The Subversive Copy Editor Blog

Are You a Difficult Writer?

 

Of Flames and Shadows, by Markus Röncke

Difficult writers and difficult people tend to share some characteristics; you might already know whether you are one or not. If you feel that being difficult is something you do well and rather enjoy, then carry on. Otherwise, here is a bit of self-examination and amateur therapy.

First, let me point out that difficult writers are often good writers. Reasonably protective of their prose, however, they unreasonably see editing as an assault.

• They are defensive. They read the editing with “No” at the ready. Unwilling to consider why a particular change might be helpful, and unable to read objectively to find the problem in the original, they assume that they know best, and that the editor is meddling.
• They are uncommunicative and dictatorial. Instead of engaging in dialogue or negotiation with the editor, they simply write “Stet” or “No.”
• They are unobservant. On page 249 they decide to uppercase “classical,” never mind that the editor had noticed their lowercasing of it in the first two chapters and their occasional inconsistency thereafter and had opted to lowercase it throughout.
• They are passive-aggressive or rude. On page 354, where the copyeditor failed to correct an instance of something she has been correcting throughout, instead of simply marking it or querying, they force a confession of incompetence: “I fail to see how this is different from the examples you changed on pages 3, 43, 67, and 112.”
• They inflate the value of their own outdated knowledge of grammar and style and misjudge their consistency in applying it to their own writing.
• They fail to read cover letters or follow directions or notify their editors of delays.

The point of submitting a piece of writing to the scrutiny of another is that self-editing is so darned hard. Scholars especially need another eye on their work, because they compose at a high level of abstraction and detail. Few brains can simultaneously monitor conceptual progress and mechanical detail without lapses. Academic copyeditors can find plenty to improve even in the writing of English PhDs—just as those scholars are perfectly able to point out errors in writing other than their own.

Easy writers—most writers, in my experience—are curious and open to learning about  trends in style and grammar. They object in reasonable tones to editing that doesn’t suit them, and they forgive an editor’s occasional errors or inability to understand specialist content. They keep in touch regarding deadlines; they ask questions; they express appreciation. The best ones enjoy the dialogue, the banter, and the spirited arguments that are part of a true collaboration.

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A version of this post originally appeared at Lingua Franca, a Chronicle of Higher Education blog, on March 27, 2012. More reader comments are available there.

 

 

 

Citing a Tweet (It’s Not Just for Twits)

 

Icons by Dryicons.com

There was online chatter recently when the Modern Language Association posted its style for citing a tweet. This didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was the amount of backlash from commenters who are still shocked at the idea of Twitter as a legitimate source of information for scholars; who cling to the idea that Twitter data consists only of what millions of users ate for breakfast; who not only choose to remain stubbornly ignorant of the technology, but are willing to boast of it in public.

Tsk.

Let me ask them this: Do you sneer at a writer who quotes profit statistics from the annual report of a foundation or corporation? Or who quotes a political speech and cites a newspaper? How is it fundamentally different if the original information is posted in a tweet with a link to the documentation?

Granted, you can learn what the world is eating and selling and watching if you choose to follow writers who post that kind of content. And it’s probable that even the most studious “tweeps” also use it for fun the way the rest of us do. (Why wouldn’t I follow @FakeAPStylebook?) But we also follow the Twitter streams of publications, institutions, and authorities in fields that interest us—people who comment on and link to information and articles we might otherwise miss. A Twitter feed that has been tailored to reflect one’s own interests is a miraculously concise and efficient way to identify and aggregate special-interest headlines from the daily avalanche of online news.

It’s not as though the vast bulk of personal handwritten or typed correspondence found in historical archives is worthy of quoting or citing. Rather, it is filled with useless trivia, including, no doubt, what Thomas Jefferson or Mozart ate for breakfast one day. Yet no one questions the respectability of quoting from such letters and memos and citing their sources.

I can’t dispute the fact that Twitter hosts a wasteland of inane blather; but it makes no sense to reject out of hand the original commentary and data that also reside there.

OK, I feel better now. So how do you cite a tweet? The MLA example is this:

Athar, Sohaib (ReallyVirtual). “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).” 1 May 2011, 3:58 p.m. Tweet.

