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You might as well be a great copy editor

blog.regehr.org

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Re: You might as well be a great copy editor

#31

Post by kens »

yesenadam wrote: post #21
fennecfoxen wrote: post #4

I would like to add a third recommendation to the list of two, and recommend "Style: Towards Clarity and Grace". (Alternatively, use any similar book by Joseph M. Williams featuring the words Style, Clarity, and Grace in the title). This book discusses the information architecture of clear and coherent phrases, sentences and paragraphs in the English language, and a few passes through its contents will leave you able…

> "Style: Towards Clarity and Grace" As I was typing in "Style: Towards Clarity and Grace" I was thinking Huh? Wouldn't "Toward" be much better?! And indeed that's what it is. Made me feel good about my copy-editing potential.

I keep running into that problem: "Toward" is the American style while "Towards" is the British style.

Re: You might as well be a great copy editor

#32

Post by fennecfoxen »

tom_mellior wrote: post #17
fennecfoxen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, yes. The passive voice is not simply dismissed in this work as a tool to avoid responsibility. Rather, it takes its place as an important tool that can make paragraphs more coherent, by structuring the sentences to elevate the parts that really matter. The subjects of sentences in this paragraph, for instance, are all strongly related to writing concepts. This paragraph itself would be weakened if I were to begin…

That's not a strong argument. The natural "translation" of your first sentence would be something like: "This work does not simply dismiss the passive voice as a tool to avoid responsibility." The author's name doesn't come into it, and there is no reason to transform "does not dismiss" into the much stronger "promotes".

Well excuse me

I am sure the author polished his work over several years. I devoted mere minutes to chatting it up on Hacker News. There's a reason you pay the author for the book and you don't pay me.

Let's see you argue something better instead of just taking potshots at people who bother to try, jerk.

Re: You might as well be a great copy editor

#33

Post by tmoertel »

aaroninsf wrote: post #15

Pro tip, from an actual pro: you can't copyedit your own copy. Lots of reasons why, including, your inability to recognize problems you are unaware of; the inexorable fact of reading what you think you wrote, not what is on the page; inability to see logical problems, missing assumptions, etc. Ad infinitum. There are line-level hacks which can help with some of this, e.g. reading backwards to find typographic and spe…

One copy-editing trick I employ is to use a text-to-speech system to read my work back to me. If I merely read it myself, my brain will autocorrect my mistakes into what I meant to write. When the computer reads my work, it pulls no punches.

Re: You might as well be a great copy editor

#34

Post by dhosek »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #18
awillen wrote: post #11

Back in high school I was the copy editor for the paper (and the minutiae of AP style are still seared into my brain), and it's definitely been a useful skill. My first job was doing developer marketing, and we had a lot of devs that were happy to contribute to our blog but didn't feel their writing was great - a lot of it was just little grammatical and style stuff, so my being able to clean it up really encouraged…

Strunk and White's Elements of Style is trash; don't buy it, don't read it, don't follow its advice. Read this first: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/LandOfTheFree.html

My wife has been reading Charlotte's Web to our kids. I asked her if she was familiar with the Strunk and White Guide and she thought I was asking if she was familiar with the drunken white guy.

(For the record, she was familiar with neither.)

(And for those who don't know, Charlotte's Web was written by E. B. White who is the White of Strunk and White.)

Re: You might as well be a great copy editor

#35

Post by greggyb »

yellowapple wrote: post #28
Wistar wrote: post #14

NYT's "Copy Edit This" quizzes are quite good. https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22copy%2Bedit%2Bthis%2... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/11/insider/copy-...

Those are fun. Just got through the first one with 17 total tries (most of which were on the 8th question). Some of them are dubious, though, IMO. For example: > The total amount available to |disperse| will be $150 million annually. I guess in a journalism context more people are talking about disbursing than dispersing, but how am I supposed to know that? For all I know this sentence comes from an article about wan…

"For example" and "for instance" are often used interchangeably, but do have some nuance between them. "For example" is broader, indicating a description of a class or category being described. "For instance" is narrower in scope, referring to a specific instance in the large class described by the example. Additionally, "for example" would be appropriate to use when creating a hypothetical, but "for instance" should always refer to something real - a concrete member of a class or category or an exemplary event which has occurred.

Re: You might as well be a great copy editor

#36

Post by Stratoscope »

Wistar wrote: post #14

NYT's "Copy Edit This" quizzes are quite good. https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22copy%2Bedit%2Bthis%2... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/11/insider/copy-...

That is a fun set of examples, and most of the answers are right on. But not this one:

> 12. Led Zeppelin did not steal the opening riff of its rock anthem “Stairway to Heaven,” a federal jury ruled here, giving the band a victory in a copyright case in which millions of dollars were at stake.

> O.K., this may be a fine point. But since what was at stake was the total amount, rather than the individual dollars or even the individual millions, I would make it “was at stake.”

Millions were at stake. Dollars were at stake.

Just putting the two together doesn't magically make it singular. No one would ever say "millions of dollars was at stake."

Copyediting should reflect how people actually speak and write.

Re: You might as well be a great copy editor

#37

Post by pdevr »

Wistar wrote: post #14

NYT's "Copy Edit This" quizzes are quite good. https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22copy%2Bedit%2Bthis%2... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/11/insider/copy-...

Thanks for sharing those links, now I am addicted :-)

This from the second quiz bothers me:

>>On the witness stand, the defendants said they had been duped by Mr. Wildstein, a self-confessed liar and political trickster, into believing that the closings were part of a legitimate traffic study.

"self-confessed liar" is a phrase present even in dictionaries - as example usage, no less. I have not seen many instances where it is substituted with "confessed liar".

Re: You might as well be a great copy editor

#38

Post by pdevr »

yellowapple wrote: post #28
Wistar wrote: post #14

NYT's "Copy Edit This" quizzes are quite good. https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22copy%2Bedit%2Bthis%2... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/11/insider/copy-...

Those are fun. Just got through the first one with 17 total tries (most of which were on the 8th question). Some of them are dubious, though, IMO. For example: > The total amount available to |disperse| will be $150 million annually. I guess in a journalism context more people are talking about disbursing than dispersing, but how am I supposed to know that? For all I know this sentence comes from an article about wan…

>>fulsome

Agree. I was tripped by that too. Here is an example from Merriam-Webster[1]:

"the passengers were fulsome in praise of the plane's crew"

The usage here seems to be in a similar context.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fulsome

Re: You might as well be a great copy editor

#40

Post by jxcl »

Stratoscope wrote: post #36
Wistar wrote: post #14

NYT's "Copy Edit This" quizzes are quite good. https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22copy%2Bedit%2Bthis%2... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/11/insider/copy-...

That is a fun set of examples, and most of the answers are right on. But not this one: > 12. Led Zeppelin did not steal the opening riff of its rock anthem “Stairway to Heaven,” a federal jury ruled here, giving the band a victory in a copyright case in which millions of dollars were at stake. > O.K., this may be a fine point. But since what was at stake was the total amount, rather than the individual dollars or eve…

But that’s exactly how I would say it: “millions of dollars was at stake.” To me, what you propose seems like a mistake someone just learning English would make.

Give it a specific sum: you wouldn’t say “two million dollars were at stake,” you would say “two million dollars was at stake”. I admit it’s pretty weird, but you also say “two million dollars is a lot of money,” not “two million dollars are a lot of money.”

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