grammar - Talk Science To Me

William Shatner as Captain James Kirk, in grayscale, holding a rock over his head with a strained expression.

Around town: Shatner and early grammar woes

by Amanda
May 27, 2016April 28, 2023

(Or why you should hire an editor.)

Local institution the University of British Columbia (UBC) is celebrating its 100^th anniversary this school year. This weekend, as part of its centenary celebrations, UBC is running a daylong event: UBC100: What’s Next? A day of exploring the future, a series of talks on upcoming issues in science, community and technology. To round off the day in style, actor, musician, author and horse breeder William Shatner will share his perspective in a talk called The Curious Life, and will take questions from the audience.

My Around Town series, as I’ve explained previously, is a collection of posts highlighting great local science events. I usually pull together interesting news from conferences happening in Vancouver or explore the topics of the conferences in a more general way. With Captain Kirk himself in town, there are so many potential topics for an Around Town blog post here: NASA…Star Trek…space…technology…horse breeding?

Forget zombie nouns–watch out for vampire verbs

by Roma
January 24, 2014April 27, 2023

I don’t often leave a six-hour seminar with more energy than when I came in, but if it’s six hours of language stuff, I’m pumped. This past Saturday the BC branch of the Editors’ Association of Canada hosted a workshop called Eight Step Editing, delivered by veteran editor and writer Jim Taylor, who developed the program in the 1980s. Jim has taught this process literally for as long as I’ve been alive, and I soaked up all the expertise I could. Eight Step Editing provides a framework for the editing process, a systematic way to approach editing that begins with making the fewest changes to the author’s words and becomes progressively more in-depth. I won’t go into the eight steps (you can find a good summary here), but I will share with you what got me so excited.