Grammdæmonium: code of ed-tics

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How to get your comment noticed on Roger Ebert's blog.

In case you haven't read it, you can read Ebert's blog here.

The comments generally run in the few-hundreds, but, if you're like me (in that you want to read the blogger's responses to some of the comments) you look for the bold-faced end-notes that say Ebert: and then follow with his response..

With all the invective that goes on in the comments section, I'm surprised no-one's put words in his mouth. I don't think I'd do it--or if I would, not maliciously, but I figure that others would similarly be on the lookout for bold text, so were I to post a comment, I would include a bolded citation just to give other readers pause.

Some other bloggers, such as Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution, usually refrain from commenting in the comments section, and when he does, it's only to correct an improper citation or clarify a statement in the original post that his readers have misread--never to argue. And he does it without adding in bold his own thoughts to the comment. That may be the wisest way to do so.

I read a lot of blogs, and Ebert's is the first I've read that comments on comments in such a way. I hope it's not exploited, but it likely will be.

Anyway, here's my comment on his latest.

how important is good grammar?

Penelope Trunk @ Brazen Careerist has an interesting post on grammar; I like these sentences:

Most grammar rules don’t matter, though. That is, if you get them wrong, the reader still can find the meaning.

Whether the particulars are true or not, I agree with the main idea: The best way to write is whatever gets your point across. (And yes, I'm aware of the grammatical failings of that statement.)

And grammar and spelling and the rules of the English language aren't as important as many people make them out to be (especially some of her commentors--ouch!) -- for many of the reasons she cites, and, I'd also add, because they're always changing. Case in point: "Today" used to be spelled with a hyphen.

Something I do quibble with, and at least one commenter pointed this out, too, are the two "grammar" errors in the statement

Over 28,000 children drew doodles for our homepage.

Vote for the one that will appear here!

According to Penelope,

The AP Stylebook says "over" is a way to move—a preposition. And “more than” must precede a number. Also, if you are voting for one, specific doodle, then the AP Stylebook tells you to use “which” rather than “that.”

They're not so much grammatical errors as they are inconsistencies with the AP Stylebook. (And if it's true that the AP Stylebook was set up to minimize printing costs, "over" would seem more correct than "more than.")

Despite that, I get her point:

Anyway, if Google is deciding that these rules are no longer useful guidelines, then we can all follow suit. And if you don’t, you risk being more newspaper and less Internet, and we know where that’s going to put your career…

author rewrites

Note to authors: If you're going to insist on rewriting the edited portions of your piece, let the editors know what changes you made--don't send it back in black-and-white like it's ready to go to press.

The reason is that, even if your grammar, syntax, and blah, blah, blah is impeccable, we're still going to proof it, because we need to make sure it conforms to the house style. And very few, if any, authors know the house style (unless they're also working in-house).

The best thing to do is use Word's "Track Changes" so we can see what parts you changed and what parts you didn't change.

And yes, we could use the "Compare Documents" feature, but it's just so much easier for us if you do it.

emphasis

When you want to add emphasis, there are many ways to do so.

You can use italics, which add emphasis with elegance; you can use bold, which certainly stands out but is a bit of an eyesore; and you can use ALL CAPS, which makes you look like a troglodyte.*

Or you can be a real ass and use all three. Or use one, then halfway through your piece, use another--if you want to aggravate your editor, this works very well because we'll keep wondering if you had a legitimate reason for doing so.

The best thing to do is learn to write so you can get your point across without physically manipulating the font. Failing that, go with italics--but use them sparingly.

*(You can also underline or even use the "highlight" function, but if you're doing that, it's clear that some vicious parasite has crawled into your head and is gnawing on the parts of your brain that control sense and decency, so I suggest you consult a physician before writing any further. And stay away from those girls at the bus stop.)

how to aggravate an editor

from a fellow editor:

A tab is a tab, not five spaces. Likewise, center does not mean hit the space key until the text looks centered. If it wouldn't make my life even more difficult, I'd remove the space key from newsroom computers.

No effing ess.

