Who needs an editor?

January 14, 2011 By

Everyone.

I was tempted to just leave it at the first paragraph. Concise, meaningful, true. But it’s a bit flip and less than helpful. So let me elucidate.

There are two kinds of writers: good ones and not-so-good ones. In each category there are subsets. They have different strengths and shortcomings, but they all have one thing in common: They all need an editor.

And it’s nothing personal or judgmental. Your editor is your first reader (or one of them), a new pair of eyes, disinterested, experienced. She focuses on your writing her ability to see what is good about it and what needs work — how to clear away the extraneous so your meaning comes through.

More soon.

Filed Under: fiction, nonfiction Tagged With: ,

RIP, Dear Edwin Newman

September 15, 2010 By

The United States has lost a voice of reason, and the English language has lost a friend and defender. Edwin Newman, NBC newsman and standard-bearer of the language, has died at 91. A wonderful article in today’s New York Times says, in part:

Mr. Newman’s best-known books, both published by Bobbs-Merrill, are Strictly Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English? (1974) and A Civil Tongue (1976). In them, he declared what he called “a protective interest in the English language,” which, he warned, was falling prey increasingly to windiness, witlessness, ungrammaticality, obfuscation and other depredations.

To quote further (since I do not pretend to such eloquence, although I agree with his sentiments):

Among the sins that set Mr. Newman’s teeth articulately on edge were these: all jargon; idiosyncratic spellings like “Amtrak” and a great many others; the non-adverbial use of “hopefully” (a sign in his office read, “Abandon ‘Hopefully’ All Ye Who Enter Here”); “y’know” as a conversational stopgap; a passel of prefixes and suffixes (“de-,” “non-,” “un-,” “-ize,” “-wise” and “-ee”); and using a preposition to end a sentence with.

And I cannot help but believe that he would agree with mine when I add to that lovely list the irritating use of the passive voice in the expression of our feeling of loss:

He will be missed. We will miss him.

Filed Under: etymology, grammar, words Tagged With: , , , , ,

e-Publish? Please!

July 29, 2010 By

In case you need another reason to e-publish your book:

Last week, Amazon announced that “e-book sales on Amazon exceed the number of hardback books sold” and today, Steven Levy tells us in WIRED’s Gadget Lab that Jeff Bezos predicts, “Our best estimate is that Kindle books will outsell paperbacks sometime in the next nine to 12 months.”

Let me repeat that.

“Our best estimate is that Kindle books will outsell paperbacks sometime in the next nine to 12 months.”

Call today! Let’s get your book up there now.

Filed Under: e-publishing, publishing, technology Tagged With: ,

Who knows?

July 19, 2010 By

Okay, here it is: Who in clauses gets seriously tricky sometimes, and the easiest way to figure it out is to do a little rewrite in your head.

  • My new boyfriend, whom I met online… Clue: I met he? Nope. I met him. So whom. Him/whom.
  • Give the money to whoever comes to the door… Clue: It’s not what you may think. To whom? Afraid not. Logical, but wrong. Who is the subject of the phrase “comes to the door”, so it is not inflected.

In a very teensy nutshell, that’s all you need to know. I said it would be ugly, but it’s really not. Difficult, maybe, but worth it. Mental gymnastics won’t do a thing for your abs, but you will impress other smart people, which is also difficult, and also worth it.

Filed Under: grammar Tagged With: , ,

To whom it may concern

July 18, 2010 By

I think that when that “whom” disappears, it will be the signal of the end of civilization. Of course, by my standards, civilization started easing on down the road when people decided it was okay not to get dressed up for concerts and theater. But I digress.

The rules of who/whom are a little bit tricky — sometimes I have to think for a moment before being certain –  but that little “who” running around naked just grates on my ear, and I want to clothe it in its decently inflected form. Needless to say, it helps to have studied Latin.

It’s always who when it’s the subject of a sentence:

  • Who ate the last piece of pizza?
  • Who left the water running?
  • Who is that person in my seat?

It takes a turn for the complex when homophones are thrown into the mix:

  • Who’s calling?
  • Whose brilliant idea is this?

With a preposition, use the inflected form (whom):

  • With whom are you sitting?
  • To whom is this addressed?
  • The argument is between whom?
  • From whom is this package?

And then, it starts to get ugly. Check back tomorrow.

Filed Under: grammar Tagged With: ,

Just between… we?

July 14, 2010 By

I used to have a client who insisted on saying, “Between he and I…” And I would routinely change it to “between him and me”. And then he would change it back. I finally threatened to quit working for him if he didn’t allow me to make him look good. That kept him in line for a couple of years.

