Author: tom

Snapshot of the editing life, 2003-04

“Prints the Chaff”was a blog for editors I created in the fall of 2003 and updated more than 800 times till the last post of any consequence appeared in May 2004. I removed the site when I stopped updating, but…

Word nerd alert

I know some of you collect dictionaries for fun. Now I see somebody watching DVD’s about newspaper editing. Oughta be a way to charge that time to the boss, if nothing else.

One too many trips to the thesaurus

David Brooks in today’s Times: The emerging responsible faction has no time now for the witless applause lines the jeering jackdaws on left and right repeat to themselves to their own perpetual self-admiration and delight. I’m too lazy to look…

Talking captions

A thread at the Visual Editors board muses on the best way to write a photo caption (I know, some of you call them cutlines). I liked this bit of advice. Back in photo-j school I was taught a very…

Two chuckles

1) Maud Newton wins a caption contest. 2) Sheila Lennon underscores the risks of putting pictures of yourself online. (This is another of those hilarious examples of goofing off with Photoshop.)

‘The fecund tree of English

… is always sprouting new leaves and casting off the dead ones,” says James Kilpatrick. I wonder if “fecund” is one of those 100 words every freshman should know? Link via Nicole Stockdale.