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Books at a Glance

March 25, 2014 by Andy Naselli

Books at a Glance is an online service that just launched this month. Fred Zaspel, the editor, has put together a team of book review editors and a board of reference (on which I’m happy to serve). [Read more…] about Books at a Glance

How to Make Your Mac Read Text Aloud

February 11, 2014 by Andy Naselli

Did you know that your Mac can read text aloud? The feature is called “Text to Speech.”

I’ve been using it in three ways:

Listen to a relatively long blog post or email while doing something else that allows me to multitask.
Listen to something I’m copy-editing (whether it’s something that I or someone else wrote). This helps pace me, and it helps me spot typos. Sometimes my ears hear errors that my eyes miss.
Listen to an English Bible translation that I don’t already own as an audio-Bible. (On listening to audio-Bibles, see here and here.) This is especially helpful when you want to listen to a variety of English translations while looking at a particular passage in Greek or Hebrew.

So how do you do this on a Mac?

1. Open “System Preferences,” and select “Dictation & Speech.”

Update on 11/7/2016: macOS Sierra does not have a “Dictation & Speech” icon. For Dictation, select Keyboard. For Speech, select, Accessibility.

The Message and Influence of Deuteronomy: A Festschrift for Dan Block

December 10, 2013 by Andy Naselli

Colleagues and former students of Dan Block surprised him with this Festschrift last month during a session at the Evangelical Theological Society in Baltimore:

Jason S. DeRouchie, Jason Gile, and Kenneth J. Turner, eds. For Our Good Always: Studies on the Message and Influence of Deuteronomy in Honor of Daniel I. Block. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2013. xxxvi + 572 pp.

You can read a two-paragraph description of the book at Eisenbraun’s site. [Read more…] about The Message and Influence of Deuteronomy: A Festschrift for Dan Block

Professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts

July 20, 2013 by Andy Naselli

When I arrived at my BCS office yesterday to move my print library from boxes to bookcases, I noticed this playful sign outside the door:

office_sign

I love it!

I imagined that title four years ago.

Update (November 2022):

The 2 Issues I Most Frequently Address When Copy-Editing

July 2, 2013 by Andy Naselli

In the last eight years or so, I’ve done a fair bit of copy-editing. For example, I’ve edited some books and copy-edited every issue of Themelios since TGC took over that journal in 2008. For the last three years I’ve been editing a massive forthcoming project that will probably be about 1 million words (more on that later).

Here’s my basic philosophy of writing in six words: Omit needless words, and be clear (HT: Strunk, Zinsser, and Williams). There’s a lot more to good writing than that, of course, but it’s hard to communicate well when your writing is cluttered and convoluted.

So I most frequently address two issues when copy-editing: [Read more…] about The 2 Issues I Most Frequently Address When Copy-Editing