Madeleine D'Angelo

June 25 was the anniversary of a monumental shift for both civil and labor rights. On that day in 1941, President Roosevelt established the Committee on Fair Employment Practices (FEPC). The first-of-its-kind committee investigated complaints of discrimination at federal agencies, private companies, and labor unions with federal contracts that were involved in the war effort from 1941 to 1946. Although it was an executive order that established the FEPC, much credit goes to leaders like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who organized the first March on Washington Movement to end discrimination in the defense sector and called for federal protections of the workforce like the FEPC.   NARA Philadelphia preserves the case files of two FEPC administrative regions. To make those key resources more available to researchers, I transcribed the Index to Active and Closed Cases, 1941–1946, of Region IV of the FEPC [https://lnkd.in/eJqtH7Z8] for a future upload to the catalog. An index like this allows a more efficient search of the collection by providing an ordered list of fields that detail the fundamental facts of each case. However, while I was transcribing, I wanted to know if any statistical patterns in the dataset could contribute to the history of the workforce during World War Two. I wrote the following blog post to activate the data contained in the index and to elevate awareness of the kinds of insights that can be drawn from this and similar collections. I accomplished this by summarizing and illuminating the range of historical circumstances and human experiences represented in the index. I hope that you’ll enjoy my dig into the data or pass it along to a researcher looking into the subject. https://lnkd.in/eiMgCX9A

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I just caught a typo in New Hart's Rules! No one is perfect, and manuscripts are rarely completely error-free. But it is reassuring when we manage to spot errors in texts that have been thoroughly edited and which are used by millions of editors arround the world. In fact, it feels a bit like finding an Easter egg. NHR is the main style manual for texts in British English, and it's used not only in the UK but in other countries as well. Editors who have worked through the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) courses know this text backwards! I forget the exact stats, but I know that even the biggest publishing houses do not expect 100% of errors to be caught. The best way to catch as many errors as possible is to have multiple sets of eyes on the manuscript by doing multiple rounds of editing. Proofreading especially should be done by someone who's never seen the text before. So I've caught this error. But I know it's not the only one in there. What have you found? PS - I left a typo in this post because it proves the point! #AmEditing #UKEnglish #Style

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I am launching a new Substack newsletter for writers called "Writing is the Way." If you have always wanted to be a writer but don't know where to start, this is for you. If you are a seasoned writer with decades of experience, this is for you, too. "Writing is the Way" is a place where anyone with a story within them can find advice and inspiration. First post will be up tomorrow morning. Please subscribe to get notified every time I post. #writers #writing #newsletter #motivation #forwriters #amwriting #storytellers #poets #bloggers #writingtips #joinme

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Travel editors: if your outlet prohibits press trips or comps *and* you also don’t pay expenses, this sends the message that promoting diverse voices isn’t a priority for you. Because you’re limiting your pool of contributors to a very narrow subset of writers who can afford to travel on their own dime (or happen to live somewhere really interesting and tourist-friendly). Meaning, you’re probably excluding a lot of talented people from marginalized groups. 

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This week's email newsletter just hit subscribers' inboxes, and it features my latest One Hit Wondering column, which has the wildly interesting story of Deep Blue Something. You'll never guess what their drummer once owned! Check it out! https://lnkd.in/e28NmhRR #musicblog #blog #newsletter

