Summer Camp: Odder Byways (Jul 7 – Aug 3, 2025)

Description

NEW! Summer Camp: Exploring and Editing the Odder Byways of the English Language

$330 (Members: $297) | How to edit unusual sentence-level concerns | 4 weeks | Instructor-led | Intermediate

During the last holiday season, Target ran an ad with the phrase “Mine, all mineeeeee!” and I had to close my eyes and count to ten instead of asking them if their ad agency had ever thought of hiring an editor.

Then I realized that not everyone knows how to edit the odder byways of the English language. And thus a class was born.

In this class, we’ll explore sentence-level conundrums that range from how to spell words with a stressed emphasis to whether the phrase is “tow the line” or “toe the line” (and how to find out). Want to know whether “fuckwit” has a hyphen? This class is calling your name.

We’ll visit the differences among English dialects, including how to catch errors such as an American character calling that bit of highway an overtaking lane.

But the class isn’t just about sentence-level concerns. It will also deal with how these oddities affect development. For example, we’ll look at how characters using idioms that don’t coincide with their background (“chuffed to bits” versus “I’m all over that”) create confusion and strike readers as inconsistent.

If you liked DE Detective, this class is in the same vein. Whether you’re a line editor, a copy editor, or a developmental editor, you’ll find something here to kick your editing skills up a notch.

Intermediate classes are intended for those with some developmental editing experience or who have taken the Beginning + Intermediate DE for Fiction classes or the self-paced DE 1 through 6 classes. 

The class is entirely online and asynchronous (you don’t have to be in any particular place at any particular time to participate) but weekly assignments are due by specific deadlines.