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!

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!

It isn’t.

Here to tell us as much as you’ll ever want to know about the history of layout is my friend and colleague, Dick Margulis, whose blog is one of the best on the internet.

Here’s what he has to say about the history of layout:

Let’s look at the history of printing and publishing a bit. Initially, publishers were printers (or printers were publishers–however you prefer to view it). There was a brief period of turmoil in the fifteenth century when at least a couple of publishers entered into a commercial venture with monastic scriptoria to produce manuscripts in competition with these newfangled printing establishments. It was a snob appeal ploy (you’re too good for that cheap mechanical stuff), but eventually it gave way.

In any case, the printers took responsibility for finding manuscripts they wanted to reproduce, designing and casting the alphabets for them, composing the type, proofreading, printing, and in some cases binding (although that was often done elsewhere, on commission, after the book was sold).

Move forward a few centuries to the American Colonies (Chicago would probably lowercase colonies, wouldn’t they? Too bad.) You’ve been to Williamsburg or Sturbridge or at least seen the Mr. Rogers version, and you know the situation at that stage. Printers are doing the occasional book, but mostly they’re doing job work. The customer comes in with a rough draft. The printer selects fonts and does the layout. The customer gets a chance to look at a proof after the printer makes his own corrections. The job is printed. Books, though, were still published by printers and so it was printers who controlled both page design and editing.

However, compositors were a highly regarded lot. They were among the most respected of craftspeople because of their literacy and their knowledge of the arcane bits of punctuation and grammar. They remained high status workers until the demise of mechanical typesetting and the introduction of desktop publishing in the 1980s.

I think we were probably well into the nineteenth century before authors had enough clout to complain to publishers about the changes made by printers, who by then had evolved into separate operations if not entirely separate companies in all cases. However, layout–for books as well as for job work–was still in the hands of printers and standards were rapidly devolving until, by the end of the nineteenth century, whatever the editorial quality may have been, typography was at its historical nadir. Apparently NOBODY was concerned with layout. Composition was strictly an economic activity, done by the lowest bidder regardless of how well respected its practitioners may have been.

Then along came William Morris in England and the Arts & Crafts movement. Suddenly some artists were taking a serious look at the possibilities for a beautiful printed page, harking back to the Medieval manuscripts and the incunabula. This led to a flowering of the arts of type design and, simultaneously, typography and layout, both in England and the US. This movement crossed over from book design to advertising design and the two fields informed each other in rich ways up to the present.

So I’d say it was the period from about 1896 to 1940 over which publishers took layout decisions away from printers and handed them explicitly to designers (earlier for high-prestige publishers, later in that range for bottom feeders). Prior to that, if editors held any sway over compositors in terms of layout, it was minimal beyond saying how many pages the book was supposed to end up.

Next week I’ll continue “What is Layout?” with some more modern examples and definitions, but I wanted to start you off with Dick’s words. Context is, after all, everything; and modern layout did not spring fully grown from the head of Zeus. Understanding where processes came from is essential to understanding those processes, so do bear with me. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

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!

I wish I were a real writer.

What nonsense! The truth is, I am a real writer. I have novels and nonfiction books, short stories and articles, poetry and produced plays to my credit. Do they pay all my bills? No; but the reality is that I have in fact fashioned a life around writing. I make my living writing copy: website copy, business copy, press releases and white papers and business articles. It doesn’t mean that I’m always writing what I want to be writing … but I’m always writing.

What makes us real? What criteria do we use to define ourselves? It’s worth spending a little time thinking about it. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

I have to warn you, however, that not all of those mentioned will be to your taste; in fact, it seemed to me that a couple were misplaced, and their creators were looking instead for the Bulwer Lytton contest instead.

I’m off to a day away from my desk, but I’ll be adding in my own favorite opening line … and I’ll be sure to include it here!

So share your favorite with the world, and see what others have to say. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

I’m not the only one that has happened to, surely. And a fairly recent article, Anne Trubek explores the same issue … with some interesting conclusions.