The murderer of our managing director, Hermione McDougall, was revealed as our very own social media consultant, Cate Springer.

Cate's dastardly deed was uncovered by Rhonda Baker, a proofreader in our legal department.

Our annual company outing is on Sunday 18 July. This year's outing will take the form of a murder mystery.

Over 20 staff and guests will be out and about in Perth and area looking for clues and solving them. If you see anyone with a deerstalker and magnifying glass then you'll know who they work for.

The denouement will take place towards the end of the afternoon and be followed by food and refreshments.

We have ordered our first Quad-Core 27-inch iMacs.

These are for our design and typesetting team. Amazing processors. Loads of main memory. Some of us can hardly wait.

Finding InDesign CS5 slow when using features such as Span Columns and Balance Columns?

Go to InDesign | Preferences | Interface and under Options set Live Drawing to Delayed or Never. 

Delayed is the same as CS4. Never will probably make things a bit faster. But Immediate might make ID run slowly on Macs older than a year or two. It is set on by default. This fix should bring about radical performance improvement.

From the help manual:

Live Screen Drawing Select an option to determine whether the image redraws as you drag an object. If Immediate is selected, the image redraws while you drag. If Never is selected, dragging an image moves only the frame, and then image is moved when you release the mouse button. If Delayed is selected, the image redraws only if you pause before dragging. Delayed offers the same behavior as in InDesign CS4.

Good news on the promotion front: one of our production editors, Petra Abbam, will become a senior production editor on 1 August.

Petra has been with us for 2 years and is a graduate in Computer Science and French.

We often provide regular clients with editing tips and tricks, and some clients have even incorporated these and other suggestions into their internal work processes.

As an example, try the following wildcard find and replace in Microsoft Word. It will find every hyphen between digits (e.g. as used in page ranges in reference lists) and replace them with proper en dashes.

Open a test document that you know contains hyphens between digits.

From Word's Edit menu select Replace. Tick the option titled Use Wildcards.

– In Find what, enter this: ([0-9])(-)([0-9])

– In Replace with, enter this: \1^=\3

– Now select Replace All.

Used appropriately, the above find and replace can save a great deal of time during editing.

We know a great number of such tips for Microsoft Word, many of which are part of a suite of custom-written macros and toolbars that we use for cleaning-up authors' files or for on-screen editing.

If the above tip captures your interest, and you have a suitable project that would benefit from this kind of intervention, then please contact us.

This is fun. Click a word in the left column then click its synonym in the right column. When you are finished, click Get Answers to see how well you did. Good luck!

Our upgrade to Adobe Creative Suite 5 is more or less complete.

The first projects we are producing with CS5 are already in proof. New features such as Span columns and Keep with previous are being put to good use.

One of our team leaders, Catriona Vernal, took her team on an away-day yesterday, to visit Luath Press in Edinburgh and ScotPrint and Hunter & Foulis in Haddington. We extend our thanks to everyone involved at these organisations.

They brought back the following happy memory.

More good news on the promotion front: one of our senior production editors, Andrew Davidson, will soon take up his new role of Publishing Team Leader.

Andrew has been with us since December 2004, having previously worked for a Cambridge-based translating company. He is a graduate of Edinburgh University, where he studied English Language and Literature, and of Cambridge University, where he gained a PhD in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic.

When writing about bacteria, the binomial nomenclature scheme should be used, i.e. a genus name and a species name. Both parts are conventionally set in italic type.

The genus name begins with a capital but the species name does not.

Examples include Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli and Clostridium difficile. The genus name can also be abbreviated to the initial letter followed by a full point and a space, i.e. S. aureus, E. coli or C. difficile. The species name should not be abbreviated, so avoid C. diff.

Watch out for redundancy when following a set of initials with the word for which the final initial stands.

A beautiful example would be the sentence I went to the ATM machine at the TSB Bank and keyed in my PIN number.

Similarly, asap if possible and please RSVP.  This is called is called RAS syndrome.

We have a new mission: to save the world's media from embarrassment.

We want to teach the world some basic science, one word or phrase at a time.

Let's start with carbon dioxide. The chemical formula is CO₂. First note that CO₂ is the chemical formula, not the abbreviation (that would be CD, wouldn't it?).

So, it's capital C (the chemical symbol for carbon, an element), capital O (the chemical symbol for oxygen, another element), not a zero, then a subscript 2 to indicate that there are two atoms of oxygen in the molecule. The digit should always be subscript, not on the line and never superscript.

To make this clear, the following are all wrong: CO2, C02 and CO².

Reticent is often used when reluctant or hesitant would be more appropriate. 

Reticent means taciturn or uncommunicative:

He was reticent about his wartime experiences.

You can't be reticent to do something:

They were reticent to agree.

would be better phrased as

They were reluctant to agree.

