Uncle John says, I want YOU

for the American Copy Editors Society.


Last week, after a five-year absence, I was able to return to a national ACES conference. In Philadelphia I was able to greet old friends, Bill Connolly, Beryl Adcock, and Alex Cruden, whom I have known since the first ACES conference at Chapel Hill in 1997, along with many others; to meet Renee Petrina, Brian White, and Emily Ingram, whom I had only known through blogs and

Twitter; and to introduce my wife, Kathleen Capcara, she of the famed “Except in Hell” remark, to them all. 

Personal gratifications aside, the conference offered considerable substance. Kathy Schenck, who is leaving editing for the business world, presented her workshop on skeptical editing for the last time. Susan Keith of Rutgers described the research she is doing on the global “seismic shift” in how editing is being done. Josh Benton gamely defended his statement “Sometimes the path between the writer and the reader will not have an editor” before a room full of skeptics. Bill Walsh, with whom I have modest but friendly differences on some points of usage, displayed in his “Rules That Aren’t” session how his views have been evolving since I last checked in on him. Doug Ward of Kansas, describing essential skills for editors in the new era, reminded us not to get so involved in technology as to neglect our traditional skills: grammar, usage, spelling, style, fact-checking, curiosity,

vocabulary, attention to detail, ability to negotiate, focusing on the writing. 

If you thought that the previous paragraph was dense, it merely skimmed a few of the workshops offered. There is no event anywhere, offered by anyone, that offers editors more substance and more useful advice, than the national ACES conference. Moreover, it was deeply heartening to be there.

And people know that. More than three hundred people showed up, many of them, like me, at personal expense. They are the veterans of the War on Editing, determined in the most difficult of times to uphold the worth of the craft, the practice it, to get better at it. They have not surrendered. 

Neither should you. ACES has more than seven hundred members. If you are not one of them, why not? Sign up. The society’s Education Fund offers scholarships to students pursuing a career in editing. The find is now self-sustaining, with contributions to date of $150,000, but it could use more, and your contributions are tax-deductible. On a modest level, you can contribute to the education fund by using GoodSearch for your Internet research, specifying the American Copy Editors Society Education Fund as the beneficiary of the cent or two contributed for each search you perform on the site. 

I have known, worked with, and respected these people for thirteen years. Many of them have stood loyally by me during the vicissitudes of personal and professional life, and their friendship has been a joy. They merit your support. 

Photo credit: Phillip Blanchard

You'd rather be in Philadelphia

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one, because I’m going to tell it anyway.

At the first national conference of the American Copy Editors Society in 1997, someone said that the three hundred of us gathered in Chapel Hill constituted perhaps the largest group of copy editors ever assembled in human history.

When I got back to Baltimore, I repeated that to my wife, at which Kathleen muttered, “Except in Hell.”

Later today I will risk life, limb, and sanity by taking Interstate 95 to Philadelphia for the fourteenth national conference, the first I have been able to attend since 2005.

Though diminished by the recent casualties in the War on Editing, the stalwarts at ACES Philadelphia represent the people who are, against heavy odds, laboring to ensure that what you read in newspapers, magazines, books, and even some Web sites is as accurate and intelligible as they can make it. You cannot imagine how much in their debt you are.

They will be gathering to attend workshops on how they can become more effective practitioners of the craft, they will honor achievements of colleagues, and they will gather in the bar in the evening to lift a cheerful glass and share stories. Nothing could be better, and it is disappointing that I will have to miss the third day because of the technical rehearsal for Annie on Saturday.

I’m unlikely to do much or any blogging while at the conference, but you can take part in it vicariously by following the ACES conference blog. Or, since this is the 381st post at this site since May of last year, you could always rummage around in the archives if you miss me.

Written at random

Talking with an admirer of the poetry of James Thomson, Samuel Johnson, who found Thomson deplorably wordy, took down a volume of Thomson’s verse and read aloud a lengthy passage. “Is not this fine?” he asked. After the listener expressed admiration, Johnson said, “Well, sir, I have omitted every other line.”

I sometimes think that much journalism could be approached that way, by omitting alternate paragraphs, without much damage to the fabric. (I actually tried that once with a Sun columnist’s work, and no one could detect the difference, though we were obliged to print the full text anyhow.)

For your inspection, an item from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel  forwarded by one of my many spies, with commentary following:

Miami firefighter killed in Hollywood motorcycle crash just back from Haiti

HOLLYWOOD

An off-duty Miami firefighter who recently returned from a rescue mission to Haiti died Thursday night after his motorcycle collided with a car, police said.

