The Detail Devil, Academic Editing Services

29/09/2022

The Detail Devil has turned 7 years old! And to celebrate, I’ve put together my Top 15 most commonly edited APA7 style points, gleaned from my applying APA style to hundreds of manuscripts over the last 7 years.

https://detaildevil.net.au/apa-style-hacks-top-15-apa7-style-edits-that-will-save-you-time-and-money/

16/09/2022

"You will never catch me using pronouns." 😅

15/09/2022

"Queue is such a great word. The actual important letter, and then four more silently waiting behind it in a line "

28/10/2021

😅

21/10/2021

This blog post discusses interesting research on how different fonts impact learning and memory - the more difficult the font is to read, the more likely we'll remember the information.

While it may not be obvious to most, text styles likely impact important cognitive processes and might make or break information retention.

12/10/2021

A really great read about the rise in using *both* double and single quotation marks ... within the same manuscript [shock, horror, stop press!].

Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California–Berkeley, was asked about how people could develop this new rule. He explained a long-standing linguistic principle: “People just make s**t up.”

And that's how language, and the style we use to express it, evolves. Although personally? I still need a little convincing :)

If you are an American, using quotation marks could hardly be simpler: Use double quotation marks at all times unless quoting something within a...

14/07/2021

Do you want to work faster, more efficiently and with increased precision, not only saving you time and improving your productivity, but reducing the risk of repetitive strain injury?

In this new blog post, I show you how to assign commands to keyboard shortcuts in Word, together with some popular keyboard shortcuts to get you started and a few lesser known shortcuts to have you working like a Word fiend.

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03/05/2021

80s flashback!

I learnt to type on a manual, but in my first job mid-80s I used electric. A couple of years later, I was using Wordstar for DOS, the first word processor, then a bit later WordPerfect (DOS).

This is when I learnt all the keyboard shortcuts we still use today in Windows - we had a card propped up in front of the keyboard, showing all the many variations of Alt, Shift and Control keys - all before the mouse was invented.

Later, in the early 90s, working for Yorkshire Water in Harehills (Leeds, England), I remember the director's 'Upstairs PA' was the first to get Windows - we all stood around her desk, oooo'ing and aaaah'ing as she proudly waggled her mouse (we'd never seen such a thing) and showed us how she could create and print a table without having to DRAW the vertical lines on afterwards with a pen and ruler - a game changer 😆

Here's the WordPerfect 5.0 command template (circa. 1988) I had on my keyboard; it slotted over the top row of function keys. I still use the shortcuts without the mouse - they all still work in Windows :)

Photo credit: Gordogato's Interesting Stuff

29/04/2021

"While I stood on the flood plains in Wagga Wagga one Sunday, I tried to imagine what life would have been like for my ancestors. I realised very quickly that I had to honour those who, for millennia, had lived, loved and nurtured the land and each other. I wanted to pay tribute to those who still carry on culture, knowledge and language today. I felt I had a responsibility to write our Wiradyuri heroes – our men and women – into the Australian narrative, where they had been ignored or forgotten for too long."

First Nations people are in every part of this country – physically, spiritually, socially and politically. A novel set in Australia must acknowledge that

20/04/2021

The life of an editor 😊

In this week's , we look at two different views of editors at work.
Blog post: https://pikkoshou.se/sm178
Archive: https://pikkoshou.se/80a76
Store: https://pikkoshou.se/52211

27/03/2021

"... is denoted by an asterix*"

😊