July 22, 2013

*Things Editors Worry About That No One Else Does

There are a lot of things I change in the course of my editing work that, in the real world, don't matter at all.

that and which

toward and towards

among and amongst

amid and amidst

underway and under way

cellphone and cell phone

healthcare and health care

child care and childcare

For about 99% of the population, these choices matter not at all. That is, you can say your character ran toward the explosion or he ran towards it. They mean the same thing. And almost no one will notice your choice anyway.

But editors will. And if you put the sentence "Joe ran towards the explosion" under the nose of an editor or copy editor, chances are it'll get changed to "toward," even though you may not notice it.

The reason? Well, a lot of editing choices are about consistency, some are about efficiency, some are about voice and some, like that and which, are about nothing at all.

Style guides say that you can't use which for what are called restrictive clauses: That is the car which I'll be driving. But that's just a style rule, not a grammar rule. And most people wouldn't put which in that sentence anyway. Either that or nothing at all would be better.

For cases like health care and healthcare in which you have to choose between a one-word and a two-word form, it often doesn't matter. Dictionaries disagree on which is correct, and some allow both. So you can either check your preferred dictionary or just not worry about it.

As for amongst and amidst, however, I'd actually recommend cashing those in for their shorter cousins, among and amid, in most cases. The longer forms are so unpopular in professional publishing that they carry a subtle air of amateurishness in a lot of cases. Or maybe that's just my warped view. Bottom line: Unless you're the editor, you probably don't have to worry about any of these.

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July 15, 2013

*Lineup, Line Up, Line-up

Here’s a word that separates the careful writers from everyone else: lineup. You know you’re reading something that’s not edited by a pro when you see: “On Saturday night, the club will have a great line-up.”

Just as telling: “On Saturday night, the club will have a great line up.”

And this mistake you don’ see as often, luckily: “The patrons had to lineup in front of the building to get in.”

That last one is a particular danger to anyone who doesn’t know to be skeptical of spell check. Most spell-check programs don’t question the one-word lineup because it is, in fact, a legit word. Yet it’s still wrong in that sentence. Here’s why.

The one-word lineup is a noun: We have a great lineup of performers today. The coach something-something’d the starting lineup. (I don’t speak sports. But you get the idea.)

The verb form is two words: Line up the planters against the wall. The children should line up outside the building at 8 a.m.

There’s no need to ever hyphenate it. Though, technically, according to the rules of punctuation, you could turn the two-word form into an adjective by writing "The line-up procedure is as follows." But that’s rare, and most people would probably just use the noun attributively (as an adjective) there anyway: The lineup procedure is as follows.

To write like a pro, use the one word lineup when you need a noun, use the two word line up when it's a verb, and never hyphenate it.

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July 8, 2013

He Said, She Says, Says He, Said She

Here’s something that drives me nuts (even though I can't really defend my position):

 “Spring is a wonderful time to visit,” says tourism board representative Jane Doe.

“The potholes will be fixed by summer,” said the mayor.

“The new Jetta has also been redesigned,” spokesman Joe Dane says.

The reason these drive me nuts? I have to change them to

tourism board representative Jane Doe SAID

the mayor SAID

spokesman Joe Dane SAID

Why do I have to change every “says” to “said” and put every one of them after the name instead of before? Because that’s how I first learned to do it, darn it.

In my first couple editing jobs, I was exposed a lot to the idea that news and feature articles should 1. use everyday, conversational language and 2. make sense.

The word “says” in “Joe Dane says” suggests he does so regularly. That’s different from “said,” which suggests he said so in an interview with a reporter. A reporter can know whether Dane said something in an interview, but he probably doesn't know whether Dane runs around saying it all the time. What’s more, it wouldn’t matter that much if he did. We’re not reporting on the man’s habits. We’re reporting on the car, and Dane’s telling us once that it’s redesigned is all that’s probably relevant to the story.

As for the part about using everyday language: In conversation, you don’t say, “Said Betty, lunch will be served in the conference room.” You say, “Betty said lunch will be served in the conference room.” Putting “said” or “says” before the name is contrary to normal conversational language and often Yoda-like (Rants on, she does).

