Does your science publication
need vivid writing?

You may need to commission a full piece, such as an article. But you may also need writing of a more subtle kind.

Here is an example from my recent work. My client, a publishing house, had me copyedit a four-author, 700-page final-year high-school physics textbook. The treatment of simultaneity in special relativity proved fuzzy. What to do? I doffed my editor's hat, donned my writer's hat, and judiciously added a detail to the authors' thought experiment. (The ready attachability of electronic comments, or "flags," to word-processor files makes this sort of surgery feasible.) The authors had invited the students to consider a train passing a pair of lamps on the station platform. Their lamps flashed simultaneously in a frame of reference anchored on the platform, yet nonsimultaneously - or so it was alleged - in a frame anchored on the train. To make the need for asserting relativity of simultaneity clear to the students, I added a rather vital physical detail. As the final page proofs now stand, our lamps explode upon flashing, leaving one pair of soot marks on the station platform, another pair of soot marks on the passing train. The separation of each of the two pairs of marks can be measured (in each case as an Einsteinian "proper distance"). In technical publishing, a few added sentences can rescue entire pages from obscurity.

Does your science publication
need astute copyediting?

Scientific materials present challenges beyond the scope of the Chicago Manual of Style. A few years ago, I did some swift telephone work to rescue my life-sciences author, who was discussing pressure, from stating a force per unit area as a mass per unit area. As chance would have it, I've seen a national Canadian newspaper come to grief on this same point, eliciting critical letters from its scientifically literate readers!

Does your science publication
need meticulous proofreading?

I am delighted to pick up subtle problems in technical copy--as when I corrected "123°K" to "123 K" in life sciences. (The SI rules require the symbol for kelvins, used in specifying thermodynamic temperatures, to be written without the degree sign.)

Most proofreaders, I'll bet, have a favourite typo. Here is mine (admittedly, a typo that I corrected when assisting with an undergraduate textbook outside my core scientific specializations): "...organizations which purchase gods and services."

Does your science publication
need insightful indexing?

I completed my first commercial indexing assignment, for a high-school physics textbook, in the early spring of 2002.

I'm now particularly keen to tackle severely technical books, in undergraduate or advanced physics (especially in astrophysics).

Some subject matters can be indexed by generalists. For physics books, however, a physics degree is advisable. Consider, for instance, our index entry for conservation of energy:

Energy, (Newtonian) law of 
conservation of, 195. 
See also Mass-energy,
(relativistic) conservation of; 
Work-energy theorem
  in collisions, 246-48
  in electric field, 365-66
  lab activity, 220-23, 231
  and Lenz's law, 417-18
  in SHM, 215-17

The indexer here has to be alert to the fact that whereas in Newtonian mechanics, mass and energy are conserved separately, it is mass-energy that is the conserved quantity in special relativity. Further, the indexer has to be alert to the fact that the work-energy theorem in Newtonian mechanics has a conceptual connection with (Newtonian) conservation of energy. The plethora of quick, tricky judgements required in physics indexing calls to mind the viewpoint of a distinguished British lawyer, who regarded the indexing of legal statutes as the proper province of the barrister, not of the publishing-house generalist.

Does your science publication
need standards-compliant
Web development?

The business-oriented pages you are now viewing illustrate my approach to Web development.

I emphasize content over appearance. But in these business pages, I do use up-to-date Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) technology to enforce several of the typographical disciplines traditional in fine book printing (including the traditional limits on line length). Further, I use CSS in these pages to position graphical elements without recourse to the <TABLE> tag.

The pages retain all their textual content in CSS-blind browsers.

I like to ensure clean display, even in CSS-blind browsers, by coding to a formal specification. (In these business pages, I have chosen the XML-generated specification XHTML 1.0 Strict, so as to achieve not only backward compatibility, but also future-proofing.) I use a validating parser to check specification-conformance of code. In addition, I use several browsers, including the text-only browser lynx, to check informally for clean rendering.

If appearances are important in your project, I will with your formal approval subcontract graphics to one or more of my contacts in Toronto's Web development community, while myself retaining day-to-day project-management functions. (You will consider appearances important if, for example, you require animated graphics. ) I am similarly likely to ask you for permission to subcontract if you need dynamically generated HTML (for instance, from Allaire ColdFusion, or from PHP), significant CGI programming, or a significant database back end.