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.

It's just spelling

The estimable Jan Freeman of The Boston Globe, whose column and blog I heartily endorse, keeps encountering some kind of obstacle in posting comments here. This comment on misused words came in an e-mail, which I am pleased to publish:

I'm on a mini-campaign to get people to remember that "confusions" like there/there and then/than are not actually semantic confusions, like infer for imply or flaunt for flout, but simply misspellings. Of course I care about spelling, but the people who think a mistake like "bigger then me" means the writer doesn't know "then" from "than" are truly confused. I wrote about it (briefly) in January (with itals in original, of course):

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/01/25/the_unkindliest_cut/

True, then for than is a fairly common spelling error, and one that spellcheckers don't catch. Then and (unstressed) than sound almost the same, and like other homophone pairs, they can be hard to keep straight. But then for than, like principle for principal, is not a confusion of sense -- it's just a spelling error.

For some reason, though, the Confusable Words industry -- dozens of websites use that label -- wants to scare us into thinking of spelling mixups as serious misunderstandings. "Check your dictionary," they intone. "Use than to make a comparison. Use then when referring to time."

But this is ludicrous. The person who types "he's bigger then me" isn't accidentally using then, the word that refers to time; he's just spelling than the way it sounds. In fact, than was often spelled then until the 18th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. "I had rather be a doore keeper in the house of my God, then to dwell in the tents of wickednesse," reads the psalm in the 1611 King James Bible.

Should students (and journalists) learn to spell correctly? Of course. But there's no need to overreact. The writer who mixes up hanger and hangar needs a spelling tip, not a brain transplant. ...

Further distinctions

We’ll start out with some additions to the “Making distinctions” post and then proceed to odds and ends.

I meant to add there, their, they’re to the list of distinctions to be preserved. But the really interesting ones are the distinctions in transition. Please be clear about this: You’re perfectly free to observe these distinctions in your own writing — as I often do. But in editing, you should be aware that the ground is shifting under your feet and you don’t get to legislate from personal preferences.


Distinctions that are dissolving

enormity I’m trying to hold on to enormity in the sense of “a great evil.” It seems to me that once you have used it in the context of the Holocaust or the millions killed by Stalin and Mao, you trivialize the word by using it to mean merely something large. I also resist the “task of daunting dimensions” sense — the enormity of health care reform. But it’s almost certainly a losing battle.

hanged/hung Restricting hanged to execution by rope is another lost cause. (A wag, commenting on Facebook about the distinctions, said that there’s a cable TV show that explains it.)

lend/loan Loan as a verb is out there. It has been out there for centuries.

who/whom Whom is not dead yet, but it is increasingly feeble. Since the language appears to be moving steadily toward using who as both subject and object, the safe course for the skittish writer is to do just that.


Verdict rendered

A reader who has acces to a a listserve of Maryland criminal defense attorneys reports concern about the opening of an article in The Sun about the reporting of a life verdict in a capital case: “A federal jury on Wednesday failed to agree on a death sentence, sparing the lives of two convicted killers and showing them the mercy that they denied their victims.”

The reader asks: “Both the use of the verb “fail” and the last phrase were objected to as being judgmental. I opined that a lead like that wouldn't have gotten through in the “old days.” Was I right?

Fail suggests that the jury attempted to impose the death penalty but was unsuccessful, something that it is doubtful the reporter could have known. Neutral, factual language would have been preferable: A federal jury declined to impose the death penalty or, even better, A federal jury reached a sentence of life imprisonment rather than the death penalty. ...

The mercy they denied their victims is one of those superfluous flourishes that writers think will juice up their dry reporting. Its effect is to telegraph that the writer thinks that killing people is a Bad Thing, which scarcely needs telling.

And, while I’m piling on, on Wednesday, at least in idiomatic English syntax, belongs after agree. Putting adverbs of time in the wrong place in sentences is an annoying journalistic tic.


Greek to me

This query arrived in an e-mail, and I have no idea what the writer is seeking.

What not to say to greeks?
I was thinking that your advice would be very helpful. I know you must be very busy so any pointers would be very much appreciated. A little advice would go a long way right now.

Maybe not to praise Turks?


On the air

I recorded an interview yesterday on the state of copy editing for National Public Radio’s On the Media. In Baltimore, you can hear it on WYPR-FM at 2:00 p.m. this Sunday. Then you can return to this blog and comment on how fatuous I sounded.

The diaspora of editors

In 1997, when American newspapers were still hugely profitable and it looked as if they might come to grips with this Internet thing, a respect for editing was on the increase.

That was the year that the American Copy Editors Society was founded, with the backing of senior figures in the newspaper industry. Within a few years, a number of major newspapers created the position of assistant managing editor for the copy desk (or an equivalent), to consolidate scattered operations, to achieve uniformity in editing practices, to make clear that editing involves more than formatting for typesetting and running the spell-check, and to give editing a voice within the high command.

You know what happened. The bottom fell out of the newspaper business model and a recession accelerated the decline. Increasingly, desperation and panic led to round after round of buyouts and layoffs. The wolves are closing in, and the children are being tossed from the troika.

Many of those assistant managing editors are gone — Melissa McCoy in Los Angeles, Kay Jarvis in Denver, Leslie Guevarra in San Francisco, Don Podesta in Washington, Merrill Perlman in New York. Kathy Schenck announced last week that she is leaving the Journal Sentinel in Milwaukee. Some of them were replaced after they took buyouts, but the position itself has sometimes been eliminated or restructured.

It is not just the ranking editors who are gone. Copy desks around the country have been decimated, and the practice is repeated in magazine journalism and book publishing. Decades of skill and experience have walked out the door, to teach, to consult, to write, to do public relations — but less and less to edit.

But I did not invite you into this post to sit on the ground and tell sad stories of the death of editing. There is work to be done.

As the economy slowly reconstitutes itself and journalism staggers blindly toward whatever its future will be, it is much more urgent than in 1997 to establish the importance of editing and to give editors a voice.

I see that ACES is working to find its footing again in training and retraining editors for the new environment, and I trust that it will continue reach out to editors and careers beyond newspapering.

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications will be meeting in Boston at the beginning of August, and Leslie-Jean Thornton of the Cronkite School at Arizona State has been inviting colleagues on Twitter to suggest ideas for the Future of Editing session. (You can also make suggestions here; I’ll forward them.)

The Poynter Institute is in the middle of a “Big Ideas” conference to sort out what is working in journalism and what avenues look productive. There’s a live blog.

Those of you who teach composition at the secondary or college level have the opportunity to make a substantial difference by showing your students that writing is more than mere self-expression, that accuracy and precision and focus and clarity can be achieved through self-editing, that precision in grammar and usage is an important skill to master.

Those of you who are readers should consider protesting shoddy work rather than shrugging it off. If an article — newspaper, magazine, online — is riddled with silly errors or shoddily constructed, complain. If the book you purchased is similarly sloppy, complain. I’m not giddy with optimism about the outcome, but I do think that over time, customers’ complaints can have an effect.

And those of you who have any authority over hiring, particularly in the growing online enterprises: When you get resumes that show experience in editing, pay attention to those candidates. They know useful things.