Writer, Editor, Helper

Note to Readers

After 12 years of blogging and social media, I’m retiring!

But I still have things to say about writing and publishing. If you don’t want to lose touch, please join my free “Writer, Editor, Helper” email newsletter list for creative writers, beginning in early 2023. Unsubscribing will be easy, if the newsletter doesn't interest you.

“Writer, Editor, Helper” is aimed at general readers. If you’ve thought about writing a book, if you’re in the middle of writing a book, if you’re interested in how publishing and self-publishing work, you’re my reader.

Subscribe to My Free Newsletter for Creative Writers

I’m just now wading into indie publishing myself. It can be overwhelming at times. I’ll share what I learn—for better or for worse—and I want to hear from you, too.

My emails will be occasional, lighthearted, and informative. And they’re free! Every email will have an unsubscribe button and contact information. 

I know many readers of this blog are also writers, so I hope you’ll stay on board. My newsletters will include

• Helpful, hopeful news for creative writers
• Self-editing tips 
• Opportunities to announce your new books
• Answers to your questions about writing and publishing
• Fun, random stuff
• Things I learn the hard way as I begin self-publishing (gaah)

I realize this is a bit of a bait-and-switch. If you’re a longtime reader of the blog who decides to bail, please accept my sincere thanks—and feel free to hop back in at any time.

All the best,

Carol

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Top Image: The Bait by nist6dh, courtesy Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

Does Your Novel Need a Copyeditor before Submission?

In the writers’ groups where I hang out online, these queries are evergreen:

• How do I know if I need a copyeditor before I submit my work to an agent or editor?
• How do I find a good copyeditor?
• How much does copyediting cost?

The replies and comments are typically so head-spinning in their range and variety that no one could blame writers for being confused. And who can blame a writer for resisting an expense they aren’t convinced is necessary?

Should Your Novel Have Chapter Numbers or Chapter Titles?

Earlier this year, Fiction+ considered whether a novel should have a table of contents. Although it might seem to be a matter of personal preference, there are strong practical reasons for including or not including a TOC, depending on a book’s genre and format.

Is the same thing true when deciding whether chapters should be numbered or titled? A survey of my social media turned up a number of reasons to go one way or the other, along with some strong opinions:

What Makes a Chapter of a Novel?

First-time novelists often struggle with dividing their work into chapters. A sample from my Facebook feed:

“How long should a chapter be?”
“Is it okay to have this one randomly short chapter?”
“Is there a standard for how long a chapter should be?”
“What is considered a reasonable maximum length of a chapter?”
“Is it okay to throw a long chapter in between two shorter chapters?”
“Is 3,000 to 4,750 words per chapter too long for a young adult urban fantasy?”

3 Easy E-Tricks for Writers, and 1 for Fun

Almost every writer I know has a love-hate relationship with their writing program, whether it’s Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Scrivener, or a yellow legal pad. It’s clear there’s no single perfect choice for drafting, editing, and formatting your work for publication.

Scrivener is great for drafting but has limited formatting capabilities. Docs is great for collaborations, and it can handle basic formatting, but it lacks compatibility with professional formatting and editing tools like PerfectIt and the add-ins from the Editorium. MS Word is the publishing workhorse, more or less required for submitting to agents and editors and publishers, but it’s pricey and not always friendly.

Getting to know your word processor better will help you love it more. Here are some moves you can use in Word and Docs and sometimes Scrivener.

When Friends Find Grammar “Errors” in Your Novel

Creative writers sometimes mangle grammar on purpose or get creative with punctuation. At the drafting stage, we keep a dictionary and style manual at hand. When slips are unintended, we count on our copyeditors to catch them.

But at some point, most of us get advice on punctuation or grammar from a friend, relative, or strangers on social media. Sometimes friends or beta readers read our draft and point out what they believe to be errors.

The problem is, they’re often wrong.