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Here's Ruth Taylor's thoughtful piece in today's Rhode Island Current. Over the past month, I've been posting here about the challenges facing the nonprofit arts sector and my organization, WaterFire Providence. While the pandemic may be over, its long term impacts continue to threaten many of our organizations. The RI Coalition for the Arts, of which WaterFire is a member, was clear that the RI Creative Futures Fund, proposed in parallel bills in the RI House and Senate, was a one time request to help fill significant deficits incurred as a result of the pandemic. Many organizations, including mine, incurred debt, such as SBA Economic Disaster Injury Loans and increased lines of credit, to keep our staffs employed and entities viable. Many of us utilized programs like RI DoL's WorkShare, SBA's Paycheck Protection Program and IRS's Employee Retention Tax Credits but we still incurred debt to preserve institutional knowledge and sustain our organizations. Critics will say that arts nonprofits should have just shut down and not incurred ANY expenses during this period but recovering from that type of action would have made it impossible for WaterFire to survive. In addition to our participation in the RICFF, WaterFire had separate parallel bills before the RI House and Senate seeking a long term reliable source of revenue. Over the past decade WaterFire has received an annual $400,000 state designated grant for general operations. While this might seem like a lot, one has to keep in mind that during a typical WaterFire season, nearly 1,000,000 visitors come to Providence to experience an admission free art event which creates over $150,000,000 in economic impact and generates over $12,000,000 in tax revenue for the State. Legendary investor Warren Buffet would love to invest $400,000 and get an ROI of $12,000,000 in the same year! WaterFire is a proven net revenue generator for the State. For our first 20 years, we could rely upon corporate sponsorship to fund our events; however, over the past 10 years, the stagnant RI economy and moribund business climate here has had a profoundly negative impact on this critical source of revenue. The justification for the WaterFire bills before the RI General Assembly last month was based upon the State being the single biggest financial beneficiary of WaterFire from the $12,000,000 in tax revenue generated each year by our activity. Our grant is an investment in RI's important tourism economy. The arts and culture sector is a powerful contributor to RI's tourism and overall economy. Many other states included their arts and culture sector in their federal ARPA funding plans; however RI excluded us from the $1.1 billion allocation received from the federal government. Ruth is right: "funding the arts and humanities in R.I. should be more focused and inclusive." It should also be intentional and strategic with a social, cultural and financial ROI that can and will pay for itself.

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Thanks to CanvasRebel Magazine for the interview. Read it to find out how freelance copywriting made me cry. https://lnkd.in/eS-QY2pf

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https://lnkd.in/eV-66dEQ What do we most want as writers? We want our work to be read. We want to complete the circuit with the reader’s mind, because that was our purpose all along. But getting that connection is often difficult, and fraught with disappointment. Actually, though, you may not realise when you’ve succeeded. Dan Blank gives examples. #writingcommunity #creativity #creativewriting #authors #storytelling

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A request I’ve had a few times from nonprofit clients: “Can you copyedit the text in our final designed files?” And I feel bad because I could…but my edits are going to change the formatting of all those carefully laid out pages. Even the addition of one word can affect the layout and page reflow of your document. If you’re designing your pages without the final (FINAL final) text, you’re going to run into headaches during editing. All that lovely design will get messed up. (I can certainly *proofread* final pages — but that’s a different process from copyediting. Proofreaders don't make changes, they flag errors.) When I get this request, I talk to the client about their editorial processes. The copyediting stage can introduce hundreds of changes to even just a few pages of text. The time to go through that process is when changes aren’t going to cause design problems. #editorial #communications #nonprofits

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I am halfway through Steven Johnson's much-talked-about new book, Infernal Machine, and I am *riveted.* It's a gripping, archtypically "Johnsonian" historical narrative, with colorful protagonists that include not online extraordinary little known historical figures, but also new technologies (dynamite! finger prints!) and powerful, contagious ideas (Anarchy). In the Book Bite below, Steven unpacks five key insights from Infernal Machine. Also check out this excerpt, just released in the New York Times: https://lnkd.in/e5ZMKDK4

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What do you do when an artist whose work you love, to which you are deeply attached, publicly expresses ideas you find repugnant? This is the question I take up in my latest article for Quillette. https://lnkd.in/eDDzpX2q

Are sound-alike words a problem for you in your writing? Here are some words that are confusing to most people. I’ll try to demystify them a little. Spoiler: I have no trick to remember their usage—other than the dictionary and old-fashioned memory. Eminent vs Imminent vs Immanent    Eminent–place of prominence or standing out  These are our country’s eminent writers (place of prominence). Imminent–happening soon or something dangerous and menacingly near   The main speech is imminent (happening soon).   They are in imminent danger (menacingly near). Immanent–intrinsic or inborn, indwelling or inherent, as in the immanence of God   The role of government is immanent in the Constitution (intrinsic).   God is immanent with his creation (indwelling). Have these words been a problem for you to use? Do you have a trick to remember them? (The image is my cat, Toby, confused by these words!) _________________ Hi, I’m Oneta Hammans, Freelance Copyeditor and Proofreader | Helping Authors and Publishers of Fiction and Memoirs | Historical, Crime, Medical Mystery, Murder Mystery, Suspense, and Thriller | Memoirs | Absorb and Entertain Readers from the First Page to the Last. DM me here on LinkedIn or shoot me an email at ohreliableproofreading@gmail.com.