Leslie Luma, an eight-year veteran with City of Miami Fire-Rescue, celebrated his anniversary with the fire department Thursday. He was married and had three children.

"He was well-loved by a lot of his co-workers and his family," Fire-Rescue spokesman Ignatius Carroll told WPLG-Ch. 10.

The firefighter's motorcycle collided with a 2001 Ford Mustang near the intersection of North State Road 7 and West Park Road just before 9 p.m., said Police Lt. Manny Marino.

The Mustang's driver, Sherry Lynn Marks, 19, suffered minor injuries.

Luma, 37, was a member of the Urban Search and Rescue Team Task Force 2 and recently returned from rescue efforts in Haiti.

Preliminary investigation indicates that the crash occurred when the Mustang traveling southbound on North State Road 7 veered into the northbound lanes and collided with the northbound 2005 American Suzuki motorcycle, Marino said.

The crash is under investigation.

Commentary

I suggest to the students in my editing class that jotting down a rough outline of the elements of an article is one way to get at structural issues. Look at the paragraph structure of this exercise:

(1) Firefighter killed in motorcycle accident.

(2) Anniversary of employment, details of family.

(3) Eulogistic quote.

(4) Detail of accident.

(5) Other motorist.

(6) Firefighter’s trip to Haiti.

(7) More details of accident.

(8) Investigation continues.

So the details of the fatal accident, which are what news this article has to offer, are broken up into four paragraphs, separated paragraphs containing other material. And the order of the paragraphs is apparently generated, like the winning Mega Millions numbers, at random.

It is then topped off with a headline written evidently by someone with a tenuous grasp of conventional English syntax. If it is necessary to pad out the headline by reference to the firefighter’s activities in Haiti (of which no significant details are given), then “Miami firefighter just back from Haiti is killed in Hollywood motorcycle crash” would have been less likely to puzzle the reader.

Refrain*

Once you eliminate most of the editors and copy editors, and overburden the remnant, this article and headline are the kind of dog’s breakfast that the reader can expect to find.

*Since this is becoming a stock observation at this blog, I thought I’d label it for you.

Santayana on the copy desk

Those who do not learn from the headline mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them.

A reader forwards this Denver Post headline:

Colo. bars taking live crayfish from Yampa basin

Bar as a noun meaning a saloon is widely recognized. But it is also a verb much favored in headlinese meaning “prohibit.”

The same ambiguity crops up in a classic headline collected in one of the Columbia Journalism Review’s features of defective headlines:

Minneapolis bars putting leaves in street

The errors of the past repay study.

Once more unto the breach

I regret having to point out to you this sentence from an article in The New York Times about the recent Republican gathering in Louisiana:

At a cocktail reception on the banks of the Mississippi River, people in yellow Tea Party shirts barely mingled with Republican stalwarts, many of whom wore neckties or broaches decorated with elephants, the proud symbol of the party.

Broach, of course, is not a noun but a verb meaning “to break open.” Its earliest sense in English was to pierce something with a sharp object, but, the English always having been great drinkers, was more commonly used to mean opening a cask or barrel to draw out the liquor. It also means to open up in a figurative sense; to broach a painful subject is to introduce it for discussion.

The word the writer was groping for is the homophone brooch, an ornament pinned to clothing. It is an etymological variant of broach, which as a noun meant “skewer” or “bodkin” in Middle English, thus suggesting the pin that fastens the ornament.

Broach the verb is sometimes confused with breach, which means to break through a barrier – as when the Turks breached the mighty walls of Constantinople in 1453 and brought down what little remained of the Byzantine Empire. Figuratively, it means to break an agreement. As a noun, breach is the gap that has been broken in a wall or the violation of the agreement, as in “breach of contract.”  

Breach in turn is confused with breech, which used to mean the buttocks. That is what breeches or britches are meant to cover. It survives in modern English as the name for the back part of a rifle or gun barrel.

Sweetheart, get me Ettlin

I wrote briefly yesterday (“Editors? We don’t need no stinking editors”) about an inept little news article from the Charlotte Observer that is sadly representative of the shoddy work proliferating in print and online. Thinking about it yesterday, I realized the problem: It had not been Ettlinized.

David Michael Ettlin was The Baltimore Sun’s veteran rewrite man, and by veteran I mean that it sometimes felt as if he had revised A.S. Abell’s copy. The rewrite man’s job – now largely vanished – existed to deal with certain realities of which the public may be unaware and which many journalists are reluctant to acknowledge:

1. Many journalists are not very good writers. The skill of reporting, of ferreting out information, is very different from the skill of composition, and few reporters are equally good at both. The rewrite man took raw copy and Englished it.

