Editrix

5 Things I Learned from "The Subversive Copy Editor"

Every month, when Chicago e-mails me to let me know that its Q&A page has been updated, I gobble up the new info faster than the Redoubtable Mr. L— can eat a pan of brownies. (It won’t be long before we’re on a first-name basis with the people at the pet emergency room.) So, when I found out that Carol Fisher Saller, the woman behind the Q&A, had written a book, I knew I had to get it—immediately. It didn’t disappoint.

Here are five things her book, The Subversive Copy Editor, taught me:

1. I shouldn’t be so quick to change “dispositioning” to “disposing” or “precipitation event” to “rain” when I’m editing technical documents. Saller writes, “[M]ost writers are likely to be better acquainted than you are with the special readership of their work, and you would do well to think before you mess with their choices.” However, if I come across a newsletter article that says the company picnic was ruined by a precipitation event, I’m going to say instead that it was rained out, and I’m going to feel really, really smug about it.
2. Some changes are best made silently. If, for example, your author has used double spaces between sentences, you might consider turning off Word’s “track changes” feature, doing a global search and replace to change all double spaces to single spaces, and subtly pointing out what you’ve done (by, say, inserting a comment like this in the margin: “Changed double spaces to single throughout”). It’s been my experience that tracked changes can freak authors out. They see the markup, and they go to a shame-filled elementary-school place, a place with the smell of chalk dust and the creak of floorboards and the feel of sweat rolling down your back as you stand at the blackboard, trying to remember the past tense of “drag,” while your teacher stands behind you, tapping her palm with a ruler. (Just remember to turn track changes back on, of course. Trust me. That’s not an amusing mistake to make.)
3. Every editor makes mistakes, even Saller: “The only time I was able to make a mess of a manuscript without annoying the author was the time a severely dyslexic writer reviewed the editing and page proofs himself. Did I get away with murder? Not a chance. To my humiliation a reviewer wrote, “ ‘Finally, I must mention that this volume is poorly edited for a product from a major university press. Typographical errors and redundancies abound.’ ”
4. If you place your cursor on a lowercase word and hit SHIFT + F3, Word will put it into initial caps. Hit SHIFT + F3 again, and Word will put it in all caps. Hit SHIFT + F3 one more time, and the word will go back to lowercase. By highlighting a block of text before hitting SHIFT + F3, you can adjust the capitalization throughout. (Unfortunately, this trick doesn’t work in Word 2007, just older versions, which means I can do it at work but not at home. Lame!)
5. “Sleight of hand is the editor’s best tool.”

The En Dash's Demise?

I’m reading The Subversive Copy Editor by Carol Fisher Saller, the editor in charge of Chicago’s online Q&A. When I came across this (oddly reassuring) proof that even the Chicago goddesses have to go with the flow sometimes, I knew I had to blab it to the world. Be that as it may, what’s this business about whacking the en dash?

The style guidelines in Chicago have accumulated over the years according to their popularity and usefulness in scholarly writing. They change from one edition to the next when they are no longer helpful. In the last edition, we decided to give up on the “9 January 1930” style and write dates the way more Americans do: January 9, 1930. We put the n back in “2nd.” In the edition before that, in a matter where style intrudes upon grammar, we flirted shamelessly with using “their” as a nonsexist pronoun in singular contexts: everyone should hold on to their hats. (We aren’t proud of that little indiscretion. Even then, we relegated it to a footnote in small type.) We constantly argue over whether to kill off the en dash.

Please, God, no! It was bad enough when Ilene Chaiken killed off Dana! Don’t take away my en dash, too!

Editrix is Stumped

In a recent comment, Andy Bechtel of The Editor's Desk asked what the plural of hit-and-run is. So I got to digging around and . . . I don't know. Webster's doesn't specify a plural for hit-and-run. Neither does the American Heritage. My usual suspects (Fowler, Garner, and Bryson) are silent on the issue.

I think it must be hit-and-runs purely because hits-and-run sounds ridiculous. Then again, I prefer men-of-war to man-of-wars, so I'm not being consistent, and you should take what I say with a grain of salt.

What say you?

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Do You Ever Come Down with Editorial Ennui?

I do.

I have it right now.

My editing has been sloppier than usual, all I want to do is go on a Sopranos binge, and I haven't bothered to properly remove the nail polish I wore to my wedding, which is now flaking off in a truly sad, red-light-district way.

How many times can I change “on an annual basis” to “annually” and “has the potential to affect” to “could affect” before I experience a psychotic break, I ask you, dear reader? HOW MANY TIMES?

Luckily, sometimes you come across a book whose slipshod editing makes you remember that the work you do isn’t as pointless as it sometimes seems.

