Beyond the Elements of Style

The Best Of …

I do marketing writing for a living, so PR campaigns, taglines, and claims of product purity don’t do much for me. I’m pretty good at separating hype from quality when I do my own shopping.

Unless, of course, the claims are true.

In three cases, I’ve found them to be. The World’s Best Cat Litter is, in my experience, the world’s best cat litter. I am owned by two cats and know whereof I speak. Likewise The World’s Best Glass Cleaner really is amazing—streak-free cleaning, a glorious shine.

And, finally, to something that’s relevant to this blog: The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need, by Susan Thurman. It’s a slim, small volume, which puts a certain pinched look on the faces of most language enthusiasts who think that bigger is better. In this case, not so much.

If you hold any linguistics degree, if you edit medical journals for a living, if you spend your free time wagering on the existence of esoteric words, then you’re right: this isn’t the book for you. But for most people who simply want to get by without misplacing their apostrophes or without confusing their and there, it’s a great tool.

For solving tricky grammar questions, avoiding embarrassing errors, and getting your thoughts organized enough to put pen to paper, this compact work will provide you with all the tools you’ll ever need.

The book’s subtitle is A One-Stop Source for Every Writing Assignment, and it’s possible that it was in fact developed with students in mind. But think of all written communication as a writing assignment, and you’ll enter into the spirit of the thing.

Here you’ll find help understanding the parts of speech and elements of a sentence, avoiding common grammar and punctuation mistakes, using correct punctuation in every sentence, and writing clearly and directly. I suspect we all have colleagues to whom we’d like to gift this book based on those claims alone!

The most damaging mistakes a writer can make are probably misspelling or misusing words. Just a few of these errors will make a reader lose confidence in what you’re trying to say. Here are basic rules of English spelling and the most commonly misused words …

Oh, yeah … (insert blissful sigh here)

The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need is published by Adams Media, is affordable, easy to slip into a jacket pocket or purse (or keep in the top drawer of your desk!), so head out to your local independent bookseller and order a copy today. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

What is Copyediting?

Ah, copyediting. That catchall phrase so often used—and misused—to cover everything from proofreading to ghostwriting.

The reality is that copyediting comprises a very specific set of tasks done to a manuscript. When in doubt, start with Wikipedia:

The “five Cs” summarize the copy editor’s job: Make the copy clear, correct, concise, comprehensible, and consistent. Copy editors should Make it say what it means, and mean what it says.

Typically, copy editing involves correcting spelling, punctuation, grammar, terminology and jargon, timelines, and semantics; ensuring that the typescript adheres to the publisher’s style.

Copy editors also add any “display copy”, such as headlines and standardized headers, footers.

Copy editors are expected to ensure that the text flows, that it is sensible, fair, and accurate, and that any legal problems have been addressed. Some newspaper copy editors select stories from wire service copy.

Copy editors may shorten the text, to improve it or to fit length limits. This is particularly so in periodical publishing, where copy must be cut to fit the layout, and the text changed to ensure there are no “short lines.”

So a copyeditor begins with a stylesheet, either one used by the publisher or one that he or she creates. The stylesheet ensures consistency: one makes a decision about how to spell something, for example (as in copy editor or copyeditor!), or what one chooses to capitalize, etc.

Using this stylesheet, the copyeditor goes through the manuscript and makes sure that spelling, grammar, usage are all correct and that usage is consistent throughout. Copyediting may also include format editing—in other words, making sure that headers and subheaders are used correctly and consistently throughout the manuscript.

Copyeditors use terms that may sound like jargon to the uninitiated (as indeed does the language used in most specialized fields) but are helpful in deciding what changes to make and explaining why one is making them.

Want to learn more? Sign up for the copyediting elist published out of Indiana University and you’ll learn everything you ever wanted to know about dangling participles, poorly constucted sentences (and how to fix them!) and compound sentences. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

What Do I Need?

What does this manuscript need?

I can’t tell you how often I receive queries that say, “This only needs proofreading,” and yet clearly requires a heavy copyedit, or developmental editing, or character development, or even layout help. Sometimes it’s the person querying who isn’t aware of, shall we say, his or her own limitations. Often it’s just about not understanding the different processes that take place when a manuscript is moving toward publication. But, in any case, confusion often ensues.