Counting Pages or Words in a Manuscript Submission

Long before a book is printed, while the text is still in manuscript form, editors at publishing houses speak in terms of word count, not page count. An appropriate word count for a project depends on the kind of book. A picture book editor might think in terms of 0–750 words. An editor acquiring young-adult fantasy novels will consider anything from about 80,000 words and up. Thrillers, graphic novels, romances—their editors all have target ranges for the length of book readers expect. There are always exceptions, of course.

Page counts, on the other hand, are for printed books. Designers and production editors use a manuscript’s word count to estimate how many pages the published book will be, taking into account how they want it to look: how large the pages will be, how much white space is wanted, whether illustrations will add to the page count, etc.

Why then, at the querying stage, are writers almost always asked to submit a set number of pages instead of a set number of words?

Is Blogging for You? Parts 2 and 3

 

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the great time I had brainstorming about blogging with Louise Harnby and Denise Cowle at their joyful Editing Podcast. Parts 2 and 3 are now available.

 

In part 1 (26:23 min) we discussed

 

  Blogging goals

  Coming up with ideas

  Promoting your blog

 

NEW: Link to Part 2  (27:14 min), in which we discuss

 

  Repurposing blog content
  Analytics, and how to avoid the rabbit hole

 

NEW: Link to Part 3 (26:23 min), which covers

 

  Monetizing your blog
  Understanding the sales funnel
  Managing reader engagement
  Blogging trajectory: Deciding who to write for and when to stop

 

 

Is Blogging for You? Part 1

 

Yesterday I had a wonderful time brainstorming about blogging with Louise Harnby and Denise Cowle at their joyful Editing Podcast. In fact, we dug into so many aspects of blogging, they decided to break the chat into 3 parts.

 

In part 1 (26:23 min) we discuss

 

  Blogging goals

  Coming up with ideas

  Promoting your blog

 

The Editing Podcast has lots of other great posts for writers and editors. You’ll love their expertise and enthusiasm.  Listen here (Blogging Tips for Editors and Authors) or through your favorite podcast app. I’ll let you know when parts 2 and 3 appear!

 

UPDATE

 

Link to Part 2  (27:14 min), in which we discuss

 

  Repurposing blog content
  Analytics, and how to avoid the rabbit hole

 

Link to Part 3 (26:23 min), which covers

 

  Monetizing your blog
  Understanding the sales funnel
  Managing reader engagement
  Blogging trajectory: Deciding who to write for and when to stop

______

Correction: My original post mistakenly referred to transcripts of each podcast. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.

 

Jack Hart Talks about Wordcraft

Jack Hart has spent five decades helping writers succeed, working shoulder-to-shoulder with journalists in newsrooms both big and small and with students at five universities. Writers who’ve worked with him have written national best sellers and won prizes that include five Pulitzers and a slew of other national awards.

Hart is the author of Storycraft, now in its second edition, and the newly published Wordcraft, both available from the University of Chicago Press.

CS: Wordcraft is primarily geared toward journalists and nonfiction writers, but almost everything in it applies to fiction writing as well. Could you say something about that overlap? You’ve written novels yourself.

8 Tips for Creative Writers on Facebook

I often encourage creative writers to join one or more private Facebook groups where they can post questions and share resources with other writers. There are specialized groups for children’s book writers, romance writers, fantasy—you name it. In groups like “Ask a Book Editor,” writers can get help from amateur and professional editors. At “The Business of Being a Writer,” people share information about self-publishing, getting an agent, drafting and revising manuscripts, and financial matters. In groups like “Scrivener Users” or “PerfectIt Users,” writers share technical advice.

Although some groups are by invitation only, typically becoming a member of a private (or closed) group is as simple as clicking on Join and agreeing to the rules. Some discussions are closely moderated, others not. The writing groups I like best prohibit ads and self-promotion and insist that conversations stick to writing and publishing topics. They provide a pet-free zone where you don’t have to see what anyone else is cooking for dinner.

What Copyeditors Can Learn Online (Maybe Not What You Think)

 

Photo: Doris Hausen

You might think you can learn to copyedit by taking a class, but I promise, even if your class does a great job of exposing you to a style manual and the general practices of editing, it can only scratch the surface. To learn well, you must have a period of feedback—the longer, the better—from a mentor.

