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. 

Secrets of editing revealed

The secret to editing is to ask questions so obvious as to make you appear slow-witted. 

These are the questions to ask when you are doing structural editing or macro-editing. The micro-editing (fact checking, spelling, punctuation, grammar, English usage, house style) is on hold until the big questions have been addressed. 

What's it about?

This is the focus question. The story, no matter how many subsidiary points it contains, must have one single, identifiable main point. If you can't state that main point in a single sentence, then there isn't one, and it's time to go back and rethink what the story is. 

Where's the point?

This is related to the focus. The story needs to get to the point quickly, without throat-clearing and background baggage, if the reader can be expected to engage further. That means you have two or three sentences to get there. (Think how long you read something before deciding to move on.) 

What happened yesterday? 

This is the chronology question. Typically, in a news story, the most recent event appears first, with the background filled in subsequently. But it includes the larger point of organization. Is the sequence of events clear? If the story shifts from the past to the present, or back and forth, does it provide transitions to keep the reader oriented? 

How do we know this?

This is the source question. How many sources are there in this story? Just one? Uh-oh. More? Who or what are they? Where do they come from? How reliable are they? What do they stand to gain or lose? Are there other sources that should be consulted? 

Who benefits?

Chances are good that someone in the story will wind up looking good and someone else will wind up looking less than good. Have both the parties been treated fairly (their positions explained, with an opportunity to respond)? Or is there a thumb on the scales to favor someone?

What do you mean here?

When you come across a sentence so muddy as to defy comprehension, it is time to turn to the writer and say, "I'm not quite clear what you mean here? Can you tell me what you meant to say?" The writer will typically utter a sentence that makes sense, and you say, "Oh, let's just write that."

Who's the reader?

Your source(s) should not be the reader, unless you are just currying favor. Is there specialized information or jargon that must be explained? How much background information is the reader likely to need? What level of sophistication in language (vocabulary, sentence structure) is appropriate? 

Why is this a story?

A story is written and published to have a consequence. Does this one have one? If it is about an event, what is the actual or potential consequence? If it is a profile, is the subject significant in some way? If it is meant simply to entertain, is it entertaining? 

Have you kept your balance?

As an editor, you are at the intersection of the interests of a number of parties: the writer, the publication, the reader. And there is [cough] your own personal and professional integrity. Have you dealt fairly with all the parties?

Are you sure you want to do this?

Mike Waller, former publisher of The Baltimore Sun, said that this is the most important question an editor can ever raise. This is the question that might spare you a libel suit. This question might spare you publication of a defective story (plagiarized? fabricated?) that will stain your reputation. And it has a secondary question:

Are you really sure?

 

It's a grand day for grammar

 In the fifth through eighth grades, I was drilled in the traditional schoolroom grammar by two formidable ladies, Mrs. Jessie Perkins and Mrs. Elizabeth Craig, and while their results with other students were variable, what they taught me stuck. 

Over years as an editor it was brought home to me that the schoolroom grammar was seriously flawed. Originally developed to apply Latin grammar to English, a bad fit because the two languages operate on different principles, but Latin was the prestige language when English was the new kid on the block. Over the centuries that grammar was distorted by an accretion of arbitrary rules and superstitions that have been exposed by linguists. But those of us who had the schoolroom grammar had little or no contact with the linguists. 

Now we can. The Truth About English Grammar by Geoffrey K. Pullum, has just been published in this country by Polity Press. Pullum, the distinguished linguist and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, speaks not as the scribes and Pharisees but as one who has authority, and bridges the gap between the traditional grammar and current linguists in a short, concise book accessible to any reader willing to put in a little time. 

He will expect you to learn some new terms for categories, such as determinative, a class that includes the definite and indefinite articles; this and that, sometimes called demonstratives; words such as all, any, both, each, either, every, few, many, no, several, and some; and all the numbers, a category he calls "gigantic." A determinative generally precedes a noun, but sometimes can stand alone, as in "Some like it hot."

He says our understanding of prepositions is muddled because grammarians understood prepositions to be only pre-positioned, standing directly in front of a noun. But words like down and up, traditionally identified as adverbs, actually function as prepositions. Adverbs, he explains, can precede verbs, but you can't revise "My horse fell down" to "My horse down fell." 