Help is here! Today I’m starting a series that will look at what we mean by copyediting, line editing, layout, developmental editing, formatting, and the like. So mark these pages and check back and see whether your questions about process are answered. You’ll finally find out what you need! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Texting as Writing?

I have two stepchildren. Anastasia is fifteen, and Jacob is seventeen. Until a few years ago, I understood most of what they had to say … and write.

That changed once they obtained mobile phones.

Now their speech and writing alike are peppered with obscure acronyms, the exclusive use of lower-case in all written communication, and expressions that are at best nonsensical. One wonders what the standards will be in another few years, when the generation raised on text-messaging will come of age. Will entire books be written this way?

A member on a list to which I subscribe writes incessantly in iChat or instant message format—not so much the IKYN and AFAICT abbreviations, as “prolly” this and that, no punctuation that follows any rule with which I am familiar, an almost complete lack of capitals, and a rigorousness of thought to match. It’s like reading messages written with alphabet cereal … in the bowl.

Okay, so I’m a curmudgeon. I’ll freely admit it. But I love love love the English language and fear that I’m seeing its waning days. Let’s try and keep texting on mobile telephones, and reserve “real” (as in, correct) language for other communication? And then we’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

More on POD, self-publishing, etc.

Since I wrote my post a couple of days ago, I’ve been pointed to some interesting articles and helpful resources on the subject, a couple of which I’d like to share with you here.

Yesterday’s New York Times carried this article, Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay The Tab. (Misusing in the process several terms as author Motoko Rich refers to “self-publishers”—in fact, the article is referring to subsidy presses—and speaking of iUniverse as a “print-on-demand” company. One sees the writing on the wall: once the Times has misused a term, it’s hard to regain accuracy!)

An older article that appeared in Information Week in 1999 spoke to the hopes and plans surrounding the print-on-demand technology. In Barnes and Noble, IBM to Develop Electronic Books, analyst Tischelle George discusses another use of the technology: a kiosk in every bookshop that will in fact print a book immediately and on-demand so that every book on the planet is available, all the time. This is a truly breathtaking use of the technology that, sadly, has not come to pass; and now we’re stuck with the term referring to authors willing to pay to have their books (at best) enter into public discourse or (at worse) gather dust on Aunt Edna’s bookshelf.

This past weekend I was sitting in the green room of a theatre, waiting for a play I’d written to go onstage, and was reading to pass the time. One of the actors looked at me in surprise and asked, “What’s that?

“A Kindle,” I responded. He continued to look baffled, so I expanded: “It’s an ebook reader.”

The actor shook his head. “I have no idea,” he said, “what any of that means!”

Soon he will; soon just about everybody will, as electronic books are the literary technology most likely to survive hard economic times and downturns in reading rates. I’m probably a lone voice crying in the wilderness here, but I believe that the way we name and communicate about these various ways of making books available to the public matters.

Think about what you want to communicate, and how you want to communicate it, so that you too can be … beyond the lements of style!

POD, Subsidy Presses, Self-Publishing, and More

Every so often I need to go through explaining what is what in publishing, as a new crop of writers and would-be writers starts slinging terms around without thinking about what those terms actually mean.

So let’s look at some definitions:

1) POD: this stands for print-on-demand. It is not a kind of publishing, it’s a publishing technology. Subsidy presses, self-publishers, and traditional publishers alike all use POD technology. It’s used most extensively in the subsidy press arena, causing many to confuse the terms. Resist that temptation. It’s a printing technology that developed after the advent of digital printing, enabling the company or individual to print a copy of a book when it is ordered, as opposed to accumulating expensive inventory. As Wikipedia says: “Many traditional small presses have replaced their traditional printing equipment with POD equipment or contract their printing out to POD service providers. Many academic publishers, including university presses, use POD services to maintain a large backlist; some even use POD for all of their publications. Larger publishers may use POD in special circumstances, such as reprinting older titles that had been out of print or doing test marketing.”

2) Subsidy presses: they used to be called vanity presses; they take your money and in return publish your book for you. Anything can and is published (few require editing;some offer it at additional expense), meaning that the books published by subsidy presses vary wildly in quality. Leading subsidy presses include iUniverse, Authorhouse, Booksurge, XLibris, and Trafford. Contracts vary: some provide all necessary services for a set fee, others are more a la carte in their offerings; some copyright your book in their name, others allow the author to retain copyright.

