A not-very-brief thread on non-AI resources for editing. Some of these are free, and some you need to make an account…

A not-very-brief thread on non-AI resources for editing. Some of these are free, and some you need to make an account or pay a subscription to use. 🧵

I realize some of these may seem very obvious but I'm becoming increasingly worried people don't know where to look for basic (and non-basic) information on the internet.

First, dictionaries: My go-to is Merriam-Webster (bc that's what our house style calls for). "Duh," you say. "Everyone knows about dictionaries, and spell check exists." Sure, but do you REALLY know the meaning of that word? Best to double check.

Other tips: Use M-W to check for hyphenated vs closed compounds (snow-capped vs snowcapped). You can also look up quite a lot of idioms. Misused or slightly off EN idioms are one of the mistakes I see often in localized work!

I also subscribe to the Oxford English Dictionary: for historical books it's one I can't live without. Usefully, it will tell you the 1st recorded instance of a word - great to get a gut check on whether a word will be jarringly anachronistic if you're attempting period language.

Next, thesauri: My personal favorite is WordHippo because it includes slang + you can easily search by context. A few of my translators also swear by Onelook. (screenshot from WordHippo)

While it's common advice not to overuse a thesaurus in your writing, it's an indispensable resource - just don't pick words you don't actually know the meaning of. (screenshot from OneLook)

Style guides: The Chicago Manual of Style is the standard style guide for most trade books published in the US. A must-have subscription if you're a pro copy editor or proofreader that elucidates many fiddly points of grammar and style.

Corpora: A corpus is a body of writing samples used for language study. My favorite is COCA. It has lots of features, but a very useful one is the ability to find collocations, aka words that are naturally associated with each other in EN. english-corpora.org/coca/

Proper collocations in localization can be the difference between fluency and awkward translationese. For example, in English you "make" a mistake, you don't "do" a mistake, and you have "deep" regrets more often than "heavy" ones.

If you're a native speaker, you might instinctively know this (like adj order...another topic), but after looking at a lot of translated text (or shifting your brain between languages if you're a translator) you do start to doubt yourself 😅

Other resources for this kind of thing are fraze.it (search a word or phrase in strings of published texts) and ozdic.com (offers definitions, synonyms, collocations in a simpler interface).

Research: For terms and spellings on historical places/people/topics try Encyclopedia Brittanica. This is again a free resource that gives you an authoritative source for standard usage.

For more obscure phrases and topics, I often go to JSTOR and see what's standard in scholarship on the subject (if anything is). If you make an account, you can read a bunch of free articles even if you're not with an institution.

This thread is getting long but there are also very specific guides on historical court titles (UCI's Dictionary of Ming Government Official Titles e.g.) & cool free resources on Youtube that break down historical weaponry and clothing. Much can be found with a google search.

One more bit of niche editing advice: if you're going to work on historical fiction, make friends with a horse girl. When it comes to equestrian terminology, I would trust a horse girl over ChatGPT any day of the week.