The Subversive Copy Editor Blog

“Had had”? Flashbacks and the Past Perfect

Novelists are sometimes urged to eliminate the past-perfect tense from their sentences, and copyeditors are sometimes trained to search out those auxiliary “hads” and lop them off from their verbs. What exactly is the past perfect? And what’s wrong with using it?

The Past-Perfect (Pluperfect) Tense

According to CMOS 5.133, “The past-perfect (or pluperfect) tense is formed by using had with the principal verb’s past participle (had walked) (had drunk). It refers to an act, state, or condition that was completed before another specified or implicit past time or past action (the engineer had driven the train to the roundhouse before we arrived) (by the time we stopped to check the map, the rain had begun falling) (the movie had already ended).”

In short, the past perfect creates a flashback.

Flashback as a Literary Device

Flashback is a useful device in storytelling, a way to catch readers up on an event that happened before the story in progress. Sometimes it’s a simple, one-verb digression that readers may barely register as a flashback; other times the trip to the past may expand to whole paragraphs, pages, or even chapters.

Although flashbacks can expose inefficient plotting when they’re used badly (“Finally, she faced her enemy—luckily, she had studied karate many years ago”), they have long been exploited for effect, even when used extensively. Think of Scheherazade’s nested yarns in One Thousand and One Nights, or the frequent digressions Gabriel García Márquez uses to layer the past with the present and future in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Whatever a writer’s motive for employing flashback, there are reasons to minimize use of the past-perfect tense, as well as some ways to get around it.

Had This, Had That, Had Had

When readers are immersed in a story that’s interrupted by a detour to the past, we can’t help feeling suspended and slightly anxious not to forget where we are. It’s as if we’re being asked to put a thumb on the page while the narrator flips back a few days or years or centuries to fill us in on something. The momentary unease isn’t resolved until the action returns to the present.

For readers trying to keep track of a story, the past-perfect “had” is an effective reminder that we’re still in flashback mode. However, the repetition of “had” gets annoying, especially if the pluperfect of the verb “to have” is in play, resulting in the unlovely “had had” (“Lee’s boss got credit for the invention, although Lee had had the idea first”).

Cheating the Past

The trick to writing an extended flashback without so much repetition is to start out with past-perfect verbs and then segue to the simple past for a while. This allows readers to relax into the story of the moment and stop worrying about the one we’ve temporarily left behind. Near the end of the flashback, slip back into the past perfect briefly as a reminder to the reader that the story has been wandering, and then return to the normal narrative past, with all the usual options for verbs.

Novelist Ha Jin does this gracefully in A Free Life (New York: Vintage International, 2009). In the following extract, bold font shows the past-perfect verbs. The first four start off the short flashback, then the pluperfect is dropped for a while, then it’s resumed with a single use (“had asked”) that serves as a transition back to the story Jin had left behind for a moment:

He was still unnerved by the lingering impact of the recession, which had lately forced another shop at the plaza out of business. The past summer his restaurant had made only $1,000 a month, and the Wus had had to withdraw money from their savings account to pay bills. Tammie had made much less than before too and complained a lot. Nan encouraged her to look for a more lucrative job elsewhere if she wanted, but she said things would come around, and she stayed. For that he was grateful. Although more people came to eat after the summer, the business wasn’t as good as it should have been. Pingping had asked Janet to let her make more necklaces and earrings, but the jewelry store was faltering too and couldn’t stock more inventory at the moment. What disconcerted the Wus most was that if someday they couldn’t come up with $1,000 for Mr. Wolfe at the end of a month, they might lose their home. (264–65)

The tactic shown in a nutshell in this extract also works for much longer flashbacks, so that the heart of the story from the past can be written in the same tense as the main story and merely framed by instances of the past perfect for the sake of introducing it and transitioning back.

As for the awkward “had had,” Jin’s works well enough. But when it doesn’t, there are alternatives. One is to simply find a different verb (“the Wus had been forced to withdraw money”). Or, when a pronoun is an option, contract the first “had” (“they’d had to withdraw money”).

Takeaways

The past perfect is a perfectly respectable tense, essential to clear writing and an excellent way to introduce a flashback of any length. Attempts to banish the pluperfect wholesale are misguided. But as with any repetition, too much is too much, and writers and copyeditors will do well to manage their pluperfects thoughtfully.

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This post originally appeared at the Chicago Manual of Style Online Shop Talk blog on December 17, 2019, © University of Chicago.

Image of nested laptops by Tumisu (Pixabay).

Sure, You Got A’s in English—But Do You Know Where Commas Go?

A few months ago in a conference session, a group of novelists digressed into good-natured complaints about being copyedited. One writer drew a lot of laughs saying, “I mean, I got A’s in English! I know where the freaking commas go!”* Others nodded in recognition and comradery.