The section on mythical grammar errors, dear to my heart, includes the split infinitive, the hopefully superstition, stranded prepositions (what they were looking at), singular they, and more. Read the section on passive clauses and you will be immune to the error that any construction including a form of to be or an auxiliary verb (yes, some people think that) is a passive construction. 

His thoroughgoing treatment of nouns and noun phrases, of the various classes of verbs, and of clauses, is more intricately detailed than I can expect to treat effectively in the space of a blog post; there is a lot of meat there. There are useful sections on spelling and punctuation, and he offers succinct advice on prose style that you will find much more helpful than Strunk and White.

It is sixty years since Mrs. Perkins and Mrs. Craig instructed me, and now I clearly have more to learn. Maybe you too?

Ink-stained wretch has just about had enough

 

On this date in 1986 I took my seat on the copy desk of The Baltimore Sun.

I had been a copy editor at The Cincinnati Enquirer for six and a half years and had tried out at The New York Times, which told me to get a job at a paper that took editing seriously and call again in two years. I had done the first part, and the second proved unnecessary. 

In thirty-four years at The Sun, nearly half my life, I saw serious journalism and became head of the copy desk as it developed a national reputation for effective editing, so much so that The Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and others poached one editor after another. 

A reverse arc was also occurring, as feckless corporate gits at the Tribune Company steadily reduced the staff through buyouts and dropped content while charging readers more, because the newspaper industry failed to adapt to changing conditions. The company we worked for was for a time even called tronc, which sounds like an unimpressive video game. 

Finally, in 2021, when vulture capitalist Alden Global Capital acquired a diminished Tribune, I took a buyout and retired. And now since the purchase of the newspaper earlier this year by David Smith of Sinclair Broadcasting and Armstrong Williams, I read the paper with the same fascination that leads drivers to slow down and gawk at smashups on the highway. 

Ignoring Williams’s otiose maundering on the op-ed page is easy. I was used to disregarding The Enquirer’s editorial page, which was also dominated by right-wing cranks. Once in the mid-1980s, The Enquirer editorialized about the spread of AIDS, saying that the disease was painful and incurable, combined with a social stigma. Nevertheless, the editorial concluded, “if apprehension of contracting AIDS should lead people to forgo promiscuous sexual intercourse, then the disease will have served a useful social purpose.” 

Appalling as they are, not even Smith and Williams have yet endorsed a disease. 

Now each morning, fortified by two cups of strong coffee, I am greeted with shoddy coverage from FOX45 and Sinclair. As one of a rapidly dwindling handful of seven-day-a-week print subscribers, I wonder why I subject myself to this (though masochism cannot be ruled out). 

There are still people at The Sun attempting to do responsible journalism under adverse circumstances, and I salute them, and pray for their deliverance. For that reason, the day to call and cancel is not here, though it may not be far off. 

ADDENDUM: Fellow copy editor David Benson has corrected my misremembering about that Cincinnati Enquirer editorial. It ran on Monday, June 21, 1982, and concerned herpes, not HIV. The final sentence: "But to the extent the threat promotes abstinence in any age group may it serve a useful purpose, sparing individuals and society enormous costs."

Note that in recasting it from memory, I sharpened the editorial board's writing. 

Whiter than white

I've been brooding over a suggestive phrase from Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me: "people who think they are white."

Part of that thinking of reflects the centuries during which slaveholders and their male relatives freely raped the women under their control, producing mixed-race children. Mary Chesnut tartly remarks in her diary: "The mulattos one sees in every family ... resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds." 

We think that Thomas Jefferson was drawn to Sally Hemings because of her strong resemblance to his deceased wife--who was also her half-sister. 

The One Drop legislation in Southern states, on the premise that one drop of Black blood made one Black, established categories, such as Mulatto (half-Negro), Quadroon (quarter-Negro), Octoroon (eighth-Negro), to establish the legal status of white and not-quite-white. It's reasonable to suspect that many "people who think they are white" today could be disconcerted by the results of a DNA test. 

But going beyond that, we have to realize that "whiteness" is as much a cultural matter as a biological one, perhaps more so. 

Though I have not resorted to Ancestry.com or a DNA test, it's pretty sure that my people were Scotch Irish and English, settled in Appalachia for a century and a half or more. Importantly, they were Protestant. White and Protestant was the badge of the True American from the beginning. 

