Word choice can powerfully affect how readers react to a text. Try choosing different words and see how they change what you’re saying – and which options most accurately convey your intended meaning. www.suzannearnold.com/blog/word-ch... #NonFiction #WritingNonFiction #NonFictionWriting

The power of word choice — Suzanne Arnold

English Grammar Day 2025 on how word choice can influence readers

suzannearnold.com

'Looking ahead, as these cancellations continue to pile up, the industry may soon be forced to codify policies to address similar situations as they arise.' #GenerativeAI #AI #BookSky

Publishers Weekly@publisherswkly.bsky.social · yesterday

Last week, Nigerian author Jerry Falade’s crime novel was nixed over suspicions it was written with AI, after fetching seven figures in a competitive auction. Falade told PW he can prove he is the book’s author. buff.ly/D9kPFX4

This is why I love editing: always learning. To me, snowballing is a thing you do after the cold stuff falls from the sky in winter. ❄️ But I’m copy-editing a piece about research whose data collection involved snowballing. After a moment’s confusion, I now know that it’s also a sampling method 😁

Couple of major points in this update from @thebookseller.com ... 'Currently, with no concrete way of proving AI use one way or another, agents are weighing trust against using AI detection tools… Little consensus has emerged…'

The Bookseller@thebookseller.com · 2d ago

Uncertainty and trepidation is the dominant theme of the literary agents following news that a crime novel sold in a 14-way auction in the US for $2.4m was withdrawn by its primary agent on Friday (31st July) due to suspected AI use. 👇

I'm notoriously bad with spiders. But I figured a book about them would do me good and be interesting – and it did and it was 🥳 Yes, it also did make me wince at times! But it was really interesting and I was glad I'd braved it.

This is coming up a lot in something I'm working on, so here's a reminder to make sure your copy–paste settings for links are suited to what you're writing. For a print book, for example, this is no good: 'Article title | website name'. geekrewind.com/how-to-chang... #AcademicSky #NonFiction

This week's @economist.com has a couple of interesting articles on generative AI... ‘their baggy prose puts a premium on editing skills. After all, even the best writers need a good editor to keep them sharp.’ www.economist.com/leaders/2026...

AI is getting better at writing. Humans must get better at editing

Our investigation suggests how

economist.com

Would you say ‘there are a plethora’ or ‘there is a plethora’? Does your answer vary depending on the context? This is a good example of how proofreading is about so much more than typos. #AmProofreading

'When the core architecture of the business remains unchanged, AI becomes decoration—a thin layer of intelligence applied to workflows that were never designed to absorb continuous intelligence' – Time Magazine time.com/article/2026...

AI’s Execution Problem

“The defining challenge of the AI era is no longer invention alone. It is execution,” writes Nigel Vaz.

time.com

How can a batch of McDonald's fries help explain an Asian economic crisis to US readers? Jack Hart's 'Story Craft', on narrative non-fiction, with compelling examples. #WritingNonFiction #NonFiction #NarrativeNonFiction #NonFictionWriting www.suzannearnold.com/blog/book-re...

Book review: Story craft — Suzanne Arnold

Whatever you’re writing, you’ll find useful lessons and ideas.

suzannearnold.com

I’m alternating chapters of a gorgeous photo book about nature and an academic book about reusing and upcycling. One’s a proofread on a typeset PDF, the other is a copy-edit in tracked changes in Word. Both are fascinating. I love my job! 😍 #AmEditing #FreelanceLife

While looking for something else, I’ve found one of my favourite examples of corporate speak. This was while I was sub-editor of ‘F1 Racing’ magazine, while McLaren’s new site was being built, which apparently is 23 years ago 😱

Blue whale heart is person-sized 😮 Mind blown. I love comparisons like this that enable you to visualise the unimaginable. (And yes, I checked: National Geographic more or less agrees – it says 5ft: blog.education.nationalgeographic.org/2015/08/31/h...)

ContempraInn 🌹@contemprainn.bsky.social · 2w ago

The largest dinosaur weighed around 85 tons. Some male blue whales weigh as much as 200 tons. A blue whale's heart is 6 feet wide and weighs 400 lbs. The largest animal that ever lived.