Letters from the Editor

It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes we get hate-mail. Well, not so much hate-mail as nit-picky mail--where a subscriber finds a single typo or misused term and then sends us a really long letter dwelling on how our negligence sent him into catatonic shock. These letters always end with the line,

"If you need help editing your articles, I'm an excellent proofreader and work cheap!"

It's obnoxious because letters like these are never written with the intent of improving the magazine; they're written so the author can show off how much of a smarty-pants he is and how big of a dumb-head we all is.

And so we occasionally bite back.

For example, a few years ago, one of our subscribers spent 1500 words and probably the better part of an afternoon expressing his dissatisfaction with an article that, in a casual aside, translated the German word verein as truly. We wrote this in response:

Sir:

You are truly correct: Mr. Smith's command of the German language is obviously, vastly inferior to your own.

And we are truly ashamed, not only with Mr. Smith's flagrant deficiencies in the Teutonic tongue, but also with our own staff, who failed to catch the error, and especially with our German editor, whom we have since dismissed and shot. Hans had been with us for years, but clearly such monstrous neglect was unacceptable.

In closing, let's just make a deal: We'll tell Smith to stick to English if you just stick to Deutsch. Truly – or, as they say in the old country, "verein."

Then again, given that the guy was a doctor, the opportunity cost was much more bitter than anything we could come up with.

But it still bug us.

Yeah, we make mistakes, but in a 70-page magazine with an average of 500 words per page--35,000 words--you're bound to overlook something, and if there's one mistake among those 35,000, you're still looking at a percentage of error that's so close to zero it may as well be.

What'd really be fun is to show our readers what most of the articles look like before we edit them--with all the authors' meandering sentences, cliches, and violent fluctuations in diction included.

But in the end, it's the occasional nit=picky letter that reminds you you're running a quality publication--if errors were common, none of your readers--whatever few you had--would bother pointing them out.

Editor Test

Test your m-editor-dle by spotting the errors:

1. Hosting a family gathering in France also meant sampling the local cuisine.

2. Ducks Unlimited is an international non-profit organization dedicated to the conservation of wetlands and associated upland habitats for waterfowl, other wildlife, and people.

3. Visit our seller on the Web at www.amazon.com

4. Request a free issue today! If you’re not satisfied, just write "cancel" on the bill, and the issue is yours to keep! If you want more of our [publication], simply fill out the billing form--just $19.99 for six issues, and we’ll include your free issue as part of the subscription.

Highlight to see answers.

1. The cheese is Stilton, an English, not a French cheese.

2. The Ducks Unlimited logo is flipped.

3. The link is broken.

4. If the sample issue is included in the subscription, it's not "free."

What do all these have in common? They're all corrections we've made. Some, like the cheese, are pretty pedantic while others, such as a broken (or mistyped) link and a flipped picture can make a big difference--especially if they're advertisements. If you just plunked down several hundred dollars for an ad placement, wouldn't you want it to be perfect?

These may seem nit-picky, but if money's involved, they're going to be the first things a good editor or proofer will look for. And since we're paid to notice them, they're going to leap out at us while most normal people overlook.

proper use of ellipsis

Okay people, hush'n up and read:

Ellipsis points (also known as ellipses, points of ellipsis, and, suspension points) are periods, usually in groups of three, that signal an omission from quoted material or indicate a pause or trailing off of speech.
--Merriam Webster's Manual for Writers & Editors

They are not commas, colons, semicolons, brackets, semibrackets, or guillemets. Do not use them as such.

(We just edited a piece that included 38 ellipses, and only one of them was correctly used, so we're in a bit of a snit.)

Why We Write

Jacqueline (we won't include the roughly 8,000,000 last names she seems to have) is looking for Grammar Nazis, Mechanics Checas, and the Usage Frumentarii to help polish her writing.

Her open invitation has evoked some interesting comments from many of her rather sharp readers on the nature of "perfect" grammar, usage, and mechanics, and while we've touched a bit on it ourselves both here and on her blog, we'd like to go a bit further.