I bit my tongue. I really wanted to say—as gently as possible—I’m sorry dear, but you freaking don’t.

Commas Are Complicated

Teachers don’t always reveal the whole truth, even to their best students, that punctuation isn’t always a right-or-wrong kind of thing, or that different publishers have different comma rules, or that sometimes it’s only by fudging a rule that creative writing can begin to sing.

The fact is, among professional writers, even professors with PhDs in English welcome copyediting of their work. And copyeditors who don’t necessarily have degrees in English (cough cough) nonetheless find plenty of commas to adjust in submitted manuscripts.

Here’s another factor: odds are good that a writer was required as a student to cleave to the rules in Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. For decades, it’s been the best-selling grammar and style reference in the US. The good news: even after a century, very little has changed in Elements with regard to using commas. The bad news: even following the latest edition (if you can figure out what it is)† won’t guarantee that a manuscript’s commas will suit all the major publishers.

For instance,

• Strunk & White (all editions, 1.2) advises adding a comma before “and” in a series (“red, white, and blue”). So does Chicago (per CMOS 6.19). But The Associated Press Stylebook (New York: Associated Press, 2019) does not (323).
• Strunk & White (all editions, 1.3) requires commas both before and after the abbreviation “etc.” Chicago no longer requires the second comma (per CMOS 6.20). According to AP Stylebook’s Ask the Editor feature, the 2019 Stylebook doesn’t address the issue.
• Originally, Strunk & White put a comma before “Jr.” and “Sr.” in a name (Hank Williams, Jr.), but the 3rd edition (New York: Macmillan, 1979) took it out (1.3), thus conforming to similar changes over time in Chicago (CMOS 6.43) and AP (158). This means that if you use an older edition of any of these manuals, you’ll be out of step with current recommendations.

Commas Are the Least of It

The above examples only begin to touch on reasons even valedictorians might find the comma rules they got right on the test being challenged by a copyeditor. Once we venture into quotation marks, hyphens, and semicolons—not to mention the galaxy of issues beyond punctuation—it’s easy to see why rules someone mastered in English comp years ago won’t always stand up against a copyeditor with an up-to-date style manual. And if by chance a young scholar also learned to be supremely confident and inflexible in their command of commas and perhaps even to despise or pity those who depart from the rules they happened to learn, well, it’s not hard to predict trouble at copyediting time.

Luckily for creative writers, good copyeditors are familiar with several style guides; they’re up to date on punctuation trends; and they know how to place a comma in those weird and tricky situations that might not have made it into the textbooks.‡ What’s more, experienced copyeditors understand the expressive power that commas pack by their presence or absence (a lesson that textbooks may choose to ignore), and sometimes with a minor tweak here or there, they can help a writer achieve the effect they’re aiming for.

Conclusion

Having your work edited can be a humbling experience. But copyeditors are there to help your commas shine. Next time you’re thinking that a few classes you took years ago armed you with everything you need to publish a professional-looking story, article, novel, or script, rejoice if you have the privilege of having a copyeditor review your work before you submit. You might learn something.

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* Apostrophe used in “A’s” for clarity (pace CMOS 7.65).

† In 2010, linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum wrangled the various editions of The Elements of Style into a neat list: “Strunk’s first privately published version of Elements was dated 1918. There followed a little-known commercial version in 1920, two radically rewritten and now forgotten editions coauthored by Edward Tenney in 1934 and 1935, and six editions of the White revision (1959, 1972, 1979, 2000, 2004, and 2009, the last being just a 50th-anniversary reissue of the 2000 edition).” (Pullum, “The Land of the Free and The Elements of Style,” English Today 102, vol. 26, no. 2 [June 2010], introduction.)

Since then, as various editions entered the public domain, versions have proliferated, including a free audiobook version by LibriVox described as “based on the public-domain text from 1918, which was originally uploaded to Wikibooks and wikified by Wikibooks:User:Lord Emsworth in 2003. In January 2006, Kernigh transwikied the text from Wikibooks:Elements of Style to Wikisource.”

‡ After all, Strunk & White barely scratches the surface on commas in its five or six little pages. For instance, does the serial comma rule apply when “and” is spelled “&”? Where do you put the comma at the end of a bracketed insertion? Do you need a comma between coordinating and subordinating conjunctions that appear next to each other when a dependent clause intervenes between two independent clauses? (Yes, that’s a thing.) You won’t find all the answers in The Elements of Style. But never fear: The Chicago Manual of Style has nearly twenty long pages of comma guidelines covering these issues and many more.

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This post originally appeared at the Chicago Manual of Style Online Shop Talk blog on July 9, 2019, © University of Chicago. 