Sadly, for most new copyeditors, and especially for the lonely freelancer, “mentorship” most often comes in the form of angry writers. But don’t worry! That can actually be highly effective. The trick is to stop crying, put aside your tender ego, and carefully consider the likelihood that the writer is right.

Meanwhile, how is a person supposed to get good at this craft? If you can’t apprentice yourself to an experienced supervisor, I recommend spending some time online. Here are three things you can learn from the Internet.

1. How not to copyedit

The Internet is filled with copyeditor horror stories. Writers love to rail about their trauma under the knife of an overeager and undertrained comma tyrant. Google the phrase “bad copyediting” or “bad editor” and brace yourself. Some of the war stories will be unfair (and some will be badly written), but in this exercise you are not allowed to get defensive. Rather, listen to how you are perceived and feared; recognize yourself and the potential you have to inflict pain and suffering; and vow to do no harm—the first rule of copyediting. It’s not that difficult: if you never meddle without knowing the reason (chapter and verse), and if you always query instead of editing when you aren’t sure, you’ll be fine.

Tip: Do not engage in the comments section of bad-copyeditor posts. That will only lead to grief. Lurk but don’t touch.

2. What the experts are thinking

Think about this: most people, after they’ve been away from school for a decade or two, assume that what they learned in science or history has been updated since then. They wouldn’t dream of asserting that their 1990-vintage textbooks are still the ultimate authority—let alone their 1960-vintage teachers. But in English grammar? If we learned it when we were twelve—or read it in Strunk & White—by George, it is rock-ribbed law.

But it’s not. Style and grammar rules change, and acceptance levels change. The problem, of course, is knowing how to judge whether a usage or construction has become acceptable to our expected audience. After all, editors need to be conservative. It’s not good for business to be on the cutting edge of experimental grammar. And that’s where continuing education comes in. In order to stay current, we need to read. For example, up-to-date editors know that linguists and language experts are not only not outraged by the singular they, but in many cases encourage it—and that’s important to know, whether you agree or not.

So where do you learn about language and writing trends? Books can be outdated by the time they’re printed. You have to read online, and social media is essential for keeping up.

There are many terrific language-writer blogs. A good place to start finding the ones you like best is with the daily news at the Copyediting blog; likewise, Stan Carey at Sentence First occasionally features a post called “Link Love,” with links to the last week or two of language and editing posts he found worthwhile. Katharine O’Moore-Klopf has a page of links to “Profession-Related Reading.” Make note of the home-page URLs of blogs you’d like to follow.

I don’t mean to suggest that you should be checking on all these blogs all the time, like homework. Rather, enjoy browsing when you have time. If you put the URLs of your favorite sites into an RSS feed (an “aggregator”) like Feedly or Netvibes, you can take a look when it’s convenient: you’ll see a list of any sites that have updated since you last checked. Scan down the headlines and excerpts and click through to any that look interesting. It’s like creating a newsletter that focuses entirely on your own interests or business.

Twitter can work the same way. If you create a Twitter account in which you follow only language writers and editors, the stream of tweets will contain advice, humor, and links to helpful news articles about language and editing. Dip in now and then to see what they’re all talking about. Jettison anyone who tweets six times an hour about what her cat is up to. A few weeks ago, the hot topic was the discovery that the Oxford English Dictionary lists “figuratively” as one of the meanings of literally. It’s a prime example of how spending ten minutes skimming through the tweets and posts can allow a person to gauge the progress of a particular controversy—and get a few laughs along the way. In this case, I learned that most good dictionaries have listed this meaning for quite a while, and I saw confirmation of what I already knew: that many people misunderstand the purpose of dictionaries, believing that they are somehow showing approval for a meaning when they include it.