2. Journalism is done in haste, which makes for mistakes. The rewrite man was a first line of defense, cleaning up a multitude of errors before shipping stories to the copy desk. (When you read corporatespeak about reducing “layers” of editing, you are to understand that every layer that is eliminated to save money increases the likelihood that what you read with be less and less reliable.)

3. Journalism is a craft, learned by apprenticeship. It was glorious to watch the incomparable Ettlin take a crew of tyros with journalism degrees and patiently instruct them how to construct an obituary, how to write a police story without convicting a suspect in advance of trial, how to get to the point in the first paragraph instead of the tenth.

4. They don’t know the territory. Tyros come in from out of town, along with other reporters migrating for (they think) better jobs. They didn’t grow up here; they don’t know the local geography, history, folkways, and people. So, over time, Ettlin would patiently point out when they made parallel streets intersect or got people’s names wrong (if R Adams Cowley of Shock Trauma saw his name in the paper with a period after the R, the newsroom would hear about it). He would also, in the palmy days, get the keys to the publisher’s Cadillac and drive the newcomers around town for the day for an instructed tour of echt Baltimore.

It would not shock me to hear a reporter say that he or she learned more from Ettlin about the practicalities of reporting and writing than from a major in journalism.

David Michael Ettlin retired from The Sun after four decades on the job and still posts occasionally on a blog, The Real Muck. The qualities he brought to the work – skepticism, irreverence about Important People, humor, an unerring news judgment, and, above all, a determination to make every text factually accurate and clear for the reader – still exist among the attenuated staffs of our newspapers and online publications. How much these qualities are valued, or even recognized, by the people making decisions is a question yet to be answered.

Editors? We don't need no stinking editors

Now that everything is all immediate and direct between writer and reader, since all those superfluous editors and copy editors were dismissed like barnacles scraped off the hull, journalism has entered an era of smooth sailing, right?

Take a look at what HeadsUp: The Blog has to say about a minor masterpiece of modern journalism out of Charlotte, North Carolina. We are treated to the work of a journalist who cannot write a twelve-paragraph article about a tree falling on a house without making a hash of it.

Adding to the overall sense of incompetence unencumbered by editorial expertise, there is the crash blossom headline:

Home crushed by tree with dog inside

 An isolated example, I grant you, but an increasingly typical one.

From over the pond

The estimable Jan Freeman, writing in The Boston Globe about British-American linguistic cross-pollination, endorses my previous suggestion that there are a number of Britishisms that we could profit from adopting:

Surely, among all these offerings, everyone can find a Britishism to cherish. How about Thursday week, meaning “a week from Thursday,” which would instantly cure our chronic confusion about whether a meeting or dinner is scheduled for “this Thursday” or “next Thursday”? I’ve always been fond of fortnight, too — I suppose it doesn’t catch on here because our vacations (their holidays) are rarely two weeks at a stretch. And surely sell-by date is sleeker and more precise than expiration date.

I’d add snog for “to make out,” top up (a drink) for “refill,” gormless for “clueless” or “stupid,” and dodgy for “unsound,” “questionable,” or “suspicious.” (Your suggestions have not exactly been arriving in a torrent; am I supposed to do all the work here?)

Ms. Freeman also drew attention to Separated by a Common Language, a blog by Lynne Murphy, an American linguist living in Britain, who has written extensively about these transatlantic exchanges. (She is also on Twitter, @lynneguist, a pun I reluctantly endorse). I was particularly happy to discover her post from last December in which she provides some details on the increasing popularity of go missing on these shores, despite the unaccountably vehement and irrational resistance to it. As she explains, along lines that I too have suggested:

Go missing is beautifully meaningful--giving us some nuances not available in other words. It's not the same as vanish or disappear--and that's what makes it so useful. When something is said to go missing, it makes it seem like a less mysterious event than 'disappearing' or 'vanishing' which have a whiff of the supernatural about them. One can use it as a way to avoid blame--including self-blame: My phone went missing rather than I lost my phone. If a person 'goes missing', then there's a sense that although we don't know where they are, they do.

These exchanges often prompt spasms of crankiness. The British tend to bridle at Americanisms, even when they turn out to have a long history in British English as well, and Americans are liable to see the adoption of any British turn of phrase as a laughable affectation. (And I have encountered enough Episcopal clergy with synthetic British accents to understand the latter reaction.)

But I suggest that we can leave the peeving aside. If a word or expression offers a nuance that we did not previously enjoy, or simply adds to our variety of expression, go for it. That last phrase is an Americanism; I offer it to the British in a spirit of linguistic cousinhood.

