose first language is Spanish, preferably with localized experience regarding where the novel takes place.

It is this type of precision that makes authenticity reading accurate.

Acting in a professional capacity means sometimes passing on projects that you could do but know that someone else could do better, and pointing the client in the right direction.

See below for the topics that I DO feel comfortable doing authenticity reading for. For example, I have "lived" in Italian. 😊
https://www.carladesantisediting.com/authenticity-reading.html

Authenticity (or sensitivity) reading provides feedback on representations in your text. Here are some of the topics I read for: Italian culture, Italian American culture, type 1 diabetes, academia, medieval manuscripts, Latin, Canadian culture

09/30/2024

Toronto's Word on the Street festival took place this past weekend, a celebration of reading and writing in Canada! As someone who is part of the publishing process, it makes me happy to see the written, printed word celebrated in the centre of our city in this way.

Yes, I specify "printed," because publishers, indie authors, writing organizations, magazines, and others all come out to display their hard copy publications -- table after table along the street. The joy of perusing books! And the advantage is that most titles are offered at a discount price or without tax.

I am a bit of a holdout for reading hard copy books for leisure. Since my work involves reading onscreen all day, I relish holding a printed book in my hands at the end of the day and turning paper pages (and specifically fiction for my leisure, as I edit primarily nonfiction for work).

Literacy advocacy also takes place at the festival, such as promoting the public libraries (see photo below). In addition, I had the opportunity to sign a petition asking our provincial government of Ontario to reinstate funding for libraries in our public schools.

In the end, whether you prefer an e-reader or printed books, it's great to see a celebration of reading, writing, and publishing happen annually in our city!

(N.B. For my "medieval" colleagues who know, the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies building is coincidentally behind me in the photo. 🙂)

09/23/2024

Here are two examples of errors (one, homonyms; the other, easily confused words that are spelled similarly) that I caught for my client today. Since the words below are valid English words, spellcheck won't catch these for you--but your human editor will:

1) stationary >(changed to) stationery
(the text was talking about writing on a type of paper)
stationary = immobile, unchanging
stationery = materials for writing

2) succession >(changed to) secession
(the text was talking about Texas seceding from Mexico in the 19th c.)
succession = the act of following in order
secession = formal withdrawal

It was the CONTEXT that alerted me to the errors. As far as I know, spellcheck and other such automated tools still cannot match the human brain in distinguishing context.

By catching such errors for my clients, I help them put their best foot forward in their publications, produce a quality text, and avoid potential embarrassment after publication.

09/03/2024

Well, I just can't help it.

I am simply hardwired to think of September as the beginning of the educational year. So, I just signed up for two live webinars offered by the Editorial Freelancers Association in September: one on copyediting productivity and another on the new changes introduced in the Chicago Manual of Style 18.

As an editor, I need to keep learning and keep updated in order to provide the best service to my clients. Continuing professional development (CPD) is something that I have committed to as an advanced professional member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading - CIEP .

So, here's to the new school year for students and CPD for professionals!

08/30/2024

Hello! It's been a while since I have posted here, as I have been busy working hard on a new project and doing some traveling over the summer.

In case you haven't heard, editors everywhere are talking about The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) 18, the latest updated edition of the most widely used style guide for many disciplines. This is a reference tool that I use every day in my work as a copyeditor, as a guide for usage rules and maintaining consistency in the scholarly texts that I edit.

So, the question is: Do I dive in right away and start implementing the changes included in the new edition?

It does weigh in at a whopping 1,192 pages! But luckily, CMOS has published a handy resource outlining the main changes from CMOS 17 to CMOS 18, so I will take some time to absorb these into future project style sheets.

But do all current style sheets need to change right away?

I work as the copyeditor for an English-Spanish bilingual journal, which uses Manual de estilo Chicago-Deusto for the Spanish contributions. This Spanish style guide is based on CMOS 16, and changing to the CMOS 18 recommendation of not including place of publication in citations for the English contributions, for example, may look too incongruous between the Spanish and English pieces.

But that is the beauty of house style: we can choose to stick with CMOS 17, to match much of Chicago-Deusto, or we can choose to modify the Chicago-Deusto style and not include place of publication in Spanish pieces, to be more consistent with CMOS 18.

Erin Brenner of Right Touch Editing has recently highlighted the flexibility that editors and writers have in following style guides and offers some helpful tips for updating house style sheets in light of the updated CMOS edition: https://www.righttouchediting.com/2024/08/29/modernize-your-writing-the-case-for-refreshing-your-style-guide/