So I like my quotation attributions in the past tense and in most cases I like the “said” to come after the name. The obvious exception, of course, is when something else must immediately follow the name. Like, “The Jetta has been totally redesigned,” said Joe Dane, president of North American sales.

But here’s why I can’t defend my position: These aren’t rules. Not in the larger world, anyway. And though some publications may have a policy of not using present-tense quotation attributions or ones that put the “say” part before the name part, it doesn’t mean you can’t do it that way. It just means that no one who writes for a publication I edit can do it that way.

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July 1, 2013

A Hard Lesson About Proofreading

There were, perhaps, 7,000 or 8,000 words in the publication -- a special newspaper insert about a beer, wine and spirits competition, complete with articles, attendee info and very, very long lists of winners.

It was my job to proofread it.

And I did. Well. I found a missing closing parenthesis in the tiny agate type in the winner listings. I found a wrong verb tense in the middle of an article. I found missing italics on several web addresses. (It’s this publication’s style to put them in italics. If that’s not your style, that’s okay, too.)

And after finding these couple of needles in this big, brain-numbing haystack, I was pretty proud of myself, as I usually am.  (Hey, catching typos is hard.) I put the marked-up copy back on the editor’s desk and went home for the day.

The next morning, however, I changed my tune when I walked in and my editor held up a copy of the front page. Luckily, he was laughing when he pointed to the title of the publication, which ran across the cover page in huge type: “The 2013 International Wine, Beer and Spirits Competion.”

Competion, not competition.

I learned years ago that the best way to catch these types of errors is to look at a document several different ways. There’s the up-close, magnifying-glass-in-hand scrutiny that let me catch those missing italics and parenthesis. Then there’s the take-a-step-back second look. I literally move the pages farther from my eyes, glance at the document as a whole, try to imagine I’m the reader seeing it for the first time, and look at the big picture stuff you just don’t notice when you’re holding that magnifying glass.

I look at the photos. I look at the captions. I look at the layout. And I read the headline and subhead.

That arm's-length portion of the process is usually all it takes to catch big errors. But not always. For whatever reason, I just don’t always see every error. And I like to believe it’s not just me.

The lessons here? When proofreading, there are no limits you should not go to in order to catch errors. Stand on your head if it helps. Read out loud. All future typos are, quite simply, inexcusable.

But yesterday’s typos – well, nobody’s perfect.

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June 24, 2013

*Quasi Possessives

Do you know about quasi possessives? You probably should. Unlike so many other things in language you can figure out on your own, quasi possessives are one of those things you just have to know. And since you’re visiting a grammar site, chances are you’re one of the people who’d like to know it. So here goes.

You know how people talk about a hard day’s work or two weeks’ pay or getting your dollar’s worth? Well, those are all considered quasi possessives. They get treated as possessives even though they don’t convey the same degree of “ownership,” if you will, as do regular possessives.

AP discusses these in its on using apostrophes and says that phrases as a day’s pay, two weeks’ vacation, three days’ work and your money’s worth all get the possessive treatment.

The Chicago Manual of Style calls this the “possessive with genitive,” which I don’t love because “genitive” roughly translates to “possessive,” making the whole term seem a bit nonsensical. However, this use of the word “genitive” is a nod to the fact that there are two ways to form possessives in English. Either with an apostrophe plus S (or, in the case most plurals, just an apostrophe): Joe’s house, the Smiths’ daughter. The other way, and this is more consistent with English’s Latin roots, is to use of: the house of Joe, the daughter of the Smiths.

As Chicago describes it, forms like a week's pay are a carry-over from the latter: “Possessive with genitive. Analogous to possessives, and formed like them, are certain experssions based on the old genitive case. The genitive here implies ‘of’: in three days’ time, an hour’s delay, six months’ leave.”

If it helps to think of these as “three days of time” or “an hour of delay,” do. But I find it easier just to remember that these expressions are possessive-like. Or, as both guides recommend, you can also tweak the sentence so you have a hyphenated compound like “a six-month leave” or “a two-week vacation.”

