It’s always gratifying to receive letters of praise from our readers, enthusiastic about an issue of Rutgers Magazine or a story or two in particular that resonated with them. Producing the magazine takes a lot of work for the magazine staff, but it’s also a lot of fun. What most people don’t know is the amount of effort that goes into making sure all the facts are right, the grammar and punctuation are correct, and spellings have been checked and checked again.

The lead copy editor at the magazine is Lisa Elwood DC’86, who works with Daryl Brower RC’88 and Karen Imperiale RC’79, SCILS’81. Also pitching in are the editors from Rutgers Foundation and Alumni Communications: Diane Blaszka, Lara De Meo Hoyt RC’97, and Amy Vames.

If you were to pass Lisa and me conversing in the hall of our editorial offices, you would think we were speaking in tongues, or maybe just a little crazy.

Me: “Up or down?”

Lisa: “Down.”

Me: “Roman?”

Lisa: “No, ital.”

Me: “Semi?”

Lisa: “Em dash.”

When I came across the name of Mary Norris, a top copy editor at the New Yorker magazine and a Douglass alumna, like Lisa, I knew that the three of us had to get together to talk shop. Norris DC’74 is the author of Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, her funny new book about her long career at the magazine, the vagaries of the English language, and other points of personal interest (“Just the Facts, Ma’am”). Lisa and I met Norris at 1 World Trade Center, where Condé Nast, the publisher of the New Yorker, has set up camp. Norris had her marked-up manuscripts to share; we came with ours. Within minutes, the three of us were deep in conversation: so many commas, nonrestrictive clauses, and subject-verb agreements to talk about!

All the magazine editors rose to the occasion to fact-check and copyedit the profiles of the five new inductees in the Rutgers Hall of Distinguished Alumni (“A New Galaxy of Stars”), wishing to honor these people appropriately for all that they have done in their illustrious careers and in being superb ambassadors for Rutgers.

Another future Rutgers alumna came into the world  recently. Lara De Meo Hoyt gave birth to Scarlet Genevieve Hoyt on April 18—a beautiful name that clearly demonstrates Lara’s fealty to Rutgers. And that’s one “t” in Scarlet’s name, not two. We checked it twice.