Today I’m deep in editing articles for the magazine. A time consuming bit is dealing with getting companies’ names, products and trademarks the way companies want them. Checking each company website and correcting or confirming the proper usage can be tedious, but it’s something editors do.

Among today’s discoveries and confirmations are these: LEGO(R) is always all caps and never ends in “s.” If you want a plural, you must be looking for the phrase “LEGO bricks” because LEGO is an adjective rather than a noun. Likewise, LEGO’s associated terms MINDSTORM(TM) and TETRIX(TM) are all caps, no plurals. On the other hand, another company, fischertechnik(R), is all lower case. Then we have the mixed marriage of eBay(R), which has its inital letter lower case, but its second letter capitalized.

LEGO provides a web page that helpfully explains its requirements, and I’m doing my best to wrangle all the letters into the necessary forms. With some other companies, it’s a matter of seeing how they write their own names and trying to be consistent with their style.

Don’t get me started on dealing with the symbols for trademarks. I’ve learned how to do the beautiful ones in Word. Looks like I’ll be consulting WordPress to figure out how to make them beautiful for the blog.

I admit it’s more fun reading and writing about homeschooling than some side trips editing sends me on. But when I’m edited by others, I appreciate knowing someone else is also following up on my work. And when I’m the editor, I often learn tiny pieces of information that help me play at home with Jeopardy.