Anyone not white and Protestant was suspect. Benjamin Franklin worried about all those Germans settling in the Pennsylvania Colony. In the mid-nineteenth century all those immigrating Irish Catholics were widely discriminated against, and after them the darker-skinned Italians and Eastern Europeans. But all of them discovered over time as they acculturated that in American you can earn whiteness. It is even possible for Jews to become honorary whites. (Henry Kissinger springs to mind.) 

The consequence is that we see opposition to immigration coming from people who think they are white, descended from immigrants who were thought not to be white, or at least not quite white like the True Americans.

There is an odd corollary that to be a True American you must be white and also live in the Heartland, the place where The New York Times sends reporters to talk to people in diners. The reason is that the True Americans long ago bought into the Jeffersonian fantasy that cities, at least large, multicultural cities, are places of corruption and that virtue resides among the farmers and small towns distant from those cities. 

The places where the people who think they are white live.

Punctuation ain't grammar

The Harris and Walz nominations have generated a flurry of back-and-forth arguments online, not about their political views, but rather how to make their names plural and possessive. 

Here is orthodoxy:

Singular: Harris, Walz

Singlar possessive: Harris's, Walz's

Plural: Harrises, Walzes

Plural possessive: Harrises', Walzes'

Punctuation is a matter of convention, not grammar. In the eighteenth century, for example, it was common to put a comma between the subject and verb of a sentence, but we no longer do that. And it is not unusual for different conventions to continue in use. 

For example, Associated Press style advises that because Harris is a proper noun, Harris' is an appropriate singular possessive. In its majestic inconsistency, the AP also advises that common nouns should take the 's, viz., boss's. *

One long-standing tradition is to make classical and biblical names possessive with the apostrophe: Socrates', Jesus', but the Chicago Manual of Style advises to use 's. If Jesus's makes you twitch, do not use it. 

Some people assert that words ending in z should be made possessive with an apostrophe only. You do you. 

Some people use 's to make names plural: the Smith's. That is right out. People will know you were not paying attention in English class. 

If you are writing for a publication that has a house style on punctuation, follow it. If you are writing for a publication that does not have a house style on punctuation, may God have mercy on your soul. If you are writing for yourself, pick a style, follow it consistently, and stop arguing with people online about which style is right. 

* The Associated Press is responsible for many quirks in journalistic writing. Newspaper reporters overuse the em dash (—) to set off parenthetical material rather than parentheses, because they use parentheses instead of square brackets to set off information added to quoted material. The AP doesn't use square brackets ([ ]) because it cannot transmit that punctuation to all the clients. That is also why AP uses quotation marks for titles and other material rather than italics. Keep in mind that when you shift from a book to a newspaper, you are code-switching punctuation. 

There were giants on the copy desk ...

An anecdote from the time before I made my escape from Gannett's Cincinnati Enquirer.

The Enquirer featured a local columnist named Frank Weikel, a former police reporter who had been given a column on the strength of his supposed sources. It was a column after the manner of Walter Winchell, short items connected by asterisks and spit. For example, it had "Departments of." One of his "Department of Names That Match Their Occupations" items, a urologist named Leake, was killed by the managing editor. 

But to our narrative. 

One day Bill Trutner is in the copy desk slot (an actual slot in a u-shaped desk), busy on deadline, when the managing editor, Jim Schottelkotte, walks up, trailed by Weikel. "Bill, we have a problem," Schottelkotte says. 

Trutner, a mild-mannered bald man who had been a high school English teacher, answers without looking up from his terminal. "What is it, Jim?"

"We have a problem with the Weikel column."

"What's wrong?"

"It's gone. He filed it, but the system seems to have eaten it. We can't find it."

"What do you want me to do about it?"

"Well," Schottelkotte says, with a little managing editor banter, "we thought we'd get you to have one of the copy editors write a Weikel column for tomorrow."

"Can't do it, Jim."

"Why not?"

"We don't have anybody dumb enough."

Weikel turns on his heel and stalks away. 

The Old Editor gets cranky in the morning

I see some things in published journalism nearly every damned day. Just look. 

