One more thing

Before I venture west to examine the marks of time on my classmates from 1969, a reminder:

I was mistaken about the broadcast of my interview about the state of copy editing on National Public Radio’s On the Media. It is scheduled for this weekend, running at 2:00 p.m. Sunday on WYPR-FM in Baltimore. (Listings may vary in your area.) You can also download the program from the On the Media Web site.

Off to the Dark and Bloody

Even the unemployed need to take a little time off.

A week ago a letter arrived announcing that fellow graduates of the Class of 1969 at Fleming County High School have planned parties for this weekend. I will be heading west tomorrow morning and won’t be back in Baltimore until early next week. You’re left to your own devices until then.

Since I won’t be monitoring this site, I’ve decided, with misgivings, to cancel comment moderation before I hit the road. You’ll be able to comment at will over the weekend, but I don’t want to get back to discover that you’ve been misbehaving.

To tide you over, some brief items:


X is not alone

Mild-mannered copy editor John McIntyre, sometime chief of the desk at The Baltimore Sun, has campaigned for years against the stale devices of journalism.

McIntyre is not alone.

Fellow copy editor and former ACES president Pam Robinson has published on her blog, Words at Work, an eye-popping collection of the hack “not alone” transition from publications that ought to have editors who know better.


Grammar for chimps

Somebody had to do it, and, sighing at the necessity, Geoffrey Pullum has demolished the latest example of “Stupid Animal Communication Stories,” this time the BBC’s report on a study that supposedly says that chimpanzees can recognize bad grammar. They can’t.**


Before you complain about the headline

A tweeted observation by Bill Walsh should give reporters and editors cause to pause before they storm over to what is left of the copy desk to complain about a headline that misses what they thought was the mark:

I side with reporters more often than you'd think when such disputes arise, but I'd say misguided headlines tend to reflect muddled stories.

Tell it, Brother Walsh.



*For readers unacquainted with the lore of the Commonwealth of Kentucky — quick, name the other three states that are technically commonwealths — the area was a battleground for Indians before European-descended settlers took over, and it was the Native Americans who called it “the dark and bloody ground.”

**If they could, reporters then could presumably be trained to make the same distinctions, and the nation’s dozen or so remaining copy editors could join me in collecting unemployment benefits.

Deferring to the godly

In yesterday’s post on regrettable news leads, I said that one reason not to affect bogus King James English was to avoid giving offense to the godly. One reader commented: “I don't think the danger of offending th godly, or anyone else for that matter, is a good reason not to write something, or do anything really.”

On the contrary, when one is writing for publication, there are excellent reasons not to *** READER ALERT: VULGAR LANGUAGE PENDING *** piss off the readers.

In some articles, on some occasions, for some audiences, one avoids certain references or certain kinds of language — profanity, for example, or ethnic slurs. Among the things to take care with are religious references, because people’s religious beliefs and associations are held profoundly. (I myself, as by adult profession a high-church Anglican, understand all too clearly the danger of hinting that other people’s beliefs and practices are silly.)

If you are going to give offense to the godly, you had better do so for a good reason — to assert, for example, that, contrary to Scripture, the earth revolves around the sun, that it came into being much earlier than an October morning in 4004 B.C., and that its human inhabitants descended from more primitive forms of life, are points of established scientific fact, rather than to adapt the language of their sacred texts merely for some cheap and transient effect.

Don't do this again

All right, I’m just a copy editor — and a cashiered copy editor at that — so you may wonder where I come off with attitude about how real writers write. (Several reporters have in the past.) In part, it’s because I was a reader first, and as a reader I identified stale devices with which writers, journalists in particular, imagine that they bring freshness and imagination to their work.

For fuller discussion, you should look at a compilation of cliche leads that Dick Thien offered to the American Copy Editors Society and a similar analysis at Bob Baker’s Newsthinking.

For some that I myself find particularly irritating:


Webster’s defines ...