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June 17, 2013

*The Teacher Who Condemned 'Got'

I never used to believe in ghosts. The idea of hauntings sounded ridiculous to me. Then I started writing about grammar. Now I know better.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been hearing bone-chilling tales of undead teachers haunting former students from the great beyond with bad information: You can’t end a sentence with a preposition. You can't use healthy to mean healthful. You can't start a sentence with but.

The stubborn persistence of these bad teachings never ceases to amaze me. But from time to time these chilling tales go beyond the pale, wowing me with just how bad bad information can be.

Case in point, an e-mail I got recently:

Dear June. Today, in your column from the Pasadena Sun section of the L.A. Times, you used "the writer got bogged down." I will never forget several teachers, including one particularly memorable Mrs. Hamilton, telling me that using "got" in any sentence anytime was simply being lazy, that it was bad English, uncouth, uneducated, etc. You get the point.

Yup, there was once a teacher who took it upon herself to single-handedly condemn a well established and highly useful word. I particularly like that “uneducated” part -- and the irony of how it came from someone who needed only to open a dictionary to see that she was misinforming her own students. Of course, I didn’t say so to the poor guy in so many words. Instead, here’s what I wrote:

The most common objection to got is that have and got are redundant in phrases like "I have got quite a few friends." Yes, it's inefficient, but it's accepted as an idiom. Every major language authority I know of agrees it's a valid option. 

We editors usually trim the gots out. Especially in news writing, which prizes efficiency, "He has got $20'" is a poor alternative to "He has $20." But that's an aesthetic. Not a grammar rule.

 From what you're saying, your teacher was condemning the word got in all its uses. And, yes, that's extreme to the point of being illogical. Got is the past tense of get, which can be both a regular verb and an auxiliary verb: "They got married."

It sounds as though Mrs. Hamilton would have everyone say, "They were married." But if so, that's just a personal preference she was trying to pass off as a rule. There isn't a dictionary under the sun that would back her up.

"I hear a lot of stories about teachers who used to lay down laws that weren't laws. (It's wrong to end a sentence with a preposition. It's wrong to split an infinitive. It's wrong to begin a sentence with and.) These kinds of unfounded prohibitions were very fashionable in educational circles for a while. But they never were rules. It's unfortunate kids got so much bad information.

 Hope that helps! - June

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June 13, 2013

Possessives of Nouns Ending in S

Most people regularly write stuff like “We went to James’s house” without stopping to think whether it should be “James’ house.”

In many areas of life, such cavalier carelessness is a bad idea. But in this case, not thinking is actually better than thinking. That’s because possessives, and especially possessives of singular words that end in S, can drive you nuts if you think about them. Most people are sure that there can be only one right way to make James possessive. But in fact the rules are a mess, the language referees disagree, and on any given day you might see James’ in a newspaper and James’s in a book.

Here, according to some of the best-known language guides, are examples of correctly formed possessives of singular proper names ending in S.

 Chicago Manual of Style
James's words

James' sake

James's seat

Associated Press Stylebook
James' words

James' sake

James' seat
BUT
The boss's words

The boss' sake

The boss' seat

Strunk & White's The Elements of Style*
James's words

James's sake

James's seat

BUT

Jesus' words

Jesus' sake

Jesus' seat

 I should note here that the Elements of Style is not an official style guide, nor do experts consider it a real language authority. But millions of people who own the book don’t know that. So it adds to the conflicting advice floating around out there.

What should you do? Pick a style -- either the “book style” of writing James’s or the “newspaper” style of writing James’ and just use that form consistently. Those funky special circumstances you see above – stuff like “boss’s word” vs. “boss’ sake” and “Jesus’ followers” -- no one expects you memorize all those. If you really need your writing to be bullet proof, you could consult a copy of AP or Chicago. But otherwise, just pick James’s or James’ and use it consistently.

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June 10, 2013

*'Wake,' 'Awake' and 'Awaken' as Verbs

Wake, awake, and awaken are weird and, together, they’re a great example of how weird English can be. They’re synonyms that, really, we don’t need. But until we put some of them out to pasture, we’ll continue to have all these forms.