Photo: Graduation Cake Guy by David Goehring, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

 

“Hazel and I’s puppy”? When Fiction Meets Bad Grammar

 

 

“Hazel and I’s Puppy. The. Cutest. Ever.”

In editing formal prose, we fix nonstandard English without hesitation. But in editing creative works, we often need to throw out the stylebook so a narrator or character in a novel or play can abuse grammar to good effect. The guideline is “believability”: would a character naturally use such a phrase, or would they speak more formally?

Creative writers toss in stock phrases like “he ain’t” or “I seen” to reveal something about a character’s education level or to show a preference for slang or dialect. Most writers can intuit immediately whether a character would naturally say “he ain’t” in a given situation. And most editors wouldn’t dream of standardizing it in those situations.

But the possessive “Hazel and I’s” is a little trickier, in that all kinds of people use it, even highly educated folks who wouldn’t dream of writing it in a job application or company report and rarely use expressions like “he ain’t” or “I seen” in conversation.* For that matter, when it comes to compound possessives, how many of us even know what’s technically correct? Hazel and my puppy? Hazel’s and my puppy? Hazel and my’s puppy? Her and my? Hers and my? All those constructions are as believable as “Hazel and I’s” in quoted conversation, among all kinds of characters.† But “Hazel and I’s” may sound best to people who think “me” sounds wrong in any compound. That is, it’s probably a hypercorrection—like using “whom” when “who” is actually correct.

Recently I saw the possessive “I’s” in the New York Times, where actor Elisabeth Moss was quoted referring to “Gayle and I’s journey into the music.” The interview was styled as a Q&A, where direct quotations appear without quotation marks like dialogue in a play (brackets were as shown):

I know there was a syllabus, as well as an email chain of reference points. Was there anything in particular that grabbed you?

I think for me, watching a lot of old backstage, behind-the-scenes documentaries, just trying to get a feeling for that time. I was looking for something that I could emotionally connect to and feel that anger and that passion. [Agyness Deyn, who co-stars as Moss’s bandmate] was really instrumental in Gayle [Rankin, who rounds out the trio] and I’s journey into the music.

Newspaper guidelines normally don’t allow the editing of real-life quotations.‡ To eliminate iffy grammar from a Q&A, an editor can either (a) not use that line or (b) substitute different wording inside square brackets.

My point: If the New York Times is OK with quoting the possessive “I’s” in real-life dialogue from an educated, articulate speaker, then an editor of creative writing needn’t blink more than twice at it in a novel or short story. In current parlance, “Hazel and I’s puppy” will ring true in a wide variety of characters.

And in children’s literature? Should we model standard English in creative works for the little dears? Absolutely not. In fiction, poetry, and plays, children deserve the same respect for character and the same opportunity to lose oneself in believable dialogue that writers give to adult readers. Especially in works for young adults, the trick is to keep language fresh and real. Editors can help by flagging outdated or anachronistic expressions and limiting slang that teens might cringe at next year.

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* You haven’t heard this usage? My informal Twitter poll showed that 35 percent of my 414 closest friends occasionally hear “and I’s” used in this way, and 16 percent find it “pretty common.” At Facebook 61% of 273 voters said “Yes,” they hear it. You’ll probably hear it now that you’re aware of it.

† If you want to be grammatical—which is not the point of this post—“our puppy,” “the puppy she and I own,” and (per CMOS 5.22, “Joint and Separate Genitives”) “Hazel’s and my puppy” are all good solutions. “Her and my puppy,” while not incorrect, is ambiguous, since “her” can read as a nonpossessive objective—kind of like the “me” in “me and my shadow.” “Hazel and my puppy” doesn’t work for similar reasons; save it for two noun subjects: “Hazel and my puppy were the two best things to hit Centerville that year.” “Hers and my puppy” is flat-out incorrect. (We don’t write “hers puppy”; “hers” must follow a noun: “the puppy is hers,” “the puppy is mine and hers.”) When no pronouns are involved, a phrase like “Hazel and Azusa’s puppy” may be used with caution anywhere it won’t read as two items: “Hazel and Azusa’s puppy [one item] was a hit.” “My best friend adored [item 1] Hazel and [item 2] Azusa’s puppy.” Making both names possessive is normally reserved for separate rather than joint ownership: “Hazel’s and Azusa’s SAT scores.”

‡ In regular reporting (not a Q&A) it would be easy to paraphrase that line to avoid bracketed explanations and pluck out the pronoun: e.g., “Moss added that Agyness Deyn, who co-stars as Moss’s bandmate, was instrumental in guiding Moss and third bandmate Gayle Rankin’s journey into the music.”