The Chicago Manual of Style’s 16th edition, prepared before the longevity of the Twitter phenomenon could be counted on, contains no mention of tweeting; however, its website Q&A posted a suggested style some months ago:

In the text, you can incorporate the facts into a sentence: In a Twitter post on September 14, 2011, Garrett Kiely (@gkiely) wrote, “Using Google, Authors Guild takes 2 mins to connect an author with an ‘orphaned work’: bit.ly/nqyjOo.”

And here’s a possible note form:

32. Garrett Kiely, Twitter post, September 14, 2011, 8:50 a.m., http://twitter.com/gkiely.

The MLA example doesn’t include a URL; the CMOS example doesn’t include a discrete URL. If I could rewrite the Chicago answer, I might add one (after shortening it at Bitly):

87. “Fact-check all political obituaries with the CIA to make sure they didn’t do it.” FakeAPStylebook, Twitter post, February 16, 2012, 9:30 a.m., http://bit.ly/wupuuy.

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A version of this post originally appeared at Lingua Franca, a Chronicle of Higher Education blog, on March 23, 2012. More reader comments are available there.

 

Old-Style Versus Lining Figures

 

Image by Duval Guillaume

Something you might or might not notice when you read a book or journal article is the style of any numerals that turn up in the text. If you don’t notice, that’s a good thing, and it is probably thanks to a professional graphic designer who put some thought into specifying the right style for that text.

The most basic choice is between old-style and lining (or modern) figures. Old-style figures are more elegant within a line of text because they vary in height and width and variously extend above or below the line, which allows them to blend in nicely with the letters of a proportional font:

Lining figures, in contrast, are of uniform height and width:

Although designers tend to find lining figures intrusive in a line of text, their uniformity is preferred in some contexts, such as table columns, which make better visual sense relative to each other when the numbers align neatly:

Old-style figures

Lining figures

Since the exact appearance of each numeral varies from one typeface to another, a graphic designer will consider the entire set of a chosen font in light of the numeric content of the text to make sure the numbers will be readable in all cases. Whether old-style or modern, ones and zeroes can be troublesome if the numeral one looks like an uppercase letter I or  lowercase L, or when the zero looks like a letter o.

Here, in Constantia, is a lowercase letter o followed by an old-style zero:

And in Times New Roman, a lowercase letter ell and a lining figure number one:

In their natural habitats, numbers will not usually be mistaken for letters, but encountered in the wild—say, in expressions that mix numbers and letters such as URLs or street addresses—they can be harder to identify. In one book I copyedited, the page proofs had to be rerun after we saw that tables full of Unicode numbers, which consist of both letters and numbers, were not reliably readable in the chosen font.

One interesting option in a clean-up macro* that I run on new manuscripts is to “change ells used as ones to ones.” Why would anyone use the ell key to type a numeral 1? Readers of a certain age will recall that on a typewriter there is no key for the numeral 1, so ones have to be typed using the ell key. Typists who have carried that habit down through the decades and onto their computer keyboards might be surprised to find oddities in their page proofs when their faked numbers are exposed as ells. (Although typewriters do have a key for zero, my macro also includes an option to “change O’s used as zeroes to zeroes.” It doesn’t surprise me that there’s a demand for this option; I’m well used to the oblivious creativity of writers.)

Unfortunately, e-book formats don’t yet accommodate more than a couple of choices in typeface. A quick browse of books on my Kindle turned up no old-style numbers. Granted, there aren’t many projects whose readability hinges on number style. But having the right kind of numbers is just one of many small refinements we enjoy in professionally designed books that in time e-books should aim to achieve.

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*FileCleaner, by Editorium.

A version of this post originally appeared at Lingua Franca, a Chronicle of Higher Education blog, on March 14, 2012. More reader comments are available there.

 

When Style and Grammar Rules Elude You

Photo by Spencer Ritenour

Few things are as annoying as not being able to find something, especially when it was within sight only moments ago. But at least in most cases you know what you’re looking for—keys, dog, car—and you’re pretty sure it exists.

Searching for a style or grammar rule can be tougher. You don’t always know whether there actually is one, much less what it’s called, and those are serious impediments to figuring out where it might be hiding. In years of reading questions e-mailed to the Chicago Manual of Style's Online Q&A, I’ve surmised a few reasons why writers can’t find a rule, and some strategies for bringing one to bay.