I don’t understand why mixing pronouns and prepositions seems to be such a tricky business for so many people. In part, I am tempted to say, it’s because the public schools in this country no longer offer Latin, and so most people manage to avoid learning the subtleties of grammar that Latin offers (which is a damned shame, too, because I suspected then, and I know now, that Latin was the most valuable subject I studied). But those of us who took Latin know that the subject form of the pronoun (I, he, she, they) appears only as the subject of a sentence. Except for the possessive form (mine, yours, his, hers, theirs), everything else is an object of one sort or another (me, him, her, them).

But (and this is another sore point with me) today, many people seem to feel that the rules of grammar are mere suggestions (like speed limits and good taste). Never mind nuance and precision; as long as “you know what I mean”, everyone is satisfied. Well, I am not satisfied. Indeed, I am appalled. And I will make my stand, with whoever* cares to stand with me, between my beloved English language and the barbarians at its gate.

* I’ll discuss the who/whom confusion tomorrow

Filed Under: grammar Tagged With: , , , ,

British vs. American punctuation

July 12, 2010 By

Now, I realize that I’m in a tiny minority of people who even notice stuff like this, but for a long time, I’ve been annoyed by a lack of logic in American punctuation. Why do we enclose commas and periods in quotation marks — aside from actual dialogue quotes, of course — when, really, they are not part of that which is quoted? Look at this example:

AMERICAN: Tonight I am going to see “Gone With the Wind.”

BRITISH: Tonight I am going to see “Gone With the Wind”.

The name of the movie does not include the period, so logically, it is not proper to include that period within the quotation marks. Here’s another example:

AMERICAN: She laid seven tiles on the Scrabble board and, starting with her opponent’s “S,” spelled the word “S-M-I-D-G-E-O-N,” but her opponent questioned her spelling.
BRITISH: She laid seven tiles on the Scrabble board and, starting with her opponent’s “S”, spelled the word “S-M-I-D-G-E-O-N”, but her opponent questioned her spelling.

Same idea applies here. The word is not smidgeon,; that is, it is not spelled with a comma. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Yes, it does.

From now on, the American way will always annoy you a little bit, too, and gradually the annoyance will spread, and the British form will gain acceptance here in the US.

Filed Under: punctuation Tagged With: , ,

A sticky wicket

June 22, 2010 By

Editors have the same problem a lot of service providers have. Hairstylists, for example, can’t tell a person that her hairstyle makes her look (contrary to her apparent belief) like an aging floozy who needs to rethink that big ‘80s mall hair. Even if it is painfully obvious. And, by the way, stop with the leggings and shoulder pads already.

Occasionally, if I point out a typo on someone’s webpage, they’ll email me and thank me. But I would never (and believe me, I have been tempted many times) email a writer and say, “Listen, friend, this copy is redundant, murky, and approaching incomprehensible. May I offer my editing services?” It’s the literary equivalent of an intervention, and like those, chances are it would not be well received. That’s not surprising; it’s a sticky situation.

So I must wait, like a spider in her web, for writers to come to me. And when they do, I always congratulate them, on two counts. First, that they have had the stamina and determination to write a whole book or dissertation or whatever it may be, and second, for having the understanding that now, it is time for a second opinion.

Filed Under: fiction, nonfiction, writing style Tagged With: ,

An open book

June 17, 2010 By

There was a writer named Stanley Elkin who said something very important about creating interesting characters:  “I never write about anyone who isn’t at the end of their rope.”

We don’t need to hear about anyone’s ordinary, average day. In gripping fiction, everything is urgent and intensified. The most interesting characters have found themselves in a dangerous, or thrilling, or frightening, or in some way life-changing place. I think we read fiction not only as an escape from tedium or our own problems, but to find out how people who lead interesting lives, who find themselves in risky places, handle themselves. I think reading is, among other things, our quest to learn how we can do better.

Our own lives tend to meander, with a lot of loose ends and dead ends and unresolved issues. Fiction is an escape from that. It’s a cheap thrill. The best writers don’t dilute the stress — we love the stress of fictional characters we are involved with. It requires nothing from us, really. We don’t have to comfort them in the middle of the night, or lend them money, or hide them from the bad guy, or have our hearts broken. We can just read about them, and when we can’t take it another second, we just close the book. Oh, if only life could be like that!

Filed Under: fiction Tagged With: ,
Newer Posts »

© Bookmark Services 1996-2011 • 413-274-6573 • victoria@bookmarkservices.net