What a wonderful surprise in today’s post – a copy of @rogersteare.bsky.social’s book ‘Ethicability’. I proofread this a few weeks ago. An extra treat was discovering that Jacqueline Harvey (a @the-ciep.bsky.social friend) had also worked on it. Books really are a team effort. Thank you all 😁

Halfway between your worst nightmare and hype: interesting explanation and analysis of the OpenAI hacking incident. www.globalplayer.com/podcasts/epi... @thenewsagents.co.uk

HackGPT: How AI escaped the lab and went rogue - Podcast Episode | Global Player

<p>Have we just crossed the AI Rubicon? OpenAI has revealed that one of its models was involved in an "unprecedented cyber incident". One of its AI programs escaped a controlled testing environment, g...

globalplayer.com

I was once chosen to work on a DIY book BECAUSE of not having subject knowledge – which meant I could sense-check step-by-step instructions from the perspective of an inexperienced reader. #EditingNonFiction #NonFictionEditing #NonFiction www.suzannearnold.com/blog/does-an...

Does an editor need to know the subject matter? — Suzanne Arnold

A lot depends on what needs doing. If the editor needs to help shape text for a non-expert reader, for example, sometimes it’s helpful to have an editor who doesn’t know the subject. Other times, it’s...

suzannearnold.com

Interesting glimpse of how some academics are using generative AI and how they feel about it. #AcademicSky

The Research Whisperer@therealrw.bsky.social · 2w ago

New post this week: early findings from a study about how academics use GenAI that offers crucial insight into the emotional aspects of engaging with it, by @neilselwyn.bsky.social and colleagues: researchwhisperer.org/2026/07/21/a... #academicsky #highered #genAI

Good news for many authors, though as others have said it doesn't fully make up for things.

Publishers Weekly@publisherswkly.bsky.social · 2w ago

Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved the landmark settlement in the class action copyright lawsuit on Monday. Authors and publishers are entitled to receive about $3,000 for each infringed work used to train the AI company’s large language models.

Like so many of the best things in life, my Egyptology started by accident and I never could have predicted where it would take me. So here’s my Egyptology origin story. #NonFictionEditor #EditingNonFiction #NonFictionEditing #NonFiction

There you are, working in tracked changes, and you insert one letter, but Word shows two letters as having changed. What’s going on? Blog post now live on font ligatures: www.suzannearnold.com/blog/ligatures #NonFiction #EditingNonFiction #NonFictionEditing #AmEditing

A few highlights from this morning’s #StetWalk, including a gorgeous moth! #AmEditing #FreelanceLife

And as if that weren’t alarming enough, it was London Climate Action Week, yet somehow they managed not to mention it.

The Guardian@theguardian.com · 3w ago

Most UK media reports on June heatwave failed to mention climate crisis

Storytelling isn't just for novels – it's powerful in non-fiction too. #NonFiction #BusinessWriting www.suzannearnold.com/blog/storyte...

Storytelling in business writing — Suzanne Arnold

Plain language and stories help convey messages. I recently copy-edited a powerful example

suzannearnold.com

This was an unexpected analogy! 😂 Pick the grapes out of the quinoa, not vice versa. You can’t proofread everything at once. Instead, focus on one thing at a time, such as that examples are correctly numbered – pick out the grapes, not the quinoa. #ProofreadingNonFiction #NonFictionProofreading

This is one of the reasons I don't paste client text into generative AI tools. Even putting aside the ethical questions, it's not reliable enough and would create extra work for me. So no, I won't paste your text into a bot. (And if/when I do in future, it'll only be with permission.)

The Guardian@theguardian.com · last mo.

AI altering meaning of users’ drafts on issues from abortion to climate, study finds

Datacentres are a ticking time bomb. We must make sure AI’s benefits outweigh the costs | Nicki Hutley

Datacentres are a ticking time bomb. We must make sure AI’s benefits outweigh the costs | Nicki Hutley

They suck up energy and water, and blast out heat. Just who is better off from all this investment – aside from tech bros?

theguardian.com

I saw the Sam Ryder Jesus Christ Superstar in London last night. Stunning production. This morning, I’ve finished some corporate thought leadership. And now I’m settling in for some CPD.

‘In the UK the position appeared to be “wait and see”, while the EU AI Act is beginning to bring in obligations around AI systems, although not all of these directly affect copyright.’ @thebookseller.com

The Bookseller@thebookseller.com · last mo.

Publishers are still waiting for “clear” legal answers on AI training, outputs and licensing, the Publishers’ Licensing Services (PLS) Conference heard. 👇

I’m having a day off and have just finished ‘The Correspondent’ 😭 Beautiful, weepy, thought-provoking. I loved Virginia Evans’ answer at Women’s Prize Live on why an older character: ‘Everyone’s life is interesting. And it gets more interesting every year.’ This book delivers on that!

Trust an editor to read multiple versions of the same news story and get distracted by whether the document was found in February or May! (These are the details trained editors habitually watch out for, which is how we spot things that seem to others like incredible finds.)