So why can’t these readers find what they’re looking for?

♦ They haven’t actually looked. Like children whining that they can’t find their socks, they write, “I’ve looked everywhere and I can’t find how to make the plural of a word in italics.” The more patient ones among us will explain how to type “plural italics” in the CMOS site’s search box or look in the index under “italics: plurals of words in” or “plurals: words or phrases in italics.”

♦ They don’t know what to look for. This I understand, because it regularly happens to me. Should it be cause or causes in the sentence “It’s you who cause(s) trouble”? What’s the name of this grammar issue? What words would you look under in a reference book to read about it? I have no idea. (Never fear—I’ll have one by the end of the post.)

♦ The rule doesn’t exist. When I’ve tried everything and come up dry, I begin to fear that I’m obsessing over something everyone knows but me, a rule so obvious and basic that it goes without saying. I have to remind myself that it’s more likely that there simply is no rule. I wish I had a list of all the alleged rules we’ve been asked to confirm at the Q&A. Like the one that says you can’t put an illustration in a preface. Or that “said Julie” must always be changed to “Julie said.” Or that because must always be preceded by a comma.

Looking things up, like all skills, gets easier with practice. Here are some ways to find grammar and style rules when you aren’t sure what you’re looking for.

♦ Check a dictionary. Dictionaries aren’t just for definitions. Many of us have an intuitive grasp of grammar without being well educated in its lingo. The examples in a good dictionary are useful for putting names to vague notions, like whether as in a given sentence is an adverb, a pronoun, or a preposition. The usage notes and discussions—sometimes extensive—will tell you that it’s fine to use since to mean because, and just how many centuries that’s been the case. I tend to use Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate (hard copy or online), because that’s my house dictionary, but if you prefer the one you got in college, that’s fine, too. Even if you don’t find the answer you’re seeking, the labels and terms found there might help you search.

♦ Search online. When I don’t know the grammatical term for what I’m seeking, I’m amazed at how often I can learn it by lamely typing related words into a search engine. To find an answer to the “It’s you who cause(s)” question, I googled “who singular or plural.” A quick scan down the list of results suggested a more refined search of “‘it is you who’ singular or plural,” which led me to a chat-room discussion identifying such constructions as “clefts,” which made it easier to consult more trusted sources.

(Need I caution that online discussion forums brim with misinformation? There’s no danger when it’s obvious: “U r all wrong the correct answer is you just WRONG.” It’s the ignorant smooth-talkers you have to beware of. But even their phony blustering might jog your memory of a grammar term you’ve forgotten, and sometimes you can use that to navigate to an authority.)

Once you know what you’re looking for, you can go directly to an online grammar or style site or forum. There are too many to mention here, but you can easily find them by typing “online grammar” into a search engine. University sites are a good place to start. The University of Chicago Writing Program has a page of suggestions, and one site will typically lead you to others. (Note that some forums are open only to members or subscribers.)

♦ For a low-tech option, consult a grammar or usage manual. If you don’t know what your issue is called, start with the table of contents. The broad categories indicated by chapter titles will help you zero in on your topic. If you know your issue is in the “Spelling and Hyphenation” chapter, you can probably figure out which subsection you need and skim to your topic from there. If the chapter titles offer too many choices (where would you look, say, for advice on apostrophes with plural abbreviations? Spelling? Abbreviations? Punctuation?), then try the index, where the relevant page number is likely to appear under all of the relevant words.

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A version of this post originally appeared at Lingua Franca, a Chronicle of Higher Education blog, on March 5, 2012. More reader comments are available there.

Which Shortening Is Best? Ibid., Op. Cit., Loc. Cit., Etc.

 

Photo by Phil Dokas

Although I have complained about the misuse of citation software, it’s not as though I believe the quaint and perhaps dying method of hand-composing citations to be a cure-all. At least the software mangles the format consistently, which allows a copyeditor to put certain gaffes right by means of global searches.

In contrast, when homemade notes fail to follow a system, they fail in myriad ways, so any editor determined to impose order is faced with endless drudgery. Recently a group of academic book manuscript editors I belong to discussed one particular aspect of notes preparation: whether and how to standardize the shortening of citations after their first, full mention.