3. How to solve almost any problem

When we’re working, it’s common for a given style or construction to look wrong, and then look right, and then look wrong . . . and sometimes it’s hard to look up the answer because we don’t know exactly what to look up. That’s where the online community of copyeditors can help. On Facebook, Twitter, or a listserv like Copyediting-L or the Forum at The Chicago Manual of Style Online, a writer or editor can post a question and hope for good advice from peers. Even if you get conflicting answers, odds are it will at least help you articulate the issue. And at least you won’t feel alone.

So take the classes, and read the books. But to continue growing and learning and loving your craft, stay current—and stay online.

 

 

And the Winner Is . . .

 

 

Thank you so much, fellow confessors! It was fun, therapeutic, and a little painful reading about your gaffes and lapses. Many of them sound familiar: spelling-check errors, overlooked homophones, misguided global corrections, and those goofs that are simply too huge to catch. The most cringe-worthy are perhaps the ones we introduce ourselves in a moment of mental vacation.

4ndyman wins the copy of Moonlight Blogger! A random number picker landed on your confession, but that “Foreward” for “Foreword” goof especially tickled me because I’ve done it myself—twice. The last time was years ago; I’m hopeful that the resulting trauma will continue to prevent me from doing it again.

I’d also like to thank all you great sinners for your generous and courteous responses. I love this community of editors and writers who defy the stereotype of the gotcha, nitpicking comma jockey. Anyone reading your copyediting confessions can see that you regret them. You care about the work and about the reader—but you also have some perspective and a sense of humor. You’ve learned as I have that in copyediting, as in life in general, that’s the way to live.

 

Copyeditor Confessions: Me First

Here in Chicago we have to work at celebrating the advent of spring. Even typing in my subzero office is challenging—thank god for fingerless gloves. So my idea is this: in the spirit of spring cleaning, since there’s no way I’m throwing my mattresses out in the snow, let’s air our consciences instead. Let’s confess our copyediting sins! I’ll stop at three. (Not that I have more . . .)

1. In a lengthy reference book, I failed to notice that the paragraphs on Mies van der Rohe appeared under R instead of under M until the book was at a late stage of production. Ten pages had to be reflowed and all those page numbers in the index had to be adjusted accordingly (by me).

2. After an author and I renumbered the figures in a book I edited, I forgot to notify the other departments, and the wrong images appeared in the page proofs.

3. On a three-volume project, I signed off on jacket copy that featured roman numerals for the volume numbers instead of the arabic numerals we had used everywhere else.  

OK—your turn! No pushing—there’s plenty of room for everyone. It will feel great, I promise. Join the community of editors who don’t pretend to be superhuman, and list your sins in the comments area below. And mind you, this is not a forum for writers who want to complain about bad copyeditors. I’ve talked about that before, and I’ll do it again. Today is about good copyeditors who had a bad day.

In any case, there should be no shame in making a mistake now and then. If you had seen the complexity of that appendix, the number of items I checked and cross-checked, and the number of corrections I made, you would probably forgive me spacing out on Mies. It’s a rare editor who catches every last error in a long or complicated project. If you’re young, you’re still learning; if you’re older, you probably have more editorial responsibility. But with luck, we keep learning from every goof.

So please don’t leave me twisting in the wind all alone here; I’m counting on you for assurance that I’m not the only one who makes mistakes! To encourage your confessions, I’ll send a free copy of my Moonlight Blogger to one commenter drawn at random from all those who post by noon on Friday, March 29, 2013.*

Remember: the topic is copyediting transgressions. Beyond that, please share with a professional. And don’t worry—I won’t tell anyone.**

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Photo: psyberartist

*Paperback or Kindle within the continental United States; Kindle only, otherwise.

**That’s a lie. This is the Internet.

 

 

How Sticklers Give Copyediting a Bad Name

 

Public sticklers have annoyed me forever, and I’ve been meaning to write about that, but recently in a post titled “Editors, Would You Do Me This Tiny Favour?” Katy McDevitt at PublishEd Adelaide did a great job of it herself.