3) Self-publishing: Here you set up your own publishing company, and contract with printers, distributors, editors, graphics and design folks, cover artists, marketing professionals, and so on, to perform the tasks associated with publishing. Many self-publishers only publish their own books; others go on to take on other authors and eventually may become small independent presses.

If we as writers can’t get our terms right, what can we expect of the rest of the world, those who (theoretically at least!) follow our lead. So don’t use these terms interchangeably: use them properly. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

More on the Double Spaces

My friend and colleague Dick Margulis — who knows far more about such things than I ever shall — sent me some more information to share with those of you who are still disbelievers.

He disagres with me about the readability of text written with only one space between sentences (”It is still true that for greater readability extra space after a sentence is desirable”); but that disagreement nonwithstanding, it’s a nice encapsulation of this history.

Read it, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Times New Roman Isn’t, Either …

When it comes to matters of typography, I am clearly a babe in the woods and sit at the feet of people such as Dick Margulis, who had this to say about my weekend post on the evils of using the Courier font:

Times New Roman was a terrible, terrible choice for a default serif font in Word–and the fact that it is the Word default font is the reason so many people use it. It was designed to be used in a narrow newspaper column (the Times of London), and as such it is a semi-condensed face. That means that with normal (default) margins on US letter-size paper, there are too many characters on a line for comfortable, extended reading.

If you’re going to recommend TNR for mss., you need to recommend, as well, that margins be bumped up to 1.5 inches. That leaves a 5.5 inch type column, and 12 point TNR is satisfactory (if boring) on that measure, because it averages 65 characters per line–close to the limit for extended reading.

However, there are much better choices, even within the default font set that installs with Word, for reading comfort.

So there it is. Times New Roman isn’t your friend, any more than Courier is; so be aware of that, and that there may be issues with your favorite font, as well.

To clarify, I’m speaking here mostly of printed documents that will be sent out as queries and proposals, not as manuscripts to be read on-screen, where one can, of course, change the font so that one can read in whatever way makes one comfortable.

Dick does add:

Oh, and I completely agree with you about Courier. I see it recommended all the time in books about submitting to agents. I even see it listed as a requirement on agent sites. But there’s really no good reason for it that I can see.

Learning about fonts (as I clearly still am) is part of being … beyond the elements of style!

No More Double Spaces!

I may have addressed this already, but in the interests of both my sanity and new readers of my blog, I’m going to take it up again.

Repeat after me: it is no longer the convention to place two spaces between sentences.

To my amazement, this seems to be one of the most difficult changes to the way we produce copy for people to accept. And some simply don’t. One of my consulting clients, a marketing firm, has two very highly placed employees who refuse to believe me and continue to place the two spaces between sentences despite my constant and no doubt annoying entreaties to remove one of them. They’re both old enough to have taken typing classes on typewriters, so I’ll cut them a very little slack; but other clients, far younger, are having the same difficulty.

Yet there’s not a single usage guide today that advocates doing so. In fact, a colleague of mine tells me that when he was learning typesetting in 1954 he was told to not insert two spaces!

Typewriters use fixed-width or monosized fonts. Computer fonts (with the exception of Courier, meant to duplicate the look of a typewriter) do not. Treating computers like typewriters –– and making the assumption that rules that work with one will work with the other — is just plain silly.

There are a few resources out there that deal with this particular issue along with other transitions from fixed-font to variable-font devices: Robin Williams’ two books, The Mac is Not a Typewriter: A Style Manual for Creating Professional-Level Type on Your Macintosh (as well as an edition for PC users) are excellent if a little dated (they came out as revised editions in 1995).

A succinct summary of the convention is available in an article in Upper and Lower Case Magazine, Double Spaces Between Sentences … NOT!, in which the author, Ilene Strizver, notes,

Conversely, nearly all computer fonts (except Courier) have proportional spacing, which means that the width of the characters and the spacing surrounding them are in proportion to each other. Proportional spacing results in a more even, balanced appearance. Because of this, a single space is enough to create the necessary visual separation between sentences.

So … don’t do it. One space after punctuation (periods are most frequently abused, though some writers add double spaces after colons, semicolons, and even commas as well) is the current law of the publishing land. Don’t make your manuscript stand out because of its errors, especially one as easily fixed as this one (a global search-and-replace will take care of it nicely).

And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!