The Final Touch

Heidi: proud copy edi­tor of ‘FRED WHO?’

Last fall I had the amaz­ing oppor­tu­nity to inter­view a real live pres­i­den­tial can­di­date for my work with the e-magazine, 10,000 Cou­ples. I was soooooo ner­vous as the time drew near for our con­ver­sa­tion over the inter­net! But Mr. Fred Karger, a lesser-known mod­er­ate Repub­li­can can­di­date for the U.S. pres­i­dency, was absolutely won­der­ful! He was such fun to talk to, easy-going, gen­er­ous with his time, very down-to-earth, and had no “agenda” what­so­ever — which is to say, he did not seem com­pelled to twist any ques­tion I asked so he could say what­ever he wanted to say, even if it had noth­ing to do with the ques­tion. So, you see… not at all like the typ­i­cal can­di­date for pub­lic office.

In prepa­ra­tion for our inter­view, I had pur­chased and read Read the rest of this entry »

I find lan­guage so inter­est­ing (per­haps the under­state­ment of the year). On any given day, I might edit the same sen­tence in two or three dif­fer­ent ways, depend­ing on the pre­ferred style guide — or just plain per­sonal pref­er­ences — of the client I’m edit­ing it for. And right there is a prime example:

Some clients would fiercely defend their right to end a sen­tence with a prepo­si­tion because it sounds more like the real way we speak, while oth­ers would insist that it never be done, no mat­ter how pretzel-like the sen­tence may sound (do pret­zels sound? you know what I mean).

Indeed, when I was in 12^th-grade Pre-College Com­po­si­tion class, Read the rest of this entry »

Not too many homo­phones trip me up, but one set con­sis­tently seems to.

Homo­phones? you ask.

Homo­phones are words that sound alike but are spelled dif­fer­ently and/or mean dif­fer­ent things. For exam­ple: to, too, two; or its, it’s; or all, awl. The list goes on and on. The one that has often sent me to the dic­tio­nary to double-check is this set: palate, pal­let, palette.

This morn­ing, over at Gram­mar Girl Mignon Fogarty’s “Quick & Dirty Tips” web­site, she offers some tricks to keep the three straight. Very help­ful! Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t you just LOVE the new logo??!!  See, I can brag about it because I’m not the one who designed it!

So here’s a shout-out to my AWESOME hus­band, who also hap­pens to be a FABULOUS graphic designer, Greg Mann! And a shame­less plug: If you’re in need of graphic-design work — book cover or inte­rior lay­out, posters, brochures, busi­ness cards, logos — he’s the one you want to con­tact! Visit the Face­book page for his busi­ness, Mon­key­Mind Stu­dios, to see pics of his work.

And… I’ve got a chal­lenge for you! There are a num­ber of sym­bols woven into my logo. If you can iden­tify at least one cor­rectly, your name will go into a draw­ing to receive a half-hour of proofreading/copyediting ser­vices from me at no charge (a $10-$15 value). Leave your ideas as a com­ment below. Respond by Mon­day, Novem­ber 7, as that is when I’ll draw the name of a lucky recip­i­ent. You never know when you could use a fresh set of eyes to look over your writ­ing: resume? col­lege appli­ca­tion essay? a paper you’ve writ­ten for school? an arti­cle for pub­li­ca­tion? And there’s no expi­ra­tion date to my offer — only to your chance to respond! So, hey! What are you wait­ing for?!

This is a longer-than-usual post, but since it is a book review, I didn’t want to split it into two or more parts. I hope you will enjoy my reflec­tions and per­haps be moved to read the book your­self. Please let me know what you think in a com­ment below.

I just fin­ished read­ing Bat­tle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua (Pen­guin, 2011). It stirred up quite a con­tro­versy upon its release, so I requested it from our local library to see what all the hub­bub was about.

Chua, the American-born daugh­ter of Chi­nese immi­grants, writes of how and why she val­ues the Chi­nese tra­di­tion of parental author­ity and the belief that – in my words, not hers – father and mother really do know best. She uses the terms “Chi­nese par­ent­ing” and “West­ern par­ent­ing” some­what loosely, explain­ing that, of course, nei­ther all Chi­nese par­ents nor all West­ern par­ents see eye to eye. In fact, she acknowl­edges, some actual Chi­nese par­ents have adopted pat­terns of leniency with their kids, while some U.S. par­ents with­out an ounce of Chi­nese blood fall more in line with Chi­nese par­ent­ing than with the style more com­mon in the United States.

Chua shares that as a child, she was not allowed to do such things as the fol­low­ing; nor did she allow her own two daugh­ters, Sophia and Louisa (“Lulu”) to do them:

• Attend a sleepover;
• Have a playdate;
• Choose their own extracur­ric­u­lar activities;
• Get any­thing less than straight As;
• Play any instru­ment other than piano or violin;
• Not play piano or violin.

Read the rest of this entry »

Like me, my sis­ter, Shan­non Hyland-Tassava, is a writer. Actu­ally, she does more orig­i­nal writ­ing at the present, while I am pas­sion­ate about help­ing oth­ers’ writ­ing shine. I’ve writ­ten a few pieces here and there — the Fore­word in a forth­com­ing book, a few arti­cles for the web-zine 10,000 Cou­ples, and some of the monthly con­tent of a sub­scrip­tion pub­li­ca­tion for church newslet­ter cre­ators — but Shan­non now has two essays pub­lished in antholo­gies related to wom­an­hood and moth­er­hood. I invite you to check them out!

The first essay, “The Mommy Wars Killed Our Friend­ship…,” Read the rest of this entry »