Editor as Cowhand: Rounding Up the Wild West of Journalistic House Style
From a copyeditor’s perspective, in-box article submissions can carry a vibe akin to the wild west, with authors throwing around rambunctious punctuation all willy-nilly: random ellipses with ambiguous intent, dashes dropped seemingly at random, and the mother of all punctuation faux pas, the exclamation point! What’s a periodical copyeditor to do?