Too few people today have had any experience with horses, and it doesn't occur to them that horses are controlled with reins. To rein in a horse, the rider pulls back the reins to stop forward progress. To give free rein is to let go of the reins, allowing the horse to go where it will--in the dimly remembered metaphor, to surrender control. People who have neglected their homonyms instead write free reign. Reign is the power or rule of a monarch, so free reign is meaningless, apart from flagging the writer's imperfect education. 

Because we are trapped in a presidential campaign year, figures on all sides are daily subjected to intense public criticism, often expressed as catching flak. Those of you who remember, or maybe read about, the Second World War, know that flak is a shortened form of the German fliegerabwehrkanone, or antiaircraft gun. Flak is a metaphor for criticism that is like sharp pieces of metal flying through the air at great velocity. You will often see it rendered as flack, but flack is a pejorative term for a public relations agent--a stooge. You do not want to catch a flack. 

I generally skip articles on home decor, partly out of distaste for gush and partly out of apprehension of  encountering references to tchotchkes on the mantle. That shelf above the fireplace is a mantel. A mantle is a cloak. Just as we're not much on horseback anymore, we're not often given to wearing cloaks. Mantle, when it is not used in various scientific senses, is a another of those metaphors worn smooth by overuse; it means authority. In 2 Kings, when the prophet Elijah is carried into heaven on a fiery chariot, he drops his mantle to his disciple Elisha. Elisha puts on the mantle of Elijah, assuming his authority as a prophet. 

And these come up before I've had my second cup of coffee. 

The Old Editor vents

Some random observations on writing and editing 

As an editor, do what you can

I have spent more than forty years in journalism, which prizes straightforward unpretentious writing (though I have had to cope with the occasional littérateuse). You try to make the crooked straight and the rough places plain, but there are limits to what you can accomplish, limits inherent in the text. Sometimes the most you can manage is to take up the defective and leave it merely mediocre. As Anthony Trollope wrote, "One cannot pour out of a jug more than is in it."

Don't start at the beginning

The Iliad starts in the middle of things, in medias res, if you want to sound like a classicist: The hero Achilles is having a hissy fit, and everything is going straight to hell for the Greeks outside the walls of Troy. It's years since Paris abducted Helen, and Homer goes straight to the main thing. Write like Homer. Start with the immediate thing, the crucial thing. You can work in the backgrounds, the subplots, and the secondary characters later in the text.

And make it succinct. Skip the throat clearing. I advised my students at Loyola Maryland to visualize the reader as a middle-aged man in a recliner with a beer in one hand and the television remote control in the other. The amount of time you have to get his attention, get him to commit to reading further, is the amount of time between clicks. 

Curb your fetishes

We all have preferences in vocabulary and usage, and so does everybody else. Unless you are a managing editor or some other tinpot despot, you don't get to legislate yours, and going on about them can make you tiresome. 

Take the Oxford comma. You can use the final comma in a series or omit it. The Chicago Manual of Style likes it, and the Associated Press Stylebook does not (though even AP advises using it where it reduces ambiguity). There are people online who clamor about it as a mark of civilization and its omission as a mark of barbarity. The opposite party claims that it is effete. Do as you please, or as your house style pleases. It is a minor stylistic point. For Fowler's sake, just shut up about it. 

Unlearning is learning

I did a series of videos for The Sun on the theme "Rubbish you were taught" and incorporated some of the material into my little book, Bad Advice. Yes, this is a plug. I take as my text for this item the word of two authorities: Henry David Thoreau, who said, "Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it," and Will Rogers, who said, "It ain't what you don't know that hurts you--it's what you know that ain't so." 

Much of the schoolroom grammar and usage I spent years laboriously acquiring, along with much of the Associated Press style I had to absorb as a journalist (and much of which I taught my charges during my first years at Loyola) turns out to be rules that ain't so. I discovered in talking about these things at professional conferences that not all of my colleagues found this welcome news, but to me it was liberating. It freed me to concentrate on what was meaningful in texts rather than wasting time on obsolete dicta of no consequence to readers apart from the occasional fussbudget. It also freed me to be a nuisance to the editors of the Associated Press Stylebook, whom I nagged for years until they heaved the dated baggage--such as "over/more than" and "split verb"--overboard.

You too can unlearn, and there are many linguists and lexicographers who can assist you.