Trying to improve and become a certified proofreader or editor, but finding so many conundrums. For instance the title for this section of the forum did not add a hyphen to In-House. What is correct? Do professional editors also miss things?
Thanks.
In House or In-House
Re: In House or In-House
I've seen article TITLES with spelling/grammar errors, so YES: even professional editors make mistakes, myself included. In this particular case, I think that "In-House" would be the correct usage for the title of this forum because neither word can stand by itself with the rest of the sentence. Meaning, the following don't make sense, "In Work For Writers" and "House Work For Writers". Only by hyphenating the two words can you create the compound adjective, "In-House", which works with the rest of the sentence. (Also, I would not have capitalized "For" in the title, either, since it is a small conjoining/combining word.)
Recent article titles I've seen that got past the editors: "Psyche Up Your [Readers?]..." Should have been "Psych", not "Psyche"; or better yet a non-abbreviation/slang/SEO-unfriendly term such as "Excite" or "Involve", or retitling the article entirely. Also, "Wheres [person's name]".
I can't think of any cases where the word "Wheres" would be valid; it should be "Where's" or better yet "Where is" (or "Where Was"--the author's intent isn't clear from the title because of the [presumed] contraction). Contractions and abbreviations are tricky and generally not universally (globally, SEO) friendly, so when I am in the editor's chair I usually advocate spelling out whatever you actually mean rather than using slang, abbreviating, contracting, acronym-izing, and so on. I especially advocate eliminating "i.e." and "e.g." and other Latin abbreviations both because they are usually used incorrectly even by very savvy writers and because your audience is clueless and will misinterpret it MOST of the time even if used correctly. Sprechen Sie English, bitte! (Speak English, please!) 
I hope this helps! --LDS, imperfect editor
Recent article titles I've seen that got past the editors: "Psyche Up Your [Readers?]..." Should have been "Psych", not "Psyche"; or better yet a non-abbreviation/slang/SEO-unfriendly term such as "Excite" or "Involve", or retitling the article entirely. Also, "Wheres [person's name]".
I can't think of any cases where the word "Wheres" would be valid; it should be "Where's" or better yet "Where is" (or "Where Was"--the author's intent isn't clear from the title because of the [presumed] contraction). Contractions and abbreviations are tricky and generally not universally (globally, SEO) friendly, so when I am in the editor's chair I usually advocate spelling out whatever you actually mean rather than using slang, abbreviating, contracting, acronym-izing, and so on. I especially advocate eliminating "i.e." and "e.g." and other Latin abbreviations both because they are usually used incorrectly even by very savvy writers and because your audience is clueless and will misinterpret it MOST of the time even if used correctly. Sprechen Sie English, bitte! (Speak English, please!) I hope this helps! --LDS, imperfect editor