First off, there is no Webster’s, or rather, no one Webster’s. Merriam-Webster is only one of a number of publishers using that name in the title. Second, giving a dictionary definition of a term as a starting point is such a fixture of low-grade sermons that a first-year seminarian, not to say a professional journalist, ought to blush at being caught resorting to it.


It’s official

It’s official means that some piece of information has been confirmed — meaning that you are telling the reader something already widely known. Usually readers expect a story to tell them things they don’t already know.


The conventional wisdom

The conventional wisdom is also something that the reader has already heard. When a writer starts by saying what the conventional wisdom is, it’s usually to move to some fresh take on the situation. Maybe the writer could just start with that fresh take.


The pathetic fallacy

If I ever catch you writing that storm clouds couldn’t dampen the spirits of any person or group at an event, or in any other manner attributing emotion to meteorology, I’ll see to it that you are locked in a room listening to recordings of Wordsworth’s later poetry until you scream for mercy.


Christmas came early

Unless a holiday has some direct connection with the subject of the article, it’s as relevant as the weather. Particularly to be shunned are cheap and obvious efforts at irony: Just on the eve of Labor Day, Joe Sixpack got the word that his factory was closing and his job was gone.


The rhetorical question

Have you ever wondered where reporters get their ideas?

No I haven’t, and since I have no intention of proceeding to a second paragraph, I guess I never will.


The clumsy misdirection

Laura Snapdragon eats turtles by the dozen.

The chocolate, caramel and peanut candies, that is.

The that is serves to say, “Looky here: I made a play on words.”


Onomatopoeia

Foom! Foom! Foom!

That was the sound of the rockets as they were launched into the night sky to burst into sprays of color to celebrate America’s birthday.

It’s recommended practice to avoid sound effects in the rest of the story, too.


The Jacobean gambit

For the love of Fowler, please do not ever attempt to imitate the language of the Authorized Version of the Bible (popularly the King James). You are apt to get the grammar wrong (the –eth suffix being grammatically proper only the with singular third-person form of the verb), or you will cloak some mundane secular phenomenon in the language of religion, giving offense to the godly.


The outdated allusion

As Jimmy Durante used to say, everybody’s trying to get into the act.

The reader doesn’t know what “the act” is, and, unless you have confirmed that your audience is geriatric, the reader is probably clueless about the Great Durante, who climbed that golden staircase in 1980 and whose last appearances on television dated to the early 1970s.

It’s a good idea to write for readers who are alive today.


The disproportionate comparison

Though 1968 is best known for domestic turmoil and the war in Vietnam, it also has a local distinction. That year Baltimore County began trying to rewrite its regulations governing outdoor signs.

One of these things is not like the other. ...

Things I wish I hadn't seen

On Twitter: “What I will drink for my (first) 39th birthday: Candied bacon martini.”

In addition to bacon baked with brown sugar, it includes vodka, applejack, amaretto and — brace yourselves — maple syrup.

In The Baltimore Sun: An article with an inane “They’re not alone” transition from the opening example to the body of the story.

It’s such a hackneyed device that it can always — and should — be deleted without any ill effect on the story whatsoever.

On Facebook: A newspaper copy editor saying that he doesn’t look at his own paper on his day off, because he’s not going to let his employer impose on his free time.

There’s not a lot that can leave me gasping in my chair, but for an editor to announce publicly that he chooses not to see what is in his own publication, as if laziness and unprofessionalism were a matter of principle, undercuts the effort of years to establish that copy editors should be taken seriously.

At You Don’t Say: Posts last week announcing that I had taped a recording for the weekend’s On the Media program on National Public Radio.

Evidently the producers of the show decided that I was not particularly interesting, a judgment that should not stun readers of this blog, and chose not to air the interview.

How could this have happened?

There’s only one explanation: Mistakes were made:

Crocs

Microsoft Vista

Jon and Kate Plus 8

Fanny packs: Perhaps the last thing that broad-of-beam Americans needed was an accessory that emphasized their girth.

Abstinence-only sex education

The Apprentice: And any other television program, contemplated or actual, featuring Donald Trump.

McDonald’s McRib

Bruno

The Atkins diet: And the Metabalife diet, the South Beach diet ...