McDevitt gets to the meat of it in point 3: “It gives people the wrong idea about what editors do and what we think about”:

Let’s kick that greengrocer’s apostrophe myth to one side and focus on the huge, constructive contributions that editors make, whether that’s helping authors to achieve clear, polished English, restructuring awkward passages of text, or any of the dozens of other ways we fix, polish, hone, and otherwise make a book ready for its star turn.

Exactly. When copyeditors brag that they haven’t overlooked a typo since they were twelve, they reinforce the image of a superficial reader with her elementary-school list of rules chopping away at the weeds without noticing the forest or where the path is headed. They relegate our profession to the status of other stereotypes that ignore the challenging, creative, intellectual aspects of a job: the librarian who is there to shush, the accountant to count beans; the novelist to crank out what everyone would if they* only had the time.

We’ve all seen how a post that derides sticklers attracts a raft of commenters who insist that without attention to punctuation and grammar, communication and trust are compromised. I get it. We all get it. But can’t we take it for granted that scrupulous attention to grammar and punctuation is a part of copyediting, instead of elevating it to the definition of what we do?

Scolding about typos and pouncing on errant apostrophes are cheap grabs for low-hanging fruit. And much of it is misinformed and counterproductive. Public sticklers waste our time on outdated rules or rules that never existed in the first place. And they waste our time by drawing focus from the point of an article or post. How many times does a fussy commenter ignore the subject entirely in pointing out a typo? Other commenters then pile on to chastise or encourage, and all hope of intelligent conversation is lost. Is that the kind of reading you would want for your own book or article?

Finally, there’s a basic discourtesy in the “You missed a spot!” way of life. Confirmed sticklers could redeem themselves by pointing out typos kindly and discreetly. Even better, they could comment on the actual content and add their corrections as a postscript. Writers are trying to communicate something–and writers are not the best proofreaders and copyeditors of their own work. It would be helpful if all those cheerleaders for communication could focus a little more on the message and put the occasional grammar or punctuation gaffe into proportion.

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*Readers who wish to comment on this use of they are requested to support their comments with two current, authoritative sources.

 

~ ~ ~

Need a gift for a writer, editor, or anyone

who works with words (or with people)?

Read the reviews of The Subversive Copy Editor;

it might be just the thing.

 

 

Going Up? Plan Ahead

                                     Photo: Alyson Hurt

A few months ago I encountered a bank of hotel elevators that made a big impression on me. This might be old hat to you,* but to me it was a wondrous invention: there were no buttons inside the elevators for choosing your floor.

Instead, you chose your floor from a panel outside the elevators. You pressed 14, and a display told you which elevator to wait for. Meanwhile someone else pressed 5 and was given a different elevator. If a conference session ended and twenty people rushed the elevators, they would each pick a floor and obediently sort themselves into little groups outside their assigned elevators.

Once inside, everyone was a little creeped out that there were no buttons for choosing a floor. “What if I picked the wrong floor?” someone asked. I had to admit I’d already done that. I’d had no choice but to get out on the wrong floor and ring for another elevator.

Over the next few days, everyone was talking about the elevators, and nearly everyone I talked to hated them. In spite of my initial detour, I loved them. If you have six elevators and thirty people going to fourteen floors, you can either let the crowd randomly and inefficiently choose the number of elevators, floors, and stops—or you can let a nifty computer algorithm minimize the number of stops each elevator makes by assigning the elevator based on floor choice. What’s not to love? Waits are short; trips are fast.

So . . . I know you can’t wait to see what cockamamie* metaphor for copyediting this inspires. It’s this: copyeditors can improve their efficiency by devising strategies before editing begins.

I’ve reviewed plenty of manuscripts where a copyeditor has gotten into deep trouble by conforming a document to house style when it doesn’t suit. A thoughtful review before barging in would have prompted doubts: is it really wise to change all book and article titles to headline casing? Will the section numbers you’re deleting be needed later?

To preview a document, look closely at any material that isn’t a straight text paragraph. Look especially at the styling of subheads, lists, bullets, tables, and captions. With regard to each element make a strategy:

—If no particular style dominates, plan on editing to house style.