Note the spelling. It's not Plexiglass.

By special request from one of our clients...

This is a tricky one as both affect and effect can be used both as a noun and as a verb. Usually, however, if a verb is being used then affect is correct and if a noun is being used effect is correct.

Affect
As a verb, affect means to influence or to adopt a pose or manner.

The outcome of treatment is affected by patients' degree of compliance.

The girl affected a couldn't care less attitude.

As a noun affect means an emotional state. It is rarely encountered outside the realm of psychiatry. So, most people are unlikely ever to use affect as a noun; however, you may well come across it in medical titles.

Effect
We don't think anyone is likely to have difficulty in comprehending the usual meaning of effect: something brought about; a result.

The effect of treatment was an improvement in patients' quality of life.

But effect may also be used as a verb, meaning to cause to happen.

The drugs effected a significant improvement in patients' quality of life.

... was a Gaul. The footnote indicator is an asterisk.

A benefactor provides largesse and a beneficiary is the recipient of it.

The above combination of letters is very common in scientific terminology. More often than not one of the consonants is missing, so always, always check. For example

ophthalmology
diphtheria (caused by Corynebacterium diphtheriae)
phenolphthalein
naphthalene

Other combinations, e.g. chth, are possible.

ichthyology

We have a vacancy for a production editor with a science degree and relevant experience.

If you are interested in working for us then have look at our current vacancies.

Please apply by Friday 12 March 2010.

Patients are people, as are children, subjects, the elderly, etc.

All of these groups should be referred to using who or whom, not which or that.

More good news on the promotion front: one of our senior production editors, Catriona Vernal, will soon take up her new role of Publishing Team Leader.

Catriona has been with us since July 2007, having previously worked as a production editor in Edinburgh. She is a graduate of Glasgow University, where she studied Scottish History and Celtic Civilisation. Among other responsibilities, Catriona's team will produce Advances Wales, a technology transfer magazine that we produce for the Welsh Assembly Government in Cardiff.

No such word. Use recur.

We have promoted Dr Lucy Harrier to the post of Publishing Manager.

In her new role Lucy will have responsibility for editorial office services and journal production for both public sector and commercial clients. Lucy has been with the company for almost 7 years, and previously was one of the company's publishing services managers.

This is such a common error that we have decided to harp on about it again.

Comprise means contains or consists of. First, it is never, ever, followed by of. Second, the whole of something comprises its parts.

In contrast, the parts of something constitute, or make up, the whole.

Right: Audiences comprise ordinary people.
Wrong: Audiences are comprised of ordinary people.

Right: Ordinary people constitute the majority of theatre goers.
Wrong: Ordinary people comprise the majority of theatre goers.

In UK usage, practice is a noun and practise a verb.

Make it your practice to practise this.

A countable noun can be singular or plural, e.g. book/books, person/people.

An uncountable noun does not have a plural form, e.g. information, sugar, respect.

Less is used with uncountable nouns and fewer with countable nouns. I have less information about that because I have fewer books on that subject.

One of our project managers recently came across the use of ex-patriots in a manuscript, which should, of course, be ex-patriates.

This is typical of the the type of mistake that professional copy-editing can correct.

averse means having a dislike of or opposition to something. You can be averse to risky investments.

adverse means harmful or unfavourable. You can experience adverse weather while on a protest march.

You can’t experience averse criticism, only adverse criticism.

Similarly, you can’t be adverse to alcohol, beetroot or cats, only averse.

We collect amusing book and journal article titles. Here are some from microbiology textbooks:

Stealth and mimicry by deadly bacterial toxins. 

Clostridium botulinum: A bug with beauty and weapon. 

Post-pasteurian cultures: the microbiopolitics of raw-milk cheese in the United States.

Fuzzy species among recombinogenic bacteria.

Maybe not up to Horace Bent's high standards but we're trying.

The latter is more commonly encountered than the former even though it is usually the former that is meant.

forego means to go before or precede

You are unlikely to come across this usage very often, except in the phrase a foregone conclusion. You cannot, for example, forego your breakfast, walk in the park or pre-dinner cocktail.

forgo means to to do without

If the weather is poor, we will have to forgo our ascent of Ben Vorlich.

If you would like to see Academic Business Collaboration, a supplement to Advances Wales, the magazine that we write, edit, design and typeset for the Welsh Assembly Government in Cardiff, then have a look here.

Advances Wales has a circulation of over 10,000, with an international readership consisting of key global players in industry, academia, research & development and investment. 

We handle all aspects of production: from journalism and picture research right through to delivery of final files for the printer and web publication.

Our updated site has scored 8.2 on Nibbler and in fact appears in the top third of Nibbler's top 100 sites. Our score includes a rating of 10 out of 10 in the technology category.

Very pleasing, considering that we haven't even finished our site redesign yet.