First off, we agree with commenter Timothy, who writes, "a lot of issues come down to style preference." The serial comma is a good example of this: AP style omits it, no rational style does not. Another example he cites and which we've written about too is the placement of quotation marks. Our own boss has a special hatred in his heart for the word "towards," and we, of course, wage ongoing war against The Dreaded Apluralstrophe!

But we can't neglect the rules, and our reason for creating this blog was largely to reconcile the two worlds of stylistic perfection, which we are paid to enforce, and the ever-transformative nature of language, which we are forced to accept. And while we, like commenter Philip Welch, have also "internalized the usage rules [we] want," we also acknowledge that most of the people we're writing/editing for have not, and, unfortunately, it's the audience for whom we're getting paid to write/edit. This is why we vigorously maintain that the best form of writing is whatever gets our point across.

And since we believe that, we also believe that 100% perfection in all things grammatical, mechanical, and usage-cal--even if it can be attained--is not the same as clear writing. Now, it's okay to know all the rules, even those that contradict the others, we're just saying (well, writing) that's it's not a good idea to practice them all.

Finally, we'd like to address Strunk & White. We've read it, and it's good, but we haven't found anything in it that wasn't also in your standard style guide. Professionally, we got more from Orwell's Politics and the English Language. Maybe that's just us; we learn better from lengthy examples. Plus we think Orwell's much wittier. Why so many people rave about Strunk & White, we're not sure--probably because it's very fun to say, "Strunk and White," which would explain why everyone refers to Strunk & White as "Strunk and White," when the actual title is The Elements of Style.

Fun Things to Do When You're an Editor

One of our favorites is correcting people's speech. Oh, not in the pedantic "it's were: subjunctive mood" way--rather in nonsensical, double-take-inducing way. It tells us whether they're paying attention.

For example, we often call people out for improper punctuation while they're speaking:

Friend: And so when I had my last biopsy...

We: You needed a comma between "so" and "when."

Friend: Excuse me?

We: Comma between "so" and "when."

Friend: I...I was speaking...

We: Misspeaking.

It won't win you many friends and likely will alienate those you already have, but we find it a blast.

glass half empty or half full

From Wikipedia.org:

Is the glass half empty or half full? is a common expression, used rhetorically to indicate that a particular situation could be a cause for pessimism (half empty) or optimism (half full); or as a general litmus test to simply determine if an individual is an optimist or a pessimist OR IF TODD'S MOM IS HOT. The purpose of the question is to demonstrate that the situation may be seen in different ways depending on one's point of view and that there may be opportunity in the situation as well as trouble.

In engineering lore, the corollary to this rhetoric question is that, for an Engineer, the glass is neither half empty nor half full, it is just exactly twice as big as necessary.

Well, here's the editor's answer: If it's being poured: half full; drained: half empty. We don't understand why this is so difficult to figure out.

"But suppose you don't know whether it was being poured or drained--suppose you just came upon this half empty/full glass, how would you refer to it?"

We'd refer to it as a glass of water. Further pressed, we'd check for signs of pourage/drainage. If we found none, we'd say we'd need more information. We have done this before, and it tends to greatly agitate the questioner.

Now we acknowledge that in spirit it's a rhetorical question, but literally it's a question about the glass, not the respondent, so why be angry? Why not rephrase the question as "Taking this glass of water as a metaphor for your disposition, would you say you're a pessimist or an optimist?"

Pendō: The way of mental presence and immediate correction.

The Editor must at all times be never without his Red Pen.

Corrections must be swift and legible, but at all times minimal, to spare the Red Pen's Essence.

Once the Red Pen has been drawn, it can never be resheathed until it has made a correction.

Grammdæmonium

How to get your comment noticed on Roger Ebert's blog.

how important is good grammar?

author rewrites

emphasis

how to aggravate an editor

Letters from the Editor

Editor Test

proper use of ellipsis

Why We Write

Fun Things to Do When You're an Editor

glass half empty or half full

Pendō: The way of mental presence and immediate correction.

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