I celebrate my multiple failures

 In 1969 I was full of youthful promise. 

I graduated from Fleming County High School in Flemingsburg, Kentucky, an honor student and co-valedictorian, with admission to Michigan State University in my hand. 

At Michigan State I was enrolled as an English-education major, because my initial ambition was to become a high school English teacher like Lynda McKee, who had been my mentor. But word leaked out quickly about the appalling boredom of classes in Education,* and I imagined that I had it in me to be a writer. 

I took classes in creative writing as well as the academic subjects, and my senior thesis was an uncompleted chunk of a novel that ceased to hold my attention. It turned out that I lack the imagination to be a writer of fiction. But when Walter Sutton, then chairman of the English department at Syracuse University (which had rejected me for the creative-writing program), called to offer me a university fellowship (free tuition and $20,000 a year) in the academic program, I accepted instantly. 

At Syracuse I fell in love with eighteenth-century English after a course with the genial Arthur Hoffman and began to imagine that I could be an eighteenth-century man--even though in a seminar on Swift and Sterne I wrote an amateurish paper that the professor (since denied tenure and dead) eviscerated with four single-spaced pages of sarcasm. I loved reading books and talking about them, and teaching as a graduate assistant, but that first experience left a blight on writing academic papers. In six years, I wrote one paper that I enjoyed writing and that had merit. 

My first wife (yes, the first marriage proved to be another failure) landed a job as a librarian at the University of Cincinnati, and we moved there. I had, without acknowledging it, abandoned my dissertation on themes of decay in the poetry of the Earl of Rochester and Jonathan Swift (Don't even ask), and I needed work. 

By chance I landed a tryout on the copy desk at The Cincinnati Enquirer. (My hiring as a minority employee is a tale for another day.) Discovering quickly that smart and irreverent copy editors were good company, I also found that I had a gift for editing. 

Working for Gannett's satraps palled after a few years, and I was encouraged to accept Andy Faith's offer to work on the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun. When I was hired in 1986, local ownership of The Sun had just passed to Times Mirror, and the glory days of the 1990s were ahead. Under John S. Carroll as editor and then Bill Marimow, I was made head of the copy desk and encouraged to hire, train, and mentor the smartest young copy editors I could find, and we developed a national reputation for editing. My hires were eventually picked off by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and others. 

But the purchase of The Sun by Tribune in 2000 led to the steady deterioration of editing, among other declines. By 2019, the last copy editor left The Sun. Two years later, after vulture capitalist Alden Global Capital acquired the paper, I accepted a buyout and retired. Now The Sun is owned by Sinclair Broadcasting's David Smith, who is systematically destroying what integrity the paper has left. What passes for editing there can be imagined. 

Now in retirement I work as a freelance copy editor for The Baltimore Banner, an online local-news organ. It has made a promising start and has an interval in which to attract enough support to become self-sufficient. I am rooting for its success, devoutly hoping never to include it among my roster of personal failures. 

* Pray forgive me, those of you who endured that curriculum to qualify for the profession. I mean you no harm. 

Everyone their own editor

Editing comes with two problems: It takes time, and it costs money. And copy editing, which piles editing on editing, doubles the problem. Many publications and publishers have reduced or even eliminated editing or copy editing. Chances are excellent that when you write you will be working without a net. 

You may think that your writing is so good that you don't need editing; I'm not licensed to treat the delusional. You may think that the internet proves that readers will accept anything, no matter how sloppy; I tell you, you have your reward. But if you think you might try to edit yourself, I can advise you. Sit down. 

The first thing is to get something in writing. Under no circumstances should you attempt to write and edit simultaneously. Yes, I know you can rub your stomach and pat your head at the same time--you're a phenomenon. But writing and editing, though allied, involve different skills, different focus. Don't paralyze yourself. When you're done with a text, or think you're done, that's the time to start editing. 

You'll need to deal with the small change of editing: punctuation, grammar, usage. Garner's Modern English Usage, now in its fifth edition, is authoritative. If Garner's appears forbidding, Mignon Fogarty's Grammar Girl posts are conversational and sensible. And [cough] there is always my Bad Advice, on rubbish you were taught about grammar and usage. Be cautious of the claims of sites like Grammarly. Every professional editor I have seen opine on Grammarly says that it will suggest some good changes and a great many inadvisable ones.  

You'll think me an old fogy (and I am one) when I tell you that factual accuracy will benefit your text. One useful task is to mark each statement of fact in your text, making sure of where you found it and how you know it to be true. If you are casual about the facts or, worse, deliberately inaccurate, you are simply giving some other writer the opportunity to expose you. And let me remind you here that you have known the basic ethics of writing since you were in elementary school: Don't copy. Don't tell lies. 

Getting analytical, you will examine how your text is put together, its structure and organization. If you have not read my previous post "Secrets of editing revealed," now would be an excellent time to put that set of questions to your work. It might benefit you to make a rough outline of your text: the main point and the subsidiary points. Are like things together? If there is a chronology, is it in order? Are the points in an order that the reader will be able to follow?

Then smoke 'em if you got 'em. Take a break. If you can put it aside for a day, you will return to it for an unpleasant discovery that it was not as good as you thought it was. If you can't spare that much time, step away from it for a while. Take a walk. Drink a cup of tea or a martini. Talk to the cat. Then go back and fix what you now see needs to be fixed. 

Read the thing aloud. When you have to give that kind of attention to every word, you will spot typos that your eye slid over. Also, when you read aloud, infelicities such as clotted syntax and unconscious repetition of words reveal themselves. Reading it aloud allows you to determine whether it sounds like something written by a human being. 