—If an element is not written to house style but is clear and consistent, ask whether it can stay as is. If you have to get permission for this, your best argument (after the most obvious one of saving time) is that in changing it, you are likely to introduce errors and typos.

—If an element is in a foreign style and is sloppy and inconsistent, look over all the instances of that element and devise the most efficient remedy. Don’t assume it will be your house style.

There’s nothing more disheartening to a copyeditor than having to start over midway through a job in order to cut losses. There’s no quick button to press once you’ve committed to a bad choice. Better to make the right choices before you get on board.

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*I’m older than you, so I get to say things like that.

 

 

So You Think You Know Where You’re Going?

Photo courtesy Erin O'Keefe

Have you ever been put out of a cab after you waited forever and finally lassoed one and got in, and after sailing past a street where you would have turned (if you had been driving), you said, “Shouldn’t you have turned there?” and the driver slammed to the curb and said, “You can get another cab,” leaving you incredulously asking “What­—? Are you kidding? Are you putting me out?” and, seeing his face, had to grab your things and slam the door (cab drivers hate that) and hike back four blocks to the thoroughfare and wait for another cab?

Me, too.

And isn’t that exactly the feeling you get when you suddenly run into trouble with a tricky word-processing feat that you’ve done before with no problem? “What­—?” you think, as you start the slog back to the beginning.

In my case, it’s always my fault. I left out a step, didn’t prepare properly, hit the wrong key. Or as that cab driver might say, I thought I knew the fastest route and bullied my way to a dead end.

This time it was the NoteStripper macro,* which miraculously unlinks all the endnotes or footnotes in a document, leaving the superscript callouts in the text and compiling the corresponding notes into a matching list. Even more miraculous: the program can do the reverse; that is, it can embed notes that have been hard-typed.

Embedding notes is the more complicated macro and calls for careful preparation of the document. NoteStripper comes with clear and detailed directions,** but for those of you who like to find your own way, let me just mention a few that will kick you to the curb if not followed:

—The number of notes must match the number of callouts.
—Every note must start with a numeral: clear out any stray spaces or tabs.
—All note callouts must be formatted as superscripts.
—Nothing else in the document can be superscripted.

I was using the easier macro, converting notes into text, but even then, my attempts to convert a large file (with 1,040 notes) failed on my first three tries. On an impulse, I read the instructions, which told me that sometimes a file can simply be corrupted at some point. I tried again and saw that the file converted successfully up to a point before it crashed. So I deleted the first note after the crash point. That did the trick: the file converted in seconds, after which I typed the corrupted note back in.

On the night I lost that cab, the second one made up for it: a brand-new car, a quiet jazz CD, and a lovely driver who didn’t smoke or text. He took the same route as the other guy, but this time I kept my mouth shut—and was home in record time.

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*From Jack Lyon’s Editorium.

**Not all products offer such helpful guidance. If you find yourself trying to make sense of gobbled directions, read my Troubleshooting Guide to Following Instructions.

 

 

The Freelancer’s Dilemma: When an Estimate Is Low

Have you ever been partway into a freelance editing job only to find that it’s going to take a lot longer than you (or the assigning editor) thought? Maybe the tables are full of math errors, or the writing requires a lot of time-consuming head scratching and minor rewriting.

If you exceed the estimated time, will the client think you’re exaggerating the problems to inflate the bill? Will they think you don’t know how to work efficiently? Which should you do: bill for the originally estimated time and take a loss, or bill for the extra time and risk alienating the client?

I’m guessing that freelancers more often cheat themselves than cheat their clients. But neither is a good solution. Instead, I recommend “working to rule.”

Experienced assigning editors know that there are two kinds of projects: (1) the kind that deserves just about exactly the estimated number of hours, and (2) the kind that takes however long it takes. The problem is, how do you know which kind you’re doing, and if it’s type 1, how do you “work to rule”?

