I was experiencing symptoms of Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) or screen fatigue, and I know I’m not alone. The American Optometric Association says that anyone who spends 2 or more hours every day looking at a screen is “at greatest risk for developing CVS” (1).

I would guess that a large portion of freelancers spend most of their working day looking at computers - that can be 4 times the amount of time that puts you at risk! Plus, most people spend their time relaxing looking at screens as well.

That means that it’s not crazy to think that a normal person could be spending 9-12 hours a day staring at a glowing box.

While screens don’t necessarily pose any major health risks, they can produce some unpleasant effects.

Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin described editors as “the invisible people”: “A good editor tries to figure out what the writer was trying to do, and helps him or her do it better, rather than trying to change the book into something else entirely.” That captures the editor’s role perfectly. Whether it is tentatively suggesting a small change to a line of dialogue, or firmly insisting on the deletion of an entire scene or character, the editor’s role is to spot the minor bumps and major p(l)otholes in the road, all in the service of the story. There might be a bit of a tussle, but between the writer and the editor, if they both do their jobs right, the road will be smoothed over, the editor’s intervention disappearing under the tarmac like a prehistoric burial site. That’s why editors are very visible to their authors and during the publication process, but they aim to become invisible in the finished book.

How does a professional copyeditor know when it’s time to retire? Freelancers especially may be tempted to sail on past the age at which in-house editors are encouraged to put down the red pencil. But in either case, how long is too long? Here are some questions to consider.

Troubleshooting is our topic now. Because sometimes, spellcheck isn’t getting it right. The problem is usually that spell checking has been turned off, either generally or for that specific text. Here are three things to check

EXCLUDE DICTIONARIES
Another sort of custom dictionary is the “exclude” dictionary. As you might infer from the name, this is a list of words you want excluded from spellcheck’s dictionary. That means, it’s a list of words that will always be marked as incorrectly spelled.

Earlier this week, Merriam-Webster Dictionaries added 850 new words and definitions to its online dictionary. Some are recent coinages that were obvious candidates for inclusion, some are drawn from slang and intentional wordplay, and some are words you might be surprised didn’t already appear in the dictionary.

And if news of dictionary updates gets your heart a-pumping, then the first new addition you’ll want to know about — the one that describes you — is wordie.

You’ll recognize a number of new additions from the digital arena from their now daily inclusion in financial and international news: cryptocurrency (currency that exists only digitally), Bitcoin (the first successful cryptocurrency), initial coin offering (the first release of a new cryptocurrency), and blockchain (which is, um . . . here’s its entry ) have all found homes in the dictionary.

The near-homophones defuse and diffuse can give writers and editors some trouble. Spellcheck certainly can’t save you from them, and understanding the words’ meanings is only half the solution. These words are easy for our eyes to slide over while we’re reading, making the error easy to miss and correct. They’re like time bombs waiting there in the text.

Not ticking time bombs. Bombs with, you know, fuses.

Defuse literally means “to remove the fuse from” — the bomb, mine, cannon or firecracker kind of fuse, not the old-fashioned turned-too-many-appliances-on-at-once-and-now-the-fuse-has-blown kind. Because few of us regularly deal with timed explosions, defuse is often used to describe deactivating something that could metaphorically explode, like a tense situation or an angry uncle’s ire.

Have you ever been in the middle of reading a novel or a short story, when you happen upon a mistake about something you’re familiar with and get so annoyed that you don’t even want to finish the book? 

Copy editors, who are among the last to review a manuscript before it goes to print, should watch out for any factual errors that might turn off readers and make them put down the book.

Aside from choosing which language the spellcheck is using, you can customize the dictionary that Word is using so that it reflects the style sheet in use. There are a few ways to customize the list. One is adding words, and the other is excluding words. (We’ll look at exclusions in the next instalment.)

You know Spellcheck, and in the previous post, you learned about language preferences and how to control them. Now we’ll look at the ways to run Spellcheck in Word and how they’re different.

The verbs career and careen are easily confused — and they have been often enough that their meanings may merge sometime in the near future. But for now, they mean different things.

CAREER

Grammar checking: troubled waters but big improvements for Word’s spellcheck.

While it might not be seen strictly as a feature of spellcheck, Word’s grammar checker is bundled with spellcheck. And while editors have been mocking Word’s bad suggestions for decades, it has made some improvements. And now, with the introduction of “Editor” in Word 365 (2016), you can’t entirely turn it off. Even when the grammar check is completely turned off, these suggestions still appear.

In last month’s post, which argued against the feast-or-famine mentality, I mentioned that I currently try to work a maximum of 25 billable hours a week. A reader asked how I divvy up my non-billable hours, which was an excellent question that also hinted at a common source of confusion: what tasks are considered non-billable, and why do they matter to us as editorial freelancers?

Let’s start by looking at some examples of both billable and non-billable tasks

Most people reading this will have partial or passive familiarity with some terminology from programming, information security, and related domains, but they may have just a hazy grasp of how they’re used. What’s the difference between DOS and DoS? Does cold call take a hyphen? Is it a SQL or an SQL? How do you pronounce ASCII? What’s a dictionary attack?*

Nita Strauss, the guitarist onstage with Alice Cooper? She's a freelancer, a hired gun. Piggy D (Matt Montgomery), the bassist onstage with Rob Zombie? Hired gun. Phil X, the guitarist who replaced Richie Sambora in Bon Jovi? Before becoming a full-fledged member of the band, he spent two years as their hired gun.

Pink's entire band? If you're one of the millions of people who are part of the gig economy, they're all just like you: Hired guns.

Which, at least by my definition, makes them -- and you -- entrepreneurs.

And that makes the documentary Hired Gun: Out of the Shadows, Into the Spotlight, available on demand and currently airing on Netflix, especially entertaining if you're a freelancer who loves music. It's a behind the scenes look at a few of the untold stories behind the artists who make music (as well as the business of music.)

Here are some great lessons from the movie about freelancing... and for good measure, about employing freelancers.