I give you Introduction to Language Development by Scott McLaughlin. (The edition I have is an old one, from 1998, and if I had money to blow right now, I’d buy the most recent edition and see if it has been improved. But I just spent $600 on new tires, and I have to spring for a dentist appointment later this week, so what are you gonna do?) The thing is, Introduction to Language Development pushes so many of my editorial buttons that I can’t concentrate on the content. First, there’s the problem with comprise. To paraphrase Stunk Strunk and White,* animals do not comprise a zoo; they constitute a zoo. So why does Introduction to Language Development keep insisting, over and over again, that parts comprise the whole? And why does it not recognize that utilize and use are not the same thing? And why are its sentence structures as lulling and monotonous as a Greyhound ride across rural Louisiana? 

The concept is central to any modern linguistic theory of language behavior. A generative grammar is one that is comprised of [!] a limited number of rules capable of generating an unlimited number of acceptable sentences in a language. It is analogous to a collection of algebraic equations that have the potential to produce an infinite variety of answers as different values are plugged in for each variable.

 And why—God, why?—does it say things like this: 

Dr. and Mrs. Watson were thrilled! [Women don’t become doctors. They go to college to get their M.R.S. degree, not their M.D.] The excitement of this first addition to their family [The newborn baby was excited? Really? I thought newborns spent most of their time lying around and shitting themselves, but hey, what do I know?] was beyond their wildest anticipation. [Just say “wildest dreams.” You know that’s what you want to say, so just say it. Changing “dreams” to “anticipation” does not eliminate the stench of cliché. It just tries to mask it with a spritz of White Diamonds.] Dr. Watson drove carefully as Mrs. Watson nestled herself close to this new little package of joy. [“Here. These have always brought me luck.”]

 And this: 

[I]n maternity wards where six mothers and their babies shared the same space, after just the third night, mothers were awakened only by the cry of their own baby . . . (Some would suggest this is an ability that few fathers develop with just one baby in the house for a year!) [Poor, poor, stupid men!]

 And this, which really appropriates the cake: 

Infants who breast-feed have been found to discriminate between their mother and other women strictly on the basis of their odor. (The ladies who participated would all probably prefer the term “fragrance.”) [!!!]

Look, I know the book’s over a decade old, but in the year it was published, I was taking freshman comp, and I distinctly remember Dr. Marcello telling us to say “his or her” instead of “his” in our essays. Didn’t—wait, let me double-check the book’s publisher—Singular Publishing Group Inc. employ any women in editorial positions, who (one hopes) would have bristled at “ladies” and put the kabosh kibosh on it, at the very least? Or was the publishing world of 1998 more like the one of 1906 than I’d like to admit?

*I'm sorry to say that this typo was not a joke. See what editorial ennui can do to you?

DNA Editors?

I subscribe to the Speaking of Faith podcast, and when I heard the following during a recent episode -- in which host Krista Tippett interviewed Sherwin Nuland, a former surgeon and current author -- I got really, really giddy. It's an excerpt from a talk Dr. Nuland gave in 2005:

Here we are with our 75 trillion cells. It's been estimated there are about 4 million cell divisions every single second. You're working so hard while you're sitting here. And when cells divide, of course it's impossible for the DNA to replicate perfectly each time, so little mistakes are made. You know, this is how mutations arise. The DNA repair enzyme is a molecule. It's a complex molecule. It travels like a little motorboat up and down the DNA molecule. It finds errors, snips them out, corrects them, and puts the right thing back in there. This is the ultimate wisdom of the body.

So, while I'm at work, editing manuals and reports, I myself am being "edited" by a DNA repair enzyme. And, for all I know, maybe there's something that "edits" the repair enzyme, and on and on . . .

OK, this is starting to freak me out.

Pen Divas Unite! [UPDATED]

I first used the Zebra GR8 retractable gel pen in October of last year, when a project manager forgot it on my desk and I—ahem—borrowed it. I used it long enough to get attached to it (possibly unhealthily attached) before the project manager came back looking for it a few days later. Turns out, I wasn’t the first person to try to steal his pen. So did our Human Resources rep and a higher-up whose title I can’t remember but that boils down to The Great and Powerful Caller of Shots.

And now, at long last, the company bought me some (four whole boxes of red ones, practically a lifetime supply), and they’re just as fantastic as I remember—which is to say, they’re quite fantastic indeed.

However, my colleagues have their own pen allegiances. One swears by the Pilot P-500 Extra Fine 0.5 millimeter. Another prefers Bic Velocity gel pens. And still another uses old-school red pencils. One of my editor friends won’t use anything besides Sharpie Ultra Fines, and Mr. K— likes Bic ballpoints, the kind you get in enormous packs for, like, a nickel.

What pens do you like best?