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This post originally appeared at the Chicago Manual of Style Online Shop Talk blog on June 6, 2019, © University of Chicago.

Photo: Old English Sheepdog, by Meredith Bannan, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 

 

Fiction+ for Creative Writers and Their Editors

Although I officially retired from my work at the Chicago Manual in December, I couldn’t say no to an opportunity to continue hanging around the CMOS Online Shop Talk blog when Russell Harper—the new editor—invited me to share a new corner of the blog with him called Fiction+. There we’ll focus on how to cope when Chicago style rules don’t quite seem to fit the creative context of a novel, story, poem, or play.

Russell kicked things off last week with a post on comma splices; today I interview Janet Burroway, author of the classic textbook Writing Fiction, a staple in creative writing classes that has just been issued in a new 10th edition.

If you’re interested in creative writing or editing, be sure to check out Fiction+. You can sign up for alerts if you want to be sure to catch new posts, and I’ll continue to give you a heads-up here.

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Photo: Woman Writing, by August Macke (1887–1914), courtesy Wikimedia Commons

 

Who’s a “Lazy” Copyeditor?

I’m blogging today at The Chicago Manual of Style Shop Talk blog:

Like all professional copyeditors, I try to keep up with news in my field, which means browsing the posts and articles of editors, grammarians, linguists, and lexicographers online. I do this through RSS feed subscriptions—Feedly is my reader of choice—and by bookmarking posts of interest into an “unread” folder, which I . . .

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Photo courtesy of Clker-Free-Vector-Images.

But Is It Wrong?

I’m blogging today at The Chicago Manual of Style Shop Talk blog:

One of the primal joys in life is to do good work. When the suit fits, the accounts balance, or the pie crust is flakey, someone takes pride in it.

In editing, it feels good to make corrections, tidy things up, and serve the reader. It feels good to put knowledge into practice. And—admit it—it feels good to spot an error! . . . Problems arise when

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Photo: Deliberate Mistake, courtesy of Neil Turner.

3 Rookie Goofs You Can Stop Making Right Now

I’m blogging today at The Chicago Manual of Style Shop Talk blog!

Some lessons are harder to learn than others. Unfortunately for new copyeditors, sometimes the only way to recognize bad habits is to get slammed a few times by writers pushing back or by supervisors writing stet all over the copy.

So let me save you some grief and humiliation! Here are three bad habits I identified the hard way as a young editor . . .

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Photo: Ooops!, courtesy of Sten Dueland.

“Dos and Don’ts”: Just Don’t

I’m blogging today at The Chicago Manual of Style Shop Talk blog!

We’ve all read those bossy directives from advice mongers: “Do rock a ripped T with a bright floral skirt.” “Don’t chew gum during an interview.” “Do practice blending eyeshadow with your brush.” “Don’t yank electrical cords from the wall.” Aside from being either fatuous and trendy or obvious and unhelpful, such lists actually pose some editorial dangers . . .

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Photo: Don’t, by Todd Slagter.

Are You a Grammar Troll?

I'm blogging today at The Chicago Manual of Style Shop Talk blog!

For years, it seems, it’s been impossible to find a language-related post or article online without a stickler making trouble in the comments section. Even on political, social, and retail sites, outraged commenters love to point out a  a missplaced apostrophe as a way to challenge the . . .

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Photo: Esther Lee, Freemont Troll, Seattle

 

 

Random Advice for Copyeditor Newbies

If you’re new to copyediting, consider these snippets of advice. (Be sure to check with your supervisor if any of them contradict your usual instructions.)

• Don’t query a word or spelling or locution without looking it up. If a writer uses an unfamiliar word or spelling more than once, it’s very possibly intended. It’s easy to paste “eat one’s cake and have it, too” into a search engine and learn that the writer doesn’t have it backward.
• Don’t waste a writer’s time by continually asking for approval. (“Okay? If you don’t like this, I can put it back.”) Rather, indicate your flexibility in the cover letter. On the manuscript, use queries for giving or asking for information.
• Save grief later by e-mailing the author before you make editing decisions that are hard to undo. (“Re romantic/Romantic: do you have a system for capping? Should I meddle?”)
• Don’t track changes that will be invisible or confusing on a black-and-white printout, such as deletions of hyphens.* If the editing is difficult to read, the writer won’t easily see that the results read well.
• Be conservative in editing until you have more experience. You should be ready to explain every mark you put on the page.
• Remember the copyeditor’s creed: First, do no harm.

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*My workaround is to explain in the cover letter that I have edited common compounds silently in accordance with CMOS and Webster’s 11th Collegiate, and that otherwise I track the opening or closing of compounds respectively like this: right_wing or home-townhometown.

Photo by Jamey Boelhower from Pixabay