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Our highbrow + brilliant map = https://whitney.org/map

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During the pandemic, we witnessed a lot of poor science journalism. But a few writers emerged as incredible public health thought leaders. Among them, three in particular stood out to me. Just as a new subject of concern would arise, and I'd start to mull over its significance and how to address it in my book, a relevant, well-researched, and well-reasoned article by one of them would seem to fall right into my lap. Zeynep Tufekci, Ed Yong, and Katherine J. Wu were always a step ahead. Their pieces were accessible yet deeply nuanced — the formula needed to meaningfully distill and convey our scientific understanding, or lack thereof, to the public. The formula with the capacity to build, rather than to erode, trust. All three have earned my trust over the years (not blind trust, mind you!) and informed my writing. If more people heeded their analyses during the pandemic, I think we'd have handled it from a much stronger evidence base, resulting in less tragic outcomes. So when they speak on issues I'm monitoring, my ears perk up. On the subject of H5N1, Tufekci is already a step ahead, as usual. I hope public officials finally start listening to her too — and start acting more rapidly and effectively to staunch this growing threat: "I’m sure the employees of these agencies are working hard, but the message they are sending is, 'Trust us — we are on this.' One troubling legacy of the coronavirus pandemic is that there was too much attention on telling the public how to feel — to panic or not panic — rather than sharing facts and inspiring confidence through transparency and competence." https://lnkd.in/eea9BcZT

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Being a writer makes me a better project manager. How so? Writing a great essay, article, story, or post requires iteration (and agility--pun intended!). Let's say you're writing a story. First, the writer comes up with a plan for the piece. I know that some writers say that they don't plan what they write, and I believe them. What I mean is that having an initial image or spark or quote can also be loosely defined as a plan, a starting point that a writer can jump off of. Second, the writer designs the story. If they're under a deadline, they'll write the first draft fast (and will produce, ahem, the *crappy* first draft--writers will understand this joke), and even if there's no tight deadline, an efficient writer will write the first draft fast anyway so that they can show it to reviewers sooner. Third, the writer shares the story and notes the feedback from reviewers. I've learned throughout my years of writing that it's better to share an early draft rather than a later one so that I don't get too wedded to my ideas and am more open to feedback from other people. Fourth, the writer implements the feedback into a second (or third) draft and tests the new draft with reviewers (ideally, the reviewer pool will include a mix of previous reviewers and different ones, too). Fifth, the writer iterates again and incorporates relevant feedback into still another draft and sends the story out for review one more time. At this point the story will either be done or will need several more rounds of iteration to get it right. With constant iteration, a writer will continue to improve, just like a project will continue to improve with the same principles. How about you--what other modes of work or play have improved your project management skills?

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Elaine Godfrey's Atlantic piece on fact-checking makes an essential point about non-fiction quality standards. Magazines like The Atlantic subject their writers to a rigorous process of third-party verification. I know. I went through it for The Atlantic, and for many other other magazines and even newspapers. Daily deadline journalism can't be fact-checked the same way, but for my recent New York Times project, which had a very long fuse, I was fact checked by one of the best -- Wired staffer Matt Giles, who a few years ago also fact checked another of my most intensively reported pieces, for Longreads. This process often surprises outsiders, in a good way, when they see the care we bring to making sure we got the story right. I hired, trained, and oversaw dozens of fact checkers as a magazine editor; trained hundreds of journalism students in the fine art of fact checking; and have (mostly) enjoyed the security of knowing as a reporter than my work stands up to the most careful scrutiny. It's one of the practices that separates professional journalism from the typical self-published social media blather. The same can't be said for most non-fiction books, unless the writers shell out the money to hire a fact checker themselves, and that often leads to outrageous fabrications making it into print, as this Atlantic piece makes clear. https://lnkd.in/gSyms_QC

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How can arts participation in communities influence social cohesion and wellbeing? One Nation/One Project seeks to answer that question. From Jill Sonke's team in Florida. Our team has undertaken foundational studies that define “arts participation,” as well as reviewed current research concerning arts participation, social cohesion and wellbeing. To read our first research brief, click here! Our Theory of Change Study is exploring relationships between the arts, social cohesion, and wellbeing through surveys, focus groups, and participatory art murals. Lastly, our team is researching social prescribing and arts prescribing through implementation science studies and in-depth case study of three #ArtsForEveryBody communities creating social prescribing programs of their own!

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