And, guess what? It’s blue. Blue, people! Not orange. Can you believe it?

OK, anyway, here is a handy list of the most significant rule changes in the new guide. I’m glad to see the Chicago editors now recommend lowercasing web and website – though they still recommend capitalizing Internet and World Wide Web. Though we don’t say that much anymore, do we?

You can use these tags to search through the jungle of Twitter to find posts relevant to writing and editing. The authors note that “#amediting” is used to label posts about editing; “#amwriting” to label posts about writing. Many more are listed in the blog.

Then, lo, a brief online search revealed . . .  the U.S. Navy Style Guide! Who’d a thunk it?

Interestingly, the guide advises readers to use the AP Stylebook rather than GPO as a secondary reference. We tried this, but found that many Navy-specific terms, such as shipbuilder or linecrew, weren’t address in AP but were in GPO.

Thus, our style took a winding road: we looked first at the U.S. Navy Guide for style guidance, then at AP, and then at GPO.

Somehow it all worked out. Because ultimately, which style you choose is less important than making sure that a style — any style — is implemented consistently across your  document. And that’s what we did.

Great catch, Amy! Just another example of helping our clients look like superstars instead of dorks.

For those who don’t know, DCS offers networking and continuing education for creative professionals, some of it process-oriented, some of it highly technical. Rick’s profile is part of DCS’s Creative Crux, an ongoing series profiling local creative companies and individuals.

Rick is a great photographer and a genuinely nice guy — a perfect combo. He’s going to be presenting to DCS later in August or September — setting up a mock photo shoot and walking us through how he puts a shoot together. The date is TBD, so check the DCS calendar to see when it’s scheduled.

In the meantime, here are a couple excerpts from Rick’s interview.

SE: So, are you a photographer who got into video, or a video guy who got into photography?

RP: Actually, neither! Originally, I was a performance art student, but I kept noticing the camera work being done on the student films around me — what shooters were doing with the camera, how they were choosing to move it, and how they were augmenting the actors’ performances. It got to the point that when I was rehearsing, my mind would begin working out coverage as if I were going to shoot the scene in my head. I guess that’s when I knew that motion photography was for me.

SE: What’s the relationship between still and motion photography? Does what you know about one play into how you approach the other?

RP: Many aspects of the mediums transfer to one another, but each is distinct. With still photography, you are capturing a single frame – that that allows you to get every detail exactly as you want it, an opportunity you don’t generally have with video. On the flip side, I think it’s far easier to tell a story using motion photography. And you still have pretty precise control over the actions, lighting, colors, and composition.

Read the whole interview here.

The work was spread across four clients. One needed just 10 pages edited; another, 830. Many of the projects came in unexpectedly and required same-day or next-day turnaround. Other projects had schedules and deadlines that fluctuated constantly, requiring us to flex our staff and our schedules to match.

How did we do it?

• Use dedicated project managers. Each client worked with a dedicated project manager who took in the documents, assigned them to our various editors, funneled them through desktop publishing (if needed), and returned them to the client. The project managers carefully tracked where each document was at any given time — so nothing got lost, and no deadlines were missed.
• Use editorial leads. For these efforts, the project managers also acted as editorial leads, fielding style questions from the editors, communicating requests from the client, and quality-checking all the work performed.
• Use experienced editors. The editors handling these four projects — which included proposals, medical journals, and marketing copy — all had extensive experience with these particular types of projects. They also had experience working with the clients involved, and knew their editorial style and preferences. Experienced editors can dig into even difficult copy without any learning curve — and produce quality results, time after time.
• Use standard processes. All of our editors follow a standard procedures sheet that guides them through the steps in the editing process, and all follow a specific style guide for each of our clients. Using standard processes eliminates questions and uncertainty when starting a job — and produces a cleaner end product, saving time in the quality-checking rounds.
• Staff around the clock. OK, we didn’t staff completely around the clock. But we had editors and project managers working on staggered shifts from 8:00 a.m. to midnight Monday through Friday, and from 8 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Using staggered shifts allows us to be much more responsive to our clients’ needs; authors can write until 4:00 p.m., for example, and have us edit between 5:00 and 10:00 p.m. It also allows us to accommodate our editors’ needs; staff with work commitments or child care duties during the day can come on call at 6:00 p.m. and give us 5 or 6 hours of quiet editing time in the evening.

The real secret to getting this amount of work done in a week, however, is our amazing Dragonfly editors and project managers. These great people are consistently willing to throw themselves into projects with challenging deadlines and “get ‘er done,” no matter what it takes. Once they commit to a project, they’re in it for the long haul. I appreciate their commitment, their attention to detail, and their good humor tremendously.

I’ve been trying to finish writing a case study for a client here in Dayton, and having a tough time getting through to their end customer to set up an interview. I wrote to my client this afternoon, telling him that my due date is next week and that I was worried I may not be able to finish the piece.

Here’s his response:

Don’t stress yourself over it. Your child is far more important. It can wait if it needs to. You can send me what you have and I’ll work with it and fill if the blanks if needed.

Thank you, dear client. That’s the kindest response I’ve ever gotten to telling someone that a deadline was in jeopardy. I promise I’ll kick butt for you after I’m back from my maternity leave!

Matthew Baldwin, one of my favorite bloggers (Defective Yeti) and a contributing writer for The Morning News, is hosting the Infinite Summer AND IT STARTS ON SUNDAY !!!

Infinite Summer involves the challenge of reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest over the course of three months. As Baldwin and friends write:

Join endurance bibliophiles from around the world in reading Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages ÷ 92 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat.

Four writers who have never before read Infinite Jest will do so for the duration of Infinite Summer. And each will be posting here weekly, not only to report on their thoughts and progress, but also to promote and facilitate discussion.

Folks who have visited this blog before may know that I’m a huge fan of Wallace’s essays, although I will admit for the first time publicly that I have never before read any of his fiction.

Well, this summer, IT’S GONNA HAPPEN. The only sad part is that we’ll be finishing up the novel just after the one-year anniversay of Wallace’s death.

In any case - I better stop writing and get over to Jay and Mary’s in Troy ASAP. The reading starts Sunday!

[p.s., go here to download bookmarks with weekly page totals to keep you on track throughout the summer.]

Maybe because I was already thinking about communications, or maybe because it was a rainy day and I was feeling reflective, I started listening closely to the lyrics. I smiled when I realized what great use Croce makes of standard techniques for effective business writing.

For example:

Use of specifics. Croce doesn’t describe Bad, Bad Leroy Brown as having “two expensive cars.” Instead, he has a “custom Continental and an El Dorado too.” We can imagine that in 1973, owning such vehicles represented the height of coolness.

Use of quotes. Croce doesn’t rely on his narrative alone to convince you how awesome Leroy is. He uses  colorful quotes from objective, third-party sources. “All the downtown ladies call [Leroy] the treetop lover,” Croce writes. “The men just call him sir.” [Note: Ladies call Leroy the "treetop lover" apparently because he "stands around six foot four."]

Use of metaphor. Writing consultant Ann Wylie often reminds her readers to use metaphor to bring numbers or abstract scenarios to life. After this song’s concluding jealousy-induced fight, Croce doesn’t describe Leroy as “having received several knife wounds.” Instead, Croce says, he “looked like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone.” Yeah, that gives us a sense of how roughed-up poor old Leroy was.

Using these techniques to create more vibrant business copy is nothing new. But it’s fun to see how well they played out in one of the most well-known pop songs in history.

Read the full lyrics to Bad, Bad Leroy Brown here.

Even better, watch Croce perform the song on TV’s Midnight Special, circa 1973.

You are celebrating, aren’t you?