Update: Check out this site. I'm sure all of you pen divas out there will appreciate it.

Ah! So Close!

Cloche has alerted me to a typo in an e-mail that New York State Senator Michael F. Nozzolio sent to his "friends":

The Governor's budget still eliminates of $1.7 billion in property tax rebates and tax relief that are depended on by struggling seniors and middle class families.*

I can't help feeling a little bit bad for the guy. But, as Cloche said, "Ugh. No, thank you, Senator Nozzolio. You must have slashed the budget for your proofreaders in an effort to save us money." The sad thing is, that's entirely possible.

* I really wish I could tinker with this sentence: "The governor's budget still eliminates $1.7 billion in property tax rebates and tax relief that struggling seniors and middle-class families depend on."

Christopher Hitchens on Terrorists, Dissidents, and Copy Editors

I'm a bit late to the party, but on Monday, Slate published an article, by Christopher Hitchens, on how the New York Times refers to terrorist groups. I was most interested in his discussion of how the IRA (the terrorist group, not the retirement account) has been called out in text—and I say that not just because it's St. Patrick's Day. 

Mr. Hitchens writes: 

Aware of the fact that its readers knew that there were two discrepant kinds of Christianity practiced in [Northern Ireland], the New York Times would do its job of being strictly informative by characterizing the IRA as "overwhelmingly Catholic." One could see what the editors were vainly trying to do—namely, to suggest that very few Ulster Protestants indeed were succumbing to the temptation to enlist in the ranks of the IRA—but the resulting image was nonetheless risible, as if someone encountering a gunman of the IRA would be first and foremost overwhelmed by his Catholicism. 

The whole article is worth a read, but it’s the paragraph I’ve quoted above that really caught my attention. On one hand, I understand what Mr. Hitchens is saying. “Overwhelmingly Catholic” could bring to mind “WWJD”-bracelet-wearing evangelists who buttonhole you on the street, invite you to a spaghetti dinner, and ask you where you are on your walk with the lord. On the other hand, I don’t know if that’s the first thing readers would imagine. First they’d imagine an IRA that is almost entirely populated by Catholics. Then, if they were reading the story in the leisurely way that cubicle monkeys with time on their hands so often do, they’d circle back to “overwhelmingly,” and maybe then they’d imagine the evangelists, but only after they’d contemplated getting another cup of tea and decided against it, because if you empty the water cooler, you have to replenish it, and those jugs are a bitch to lift. 

What I’m saying is, I can’t decide how I feel about it. What do you think?

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Like Mad Libs, Only Different

As many of you probably already know, my favorite punctuation mark is the en dash, but the square bracket comes in at a not-so-distant second, largely because of sentences like this:

But those people who are choosing to print out their photos and make scrapbooks may have the last laugh because the materials they are working with now are much more [durable] than they were before.

In case you’re curious, I lifted this sentence from an interview with Jessica Helfand, author of Scrapbooks: An American History, that I came across in Salon. What I love about it is, I can’t figure out what Ms. Helfand would have said instead of “durable.” I mean, “durable” was an editorial insertion, right? OK, fine. But what is it a replacement for? Something longwinded (“likely to retain their characteristics over the course of time and in myriad environments”)? Something fabulously bombastic (“akin to the hide of an elephant that has rolled in red dust and bathed in pools and brushed against the trunk of a Jackalberry tree, and yet, feels no pain”)? Something cracked-out (“outrageous—truuuuly, truly, truly outrageous. Whoa, Jem! The music’s contagious!”)?

We’ll never know.

The Bug Up Ass Corporation

My friend* has an editing dilemma on his hands, and I was interested to know what you would do if you were in his shoes.

He has edited a document that mentions a business whose name starts with the; let’s call it—oh, I don’t know—“the BUA Corporation” (i.e., “the Bug Up Ass Corporation”).

My friend consistently lowercased the whenever the company name came up. So, it was the BUA Corporation—and not The BUA Corporation—that was subcontracted, that performed work, and that received payment. Now the BUA Corporation is complaining to my editor friend that the should be capitalized. They are not merely the BUA Corporation. They are The BUA Corporation. They are The BUA Bad Mamma Jamma Corporation.

Chicago says to lowercase the the. However, although the AP Stylebook does not address this topic directly, it does dictate that people refer to its organization as The Associated Press, not the Associated Press, upon first mention. I’d dig into Garner’s, Fowler’s, etc., but they’re at my office, and I’m at my kitchen table.

What advice would you give my friend?

*It really is my friend’s—and not my—dilemma. Really. This is not like writing to Dan Savage and saying, “I have this friend who wants to wear a diaper during sex and be spanked with a rattle, but his girlfriend won’t play along. What should my friend do?”

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