Friday farrago

Before I head off to Memorial Episcopal to help erect the set for Annie – you are planning to see the show, aren’t you? – I am assembling some odds and ends to amuse and instruct. (Farrago, “a confused mixture,” comes from a Latin word meaning “mixed fodder.”)

Item: If you were both instructed and amused by yesterday’s post linking to John McWhorter’s analysis of Sarah Palin’s speech patterns, you should have a look at Mark Liberman’s follow-up on Ms. Palin’s distal demonstratives at Language Log.

Item: The estimable and apparently indefatigable Professor Liberman also tackled Louann Brizendine’s The Male Brain and painstakingly examined sources identified in the endnotes. What he discovered, and demonstrates, is that citation after citation refers to a study that not only does not support the author’s assertions, but has at best the most tenuous relationship to her subject.

His conclusion: “… Dr. Brizendine's new book is more of the same sort of ‘psychoneuroindoctrinology’ found in her first book, in which the pages and pages of endnotes and references are a sort of Potemkin Village of scientific pretense laid out in support of banal gender stereotypes.”  

Item: The War on Editing claims another set of casualties as Media General “consolidates” (read: “eliminates staff while homogenizing content”) copy editing and page design at the Tampa Tribune, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Winston-Salem Journal.

The typical robotic justification has been offered:

“Our consolidated editing and design operations allow our newsrooms to focus on strong local news reporting. Stories will be edited once rather than multiple times, and we can take advantage of economies of scale and centralization of top talent,” said Donna Reed, Media General’s Vice President of Content. “Our customers will be unaffected by this internal process change and all news decisions will continue to be made by our local editors,” said Ms. Reed.

I will not be taking any bets on the customers’ satisfaction.

Item: Gene Roberts of the University of Maryland, formerly of The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times, co-author of The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, coincidentally talked yesterday about the effects for the public of these economies of scale and centralizations. “It is past time for America to become alarmed about its shrinking news coverage, but it is showing few signs of concern,” he said. A fuller account is at Poynter.org.

Item: And finally, an endorsement. I regularly encounter in my editing class at Loyola University Maryland students who immediately grasp what is essential in the craft of editing. One of the most promising in the thirty semesters I have taught was Elizabeth Morrison. She would have been a magnificent editor, had there been any future in editing. But, after military service and marriage, she has settled with her husband in Charlotte, North Carolina, and made a career as a photographer.

 Any of you in Charlotte or environs who might be in the market for photography would do well to have a look at her Web site, Elizabeth Morrison Photography. It’s also on Facebook.  

Why Sarah Palin talks like that

If you have marveled, as many have, about Sarah Palin’s distinctive speech patterns, John McWhorter has an explanation: She speaks like a child.

Please, please, good people, before you rush to Plymouth Road with your pitchforks and torches, this is not a Palin-bashing exercise. Dr. McWhorter is a linguist, and he presents at The New Republic a linguistic analysis of Ms. Palin’s speech patterns, along with an explanation of its appeal to the public.

As he explains, it was once the case that public figures practiced oratory. They thought out carefully what they intended to say, they wrote it down, in formal English, and they delivered it. One surviving exemplar of this practice is Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia:

Byrd is old enough to have minted in the days when making a speech meant clearing your throat and reading a prepared statement bedecked with ten-dollar words, and it qualifies today as an eccentricity. The practice will die with him.

Public address, even in Congress, has become much more casual, more conversational, more informal, more colloquial. And Ms. Palin, Dr. McWhorter argues, has carried this development further. Though you owe it to yourself to read his entire article, what his examination of a set of Palin utterances shows is that she does not link words and phrases so much syntactically or logically, but associatively.

The people who like that form of speech are those who are uncomfortable with the formalities and structures of written English. And that, though Dr. McWhorter does not address the point, is a potential source of difficulty for President Obama. The American people, taken as a whole, admire educational credentials more than they admire education, and Mr. Obama’s careful, structured, lawyerly sentences are likely to pall over time.

Mr. Obama’s supporters like to think that he is a model American, but I suspect that Dr. McWhorter is closer to the mark in his conclusion:

The modern American typically relates warmly to the use of English to the extent that it summons the oral — “You betcha,” “Yes we can!” – while passing from indifference to discomfort to the extent that its use leans towards the stringent artifice of written language. As such, Sarah Palin can talk, basically, like a child and be lionized by a robust number of perfectly intelligent people as an avatar of American culture. And linguistically, let’s face it: she is.