Spellcheck is the last thing, but be cautious. It will highlight typographical errors but pass over the wrong homonym undetected. And be careful about the auto-replace function, remembering the classic example of the website that wanted the word "gay" replaced with "homosexual" in all instances and wound up changing an Associated Press story about Tyson Gay to identify the sprinter as Tyson Homosexual.

Then, once it's gone, prepare yourself to take correction graciously. You will have done your best, but something will be wrong, likely minor but still embarrassing. I have no editor for this blog. Some people point out my errors in a polite note; others proclaim them publicly with glee. I accept them all, with thanks. So should you. 

Words for editors

Today's offering is selections from my commonplace book, some of which you may want to post above your desk or, if you do cross stitch, work into a sampler. 

"Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it."  Henry David Thoreau

"It's not what we don't know that gets us into trouble, it's what we know that ain't so." Will Rogers 

"In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it."  George Bernard Shaw 

"Try to preserve an author's style, if he is an author and has a style."  Wolcott Gibbs 

"You write with ease, to show your breeding, / But easy writing's vile hard reading."  Richard Brinsley Sheridan, "Clio's Protest"

"The copy desk was like a sieve for prose: the copy editor filtered out impurities without adding anything new."  Mary Norris, Greek to Me

"Copy editors are meant to be gnomes working invisibly below deck to ensure that the engine of prose runs smoothly."  Geoff Nunberg, Language Log

"Editing raw copy is like looking at your grandmother naked."  Rafael Alvarez, Baltimore Sun

"Dictionaries are like watches: the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true."  Samuel Johnson 

"Dictionaries are but the depositories of words already legitimated by usage."  Thomas Jefferson to John Adams 

Languages certainly do follow rules, but they don't follow orders."  Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster

"When a grammarian notes that something is wrong, it means that many people are already doing it."  Nicholas Ostler, Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin

"The public conversation about language is dominated by a kind of middlebrow irascibility, rather than by patient examination of language facts and their consequences."  Lane Greene, Talk on the Wild Side

"The history of prescriptivism about English .. is in part a history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance."  Henry Hitchings, The Language Wars

"The error of ... viewers with alarm is in assuming that there is enough magic in pedagogy to teach 'correct' English to the plain people. There is, in fact, too little; even the fearsome abracadabra of Teachers College, Columbia, will never suffice for the purpose. The plain people will always make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and often without much insight. Their lives would be more comfortable if they ceased to repine over it, and instead gave it some hard study. It is very amusing, and not a little instructive."  H.L. Mencken, The American Language

Take that

 Yes, I said it, on social media, under my own name as an editor: "Half my editing is inserting 'that' where journalists have left it out."

Yes, a jocular exaggeration, but it smoked out the that-cutters, the writers, journalists, and, Fowler save us, editors who see it as their duty to excise that wherever it appears as a conjunction.* Some of the that-cutters profess their fealty to the Associated Press. So let me show you what the Associated Press Stylebook actually says: 

Use the conjunction that to introduce a dependent clause if the sentence sounds or looks awkward without it. There are no hard-and-fast rules, but in general:

–That usually may be omitted when a dependent clause immediately follows a form of the verb to say: The president said he had signed the bill.

–That should be used when a time element intervenes between the verb and the dependent clause: The president said Monday that he had signed the bill.

–That usually is necessary after some verbs. They include: advocate, assert, contend, declare, estimate, make clear, point out, propose and state.

–That is required before subordinate clauses beginning with conjunctions such as, after, although, because, before, in addition to, until and while: Haldeman said that after he learned of Nixon's intention to resign, he sought pardons for all connected with Watergate.

When in doubt, include that. Omission can hurt. Inclusion never does.

Got that?

To enlarge on that a little. Omitting that is common and acceptable when there are a couple of short clauses, as in She told him it was over. But you really ought to use that when you have more than one clause in the predicate, as an act of simple, decent respect for the reader: She told him that it was over and that she would call the police if she ever heard from him again. 

* That post also smoked out those people who think that that as a relative pronoun cannot refer to human beings. Their lack of awareness of that use of the pronoun regularly in English for the past 13 centuries is regrettable, but I can address the point if you need help.  

What she said

Anne Curzan thinks that two parties within us struggle to prevail over how we understand and use the English language. 

One party she calls the grammando (think "stickler" or "pedant"), avid to enforce The Rules (even when some of them are bogus). The other she calls the wordie, whose response to encountering a new word or usage is "Wow, that looks interesting." 

In Says Who? (Crown, $29) she looks to strike a balance. 

The formidably titled Geneva Smitherman Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature, Linguistics, and Education and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan writes with authority, but in an easy, conversational style. If she drops in the occasional technical term like "metathesis," she is quick to explain that it means the transposition of letters or sounds in a word, as in ask/aks. But mostly she writes as if she were sitting across the table from you talking about language and how we use it.

And she covers the territory: the split infinitive, the hopefully superstition, terminal prepositions, singular they, who/whom, true and false passives, the instability of the apostrophe, and dozens more. (I agree with her on every point, so we can see that she is a genuine authority.)

Her subtitle, A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words, indicates what she is about. The grammando will have to unlearn some rules that are not actual rules and loosen up about words and usages outside formal written contexts ("funner"), and the wordie will have to curb their enthusiasm when formal contexts merit formal precision. She is "comparing what speakers and writers actually do and what we're told we're 'supposed to do' in formal contexts, in order to come up with our own, informed decisions about what effective usage is, based on context." 

The project, then, is not to bring The Rules to bear inflexibly, or decide that Anything Goes, but to "weigh the the benefits and drawbacks of our language choices, given what we know about the usage rules, the judgments others may make based on our adherence to those rules, our own preferences and purposes, our knowledge of our audience, and our understanding of how the language may be changing." 

This is a book by a savvy, approachable authority who aims to equip you to make those informed decisions about how you speak and write. It is worth your time.