First to go will probably be the verb form of awake. In my world, it’s only used as an adjective. I was awake. I never hear it as a verb: When I awake.

This verb use has a distinctly Jane Austen ring to it. I shall awake before dawn. Nobody talks that way anymore, at least not anywhere I can hear them. Everyone uses wake up, woke up, and woken up.

But until the dictionaries drop it, you can continue to use it in all its weird forms without worry, right along with its weird cousins.

To form the past tense and the past participle of awaken and awake, just add “ed.”

Yesterday I awakened.

Yesterday I awaked.

In the past I have awakened.

In the past I have awaked.

Again, I’m betting that “Yesterday I awaked” and “In the past I have awaked” aren’t that useful to you. And you may not like “awakened” in casual speech, either. But that could come in handy in certain types of writing, especially fiction, where characters’ speech peculiarities so often help round them out as people.

If you forget the past tenses of any of these, remember: They’re all right in the dictionary. They’re listed right after the main entry for the word. Plus, some of these past tenses even have their own entries at m-w.com. So they’re easy to find.

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June 3, 2013

Annual Splitting Infinitives Speech

Is it time for my annual “There’s no rule against splitting infinitives” speech already? How time flies. Seems it was just months ago that I was blathering on and on about how it’s a myth that you can’t split an infinitive and that, if you don’t believe a language liberal like me, you can ask Messrs. Strunk and White.

Okay, I’m hamming it up a bit. But it’s just weird to write in a newspaper column perhaps a dozen times that there’s no rule against splitting infinitives and still get e-mails like one I got recently asking about a quote that appeared in the column.

The quote was lifted from another article in which a scientist was talking about proton therapy. He said that this kind of therapy “makes it feasible to just hone in on the actual tumors.”

Notice how there’s a word between “to” and “hone”? Well, so did a reader.

<< Thank you for your enjoyable column in today's paper, "A Misspoken Word Makes a Point." In the quote you use as an example, is it now all right to split infinitives, as in "Proton therapy makes it feasible to just hone in ...?" Maybe precise speech is just a dying entity. I used to collect entertaining malapropisms but there are too many nowadays.>>

So I had to be the heavy again and tell him that something he’s probably accepted as fact for decades is just myth.

<<It's not wrong to split an infinitive. Never has been.>> I wrote back. <<The idea that you can't is a longstanding myth. Garner's Modern American Usage calls it a "superstition." Every language authority under the sun, including Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style" agree on this point.>>

And thus, another small-town newspaper reader gets the bad news. One down, five million to go …

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May 27, 2013

Plurals and Possessives of Movie Titles in Quote Marks

If you were writing for the news media or any publication that follows Associated Press style, you would put movie titles in quotation marks.

They watched “Casablanca.”

That’s different from most book publishing, which uses italics. And once you understand it’s just a style thing, that’s easy enough. But it can get harder.

For example, what if you wanted to make the movie title possessive?

“Casablanca”’s     ?

“Casablanca’s”    ?

What if you wanted to make it plural, say, envisioning a scenario in which there were two of the same film?

“Casablanca”s     ?

“Casablancas”     ?

Well, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that the style guides don’t say. The good news is that the style guides don’t say. That means that, while you can’t get it right. Technically, you can’t get it wrong, either.

And here’s some better news: I recently asked some fellow copy editors what they would do, and it turns out even professionals disagree on this one.

Well, actually, they all agreed on one thing: These unsightly constructions should be avoided whenever possible. Good editors recast sentences whenever they can to spare readers such visual assaults. But when it came to where to put a plural S or a possessive S and an apostrophe, they disagreed on whether it should be inside or outside the quotation marks.

I learned many years ago that the plural or possessive S goes inside the quotation marks. Unfortunately, I don’t remember where I learned it and, because I can’t find any documentation of it now, I suspect I was putting blind faith in a source that didn’t deserve it.

Still, the lesson stuck. So if you want my personal preference, it’s this: Put all that stuff before the closing quotation mark.

If only they had made two different “Casablancas.”

If there were two of the same film, then both "Casablancas'" lead actors would be famous.

"Casablanca's" actors were critically acclaimed.

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