Authors rarely cite a work in full every time it appears. Sometimes they cite it fully the first time it appears in each chapter. Sometimes they give it the full treatment only the first time it’s mentioned in the book. Either way, subsequent mentions of the work are most often shortened to the author’s name, a short title, and a page number. This type of shortening is clear, concise, and difficult to botch—it’s what my group likes best.

Some writers, however, prefer to lard their notes with Latin abbreviations.

 31. Fama, Overboard, 23.
     32. Welch, Waiting to Forget, 13.
     33. Ibid.
     34. Ibid., 66; Fama, op. cit., 42; Welch, “The Holding-On Night,” 16.
     35. Welch, “The Holding-On Night,” 13.
     36. Idem, Waiting to Forget, 16.
     37. Ibid., 14.
     38. Fama, loc. cit.

Of the Latin abbreviations, ibid. (Latin abbreviation for ibidem, “in the same place”) is the only one still commonly used, and it works well enough when the user understands its somewhat annoying and arbitrary limits:

• Ibid. may be used only when the preceding note consists of a single citation. Note 35 above, for example, cannot use ibid., because note 34 consists of more than one citation.
• Ibid. takes the place of whichever elements in the preceding citation are identical to those in the current one. Thus note 37 refers to Welch, Waiting to Forget, but to a different page number.
• Ibid. may not stand for the author’s name alone—that’s what idem is for (Latin for “the same,” sometimes abbreviated id.). Note 36 could not properly be written Ibid., Waiting to Forget.
• When the use of ibid. is required on an even-numbered note, it is spelled backward, dibi. (Latin abbreviation for dibathi), which . . . just kidding.

I confess I don’t understand the attraction of using ibid., other than to save a few keystrokes. Knowing the author and a short title is more useful to readers, especially in footnotes. If note 37 in my example appears three pages after note 36, a reader will have to turn pages to see which work was meant. Why not just say?

Neither op. cit. nor loc. cit. is much used these days,* perhaps partly because The Chicago Manual of Style has frowned on them for generations. The instructions in the 11th edition (1949) are comically opaque (“Op. cit. is not used to repeat the title of a journal when the reference is to another author, but may be used in reference to the same author’s work in a periodical” [p. 142])—and with typical charm, the 12th edition admits defeat: “To save the reader’s nerves, not to mention the editor’s, and for greater clarity, the University of Chicago Press has discarded both op. cit. and loc. cit. and in place of them has adopted the short-title form” (15.41).**

The question my group of editors discussed was this: in a book with no bibliography, if the author cites a work in full only the first time it appears, is the manuscript editor obliged to create full citations the first time that work appears in every subsequent chapter? There was no consensus, other than a general wish that authors would either supply a bibliography and eliminate the problem or supply a full citation at first mention in every chapter and save us from having to decide what to do.

Although bibliographies are lately an endangered species—either authors don’t supply them, or they produce them badly—in my view, a bibliography is the best solution, since it eliminates the need for full citations in the notes, and it allows for simple author-title shortening throughout, with or without the use of ibid. (and without the flakiness caused by too much Latin shortening).

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*Op. cit. (Latin abbreviation for opere citato, “in the work cited”) may be used anywhere in a work, as long as the source was previously cited in full, even several chapters back. Loc. cit. (loco citato, “in the place cited”) may also be used anywhere in a work to refer to a title plus page number or other locator—that is, an exact place—already cited. It can cause trouble when writers forget they’ve cited more than one work by a given author. Note 38 above is vague enough as it is, although it properly refers to the most recently cited location in Fama, Overboard, which was page 42.

**In the 11th edition of CMOS Latin terms in notes were to be styled in italics (unlike in the notes examples above, where they are all in roman type). In the 12th edition, the style was changed to roman. In the 12th edition, the sections that treat Latin abbreviations used roman type for the Latin terms at every mention, even when the terms functioned as “words used as words.” I assume this was from a determination not to encourage any italic setting of such words.

A version of this post originally appeared at Lingua Franca, a Chronicle of Higher Education blog, on March 1, 2012. More reader comments are available there.