Whether you’re working for a flat fee or by the hour, you can try to get a sense of a project’s importance by asking the assigning editor whether it’s okay if it takes longer than estimated. Pay close attention to her response. Not that she’ll come right out and give you permission to cut corners. Rather, she’ll let you know if the opposite is true: that it’s the kind of project that requires your best effort, regardless of cost. She’ll also know whether the schedule can be stretched.

If it turns out that you’re expected to match the estimate, that’s what you should do. Working to a specified number of hours takes experience. Learn to monitor your progress and make adjustments: Fact-check less (if it’s not what you were hired to do). Identify tasks that you can automate. Make a decision to live with idiosyncratic styles if they are logical and consistent.

I can hear you protesting, “No! We can’t lower our standards!” But let’s be reasonable. Some of our “standards” are just time-consuming habits that don’t really make a difference to the reader. Letting go of them gives us time for more important tasks—and if working for our employers means working to a schedule, working for the reader means using the time we have in the best ways possible. Besides, the manuscript doesn’t have to be perfect.

Shocked? Don’t be. The manuscript does not have to be perfect because perfect isn’t possible. As I say in The Subversive Copy Editor, there’s no Platonic ideal for that document, one “correct” way for it to turn out, one perfect version hidden in the block of marble that it’s your job to discover by endless chipping away. It simply has to be the best you can make it in the time you’re given, free of true errors, rendered consistent in every way that the reader needs in order to understand and appreciate, and as close to your chosen style as is practical.

You can fiddle with a text forever, but a client will only pay so much. Working to rule—with the reader in mind—is the best solution.

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Image of woman pouring coins from wallet by Marco Verch via Creative Commons 2.0. 

Getting Along with Colleagues Tip #2: Think Before You Send

Last week I handled something badly at work, and I’m still beating myself up about it. Since I don’t think that posting the details on the internet would help (see tip #142), I’ll just say that it amounted to embarrassing a colleague by copying others in on an e-mail that implied criticism.

Yes, I know I say in my book not to do this! Sometimes I don’t know what gets into me. But in penance, I’ll give you the benefit of my experience: I've learned, and continue to learn, that when you have a problem with a colleague, it’s best to address the issue directly with that person and only that person. Until you’ve tried that without results, don’t go elsewhere (especially not higher) with your complaint.

This isn’t merely kindness; it’s also a better way to resolve an issue. The private communication allows your colleague to focus on the problem rather than on saving face. It helps forestall that escalation of blaming we so often see in public figures who are publically accused of some misstep.

My own misstep ended well because of the grace and good nature of the person I embarrassed, so it’s time for me to let go of it. But I’ll keep it in mind; next time I might not be so lucky.

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Photo: Dejected White Figure Contemplating God Knows What, by Mike Steele, courtesy of Flickr

“It,” “Them”—What’s the Diff?

Terrifyingly Large Ant, courtesy of Amy Stewart

Last year I had a problem with ants in my kitchen, but at the hardware store there were several different kinds of poison and each package said, “Will kill this kind of ant, but not that kind.” So I went back home to figure out what kind I had.

The first step was to capture one, which wasn’t hard. The second step was to capture one without squishing it, which took a little longer. Once I had one in captivity, I went online to identify it by looking at pictures and descriptions and comparing them to my ant under a magnifying glass. “Does it have a slender waist?” Hmm. Where exactly was this guy’s waist? (Did we learn in school that ants have waists?)

I gave up. Instead, remembering how many times the hardware store employees had given me great household advice, I took the ant in its container back to the store, found the man in insecticides, and asked, “Do you know what kind of ant this is? I want to buy the right poison for it.”

Trained to be super helpful, he said, “Heck, I’ll kill it for you right here if you want.”

When I was able to speak, I thanked him and explained that there were actually more at home. Unfazed, he showed me what I needed and I went home to slay the ants.

The moral (yes, I’m determined to relate this story to writing and editing) is that a failure to choose our words precisely is not usually a matter of life and death, nor is it usually very funny, although in the rare instance like this one, it could be both. In any case, care in word choice is almost always a good idea.

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Image of ant by Joealfaraby, courtesy Pixabay.com.