AIG

Knight Rider: All versions.

Jell-O shooters

Gladiator flip-flops: Actually, any flip-flops worn anywhere but to the shower or the pool.

Sport utility vehicles

Chocolate martinis: Actually any cocktail labeled as a martini containing anything other than gin or vodka and vermouth.

Tattoos

Two warnings

Be careful about what you write: Mike Memoli, one of my former students, now covering the White House for Real Clear Politics, sent out a tweet this week warning journalists to be careful what they say in e-mail, because that correspondence can be subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

The State in South Carolina got hold of e-mails to Gov. Mark Sanford’s staff by that means, and some of what came to light was not pretty.

Be careful about what you listen to: Unless the program directors have turned up someone more interesting in the past three days, a short interview with me on the parlous state of copy editing is to be broadcast on this week’s On the Media at National Public Radio.

The program’s Web site will help you find when the program is being broadcast in your area, and you can download the program from the Web site if it’s not possible or convenient to listen to the broadcast.

C'mon, AP, tell us about the Olden Times

It’s the little touches that make newspaper/wire service journalism look as if it was written exclusively for people who remember the Eisenhower administration. For your inspection, this Associated Press headline:

Senate saw carbon copy of courthouse Sotomayor

Feel free to mention in comments the last time you used carbon paper or saw someone use carbon paper. Full marks if you have had to explain to a child what a carbon copy is. Extra credit if you have had to explain to an adult what a carbon copy is. And please name any newspaper that was lazy enough to use the AP headline in the print edition.

And now I have a busy day of writing ahead and have to sharpen my quills.

Is nonlife threatened?

From The Baltimore Sun: The woman was being treated at the station for nonlife-threatening injuries and was expected to be taken to a local hospital, according to an MTA spokeswoman [emphasis added].

The woman, this sentence tells me, has injuries that are threatening nonlife. That, of course, is nonsense, and a reader would have to be thicker than a plank to understand the phrase as other than non-life-threatening injuries, with non modifying life-threatening. Still, it’s an awkward-looking construction, and I think I know where it comes from.

The Associated Press Stylebook says that the prefix non is generally attached without a hyphen. So a copy editor who applies “rules” without thinking will make sure that the reader gets nonlife-threatening.

But the AP says also to use a hyphen to avoid “awkward constructions.”

That would require judgment.

The substitution error

Yesterday I quoted Jan Freeman’s caution that errors involving homonyms are often merely errors of spelling, rather than the result of ignorance or defective education. A writer certainly knows the difference of meaning between then and than, she says, and the substitution of one for the other is a mistake in spelling.

Responding on Facebook to that post, Mike Pope called attention to a post on his blog about the categories of typos, which he lists as mechanical, language mastery, hard words, creative, and due diligence. I encourage you to follow the link to the post for his explanation of them.

Apart from the purely mechanical errors — I am a vile typist — a particularly vexatious typographical error to which I am prone is one that Mr. Pope does not specifically address. Writing earlier this week at Regret the Error about plagiarism, I got Chris Anderson’s name right on first reference and subsequently transformed it to Curt Anderson. A sharp-eyed reader who noticed the errors suggested that Curt Anderson’s name may have been lurking in my head because he is a member of the Maryland House of Delegates.

This substitution error, to give it a name, results when the wrong synapse fires and inserts in the text a more familiar name or common noun — not necessarily a homonym. Early in my career, for reasons I myself could not explain, I wrote mayor in a headline that should have said sheriff. The slot editor didn’t catch it either, and the paper had to run a correction the next day.* Such an error is particularly treacherous because the wrong word, being familiar, will look right and will not, usually, be flagged in spell-check.

When I tell you that everyone needs an editor, I mean everyone. I am just as fallible as you are, and, like other bloggers, I am working without a net here. The only thing you can do is to educate yourself in the kinds of error to which you are prone, or which the writers whose work you edit are prone, and to remain vigilant.



*That was in 1980. These are things that copy editors reflect on lying awake at four o’clock in the morning.