Writer, Editor, Helper

Quoting Well, Part 1: It’s More Than Just Accuracy

 

Academics love to quote—as evidence, as embellishment, as filler. Snippets and long blocks. Quotations within quotations. It’s a pity that so many do it so poorly. Here is part 1 of some advice from a copyeditor experienced in tidying up quotations.

In Conversation with Amy Einsohn

My guest today is Amy Einsohn, author of The Copyeditor’s Handbook, a book long beloved* by writers and editors and just recently appearing in its third edition. Many of you will have worn out your first or second editions by now, so let me recommend the new one, which Amy has updated not only in matters of editing technology, but also to take account of (ahem) the 16th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style and other resources. A professional editor herself, with experience across the board in trade, scholarly, and corporate editing, Amy also teaches copyediting classes and workshops.

Carol: Amy, thank you so much for agreeing to blog with me here! I’ve been looking at the new edition, and here’s something I’m curious about: In The Copyeditor’s Handbook you are known and loved for your flexible and humane approach to “the rules.” Were you always of this mindset even as a child, or were you naturally bossy but somehow evolved?

Amy: I didn’t have siblings or pets at home, and I was always the smallest and youngest kid in my class at school. So I didn’t have the opportunity to test out any innate bossiness. I entered adolescence during the sixties, and questioning “the rules” was the theme of the decade. By the time I was working at my first serious job—teaching freshman composition at UC Berkeley—I had figured out that my strengths as an instructor were my enthusiasm, humor, informality, and open-mindedness. Years later, when I was teaching in the UC Extension copyediting program, I had read enough to understand the value of distinguishing real rules from conventions, shibboleths, preferences, fetishes, and peeves.

Carol: (Aha. I just learned the value of being a middle child: it’s where I found my innate bossiness.) In your last sentence, I hear you alluding to the ongoing battle between descriptivism and prescriptivism. More recently, I’m seeing online a growing backlash against what Eugene Volokh calls “assertionism,” which is (briefly put) prescriptivism without literary or historical evidence to support one’s assertions. But it sounds as though this is nothing new for you. Do you get any grief from readers or students for not promoting rules more strictly?

Amy: Some students are disappointed; many are relieved. The disappointed ones had hoped that I would arm them with new, more obscure shibboleths to enforce. I often meet students who cling to unfounded precepts that they learned in high school, and they become uneasy when I offer three possible explanations: (1) they have misremembered what their teacher said, (2) their teacher was a well-meaning oversimplifier, or (3) their teacher was a Miss Thistlebottom—Theodore Bernstein’s name for the pedant who proclaims her antique preferences to be immutable rules.

I send students off to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, to read about the history of a contested usage, examine a range of expert opinions, and look at examples by well-known writers. Or I bring in entries from the major style manuals to illustrate that what a student thought was a rule is actually an editorial convention, a matter of house style.

I hate it when I have to refute the “fake rules” because I fear that by even mentioning them I might be tainting the minds of students lucky enough never to have heard of them. But anyone who does editorial work will run into these bugaboos, and I try to prepare my readers and students for encounters with supervisors and authors who perpetuate what Arnold Zwicky calls “zombie rules.”

My perennial advice to copyeditors is: If you don’t care for construction X, don’t use it in your writing, but copyeditors aren’t hired to impose their own taboos and taste on authors.

Carol: I agree. But I sometimes find that writers actually follow the fake rules they were taught about not splitting infinitives or beginning sentences with conjunctions. And that’s fine. I try not to meddle unless there’s a problem. I have to say, though, it’s pretty rare for a writer to object if I end up having to raise an issue like that. It shouldn’t surprise me. Academics—and writers, for that matter—tend to be creative and curious and to think of themselves as lifelong learners. Maybe you’ve found as I have, in fact, that more experienced writers are more open to editing?

Amy: Most are appreciative—especially those who know that every time you revise, you learn something new about writing. But I’ll always remember the senior professor who told me, at our first meeting, that Dante had committed a grievous error by not reserving a circle in the Inferno for editors. (I didn’t ask whether he wanted to place us nearer to the thieves, the usurers, or the counterfeiters.)

Carol: Hmm. Probably near the heretics. But one reason writers fear copyeditors is that they’ve had bad experiences with them. I’ll admit there have been times when I was defensive and inflexible about my editing. Sometimes a writer just pushes a button! And once my competence is questioned, it’s very hard not to push back. But I don’t suppose you have any experience with that . . .

Amy: I now regret how I treated several of my early victims (read: authors). Then I realized that pushing back only made things worse—for me and my prospects as a freelancer as well as for the publisher’s staff. Instead, I took the approach that my editing represented my best professional judgment, which the author had the prerogative to accept or reject. During the cleanup pass, I complied with the author’s changes and stets unless I felt they might prove embarrassing for the author or might damage the publisher’s reputation.

For example, I did push back when a pair of coauthors quoted a homophobic pun—a newspaper lead from the 1930s about a murder—calling it one of the best-known leads of that era. I asked the authors to supply a substitute, saying that it was inadvisable (tactful me!) to present an offensive sentence as exemplary. They thought the pun was witty and ignored my request. I didn’t bother re-posing my query. I took the passage to the managing editor, who relayed my concerns “upstairs.” Someone up there prevailed, and the sentence did not appear in the published volume.

Carol: Ah, yes—we have an “upstairs,” too. (It’s interesting how publishers always seem to put the copy editors “downstairs.”) I must say it’s comforting to hear that you too were once a new editor who made mistakes but learned from them.

Amy: And today I’m an experienced editor who still makes mistakes and is still trying to learn from them.

Carol: I’ll let you go now, but with one last question I can’t resist asking: I notice that on your book page the marketers at the University of California Press have chosen to list Write Your Own Egyptian Hieroglyphics among the “related titles.” That’s an unusual pairing.

Amy: I guess the tie-in is that my book and hieroglyphics are in the “language and writing” category of the press’s list. I don’t think they’re part of a new “career opportunities” series.

Thank you, Carol, for letting me ramble on.

Carol: Amy, thank you! You’re a good sport. This has been a wonderful opportunity for fans (like me) to learn a little about you personally.

______

*My favorite tribute is from Constance Hale, the author of Sin and Syntax and Wired Style, who wrote of The Copyeditor’s Handbook, “This book warms the cockles of the copyediting heart. It is thorough, useful, helpful, and smart.” 

 

Diversionary Tactics, or How to Lose Your Readers

 

Photo: Adam Smasher

Having a number of deadlines last week, I resorted to my emergency ploy of watching more television. As always, it was revelatory. This time I was struck by screenwriters’ never-ending resort to the ancient and lame “Look over there!” strategy to extricate heroes and villains from tight spots.

Are Copy Editors Bullies?

 

Photo: Prodigy69.co.u

Chase bank is bullying me.

The other day I received a threatening letter informing me that unless I notify them by December 15, they will begin mailing me “offers” for their products and services in nine (9!)  categories, including auto financing (I don’t have a car), education (done that), mortgage (I’m set), and a raft of others. From Googling the return envelope’s address, I’m convinced the letter is authentic.

“Citation Obsession”? Dream on!

Kurt Schick’s recent article about what he perceives as overattention to citation formats in the teaching of undergraduates drew passionate replies on every side of the issue (along with the usual number not really having much to do with the issue).

Some of Mr. Schick’s claims surprise me. At James Madison University, he says, “academic departments and even whole colleges consistently beg the library and writing center for workshops to rehabilitate their worst citation transgressors.” Really? The librarians I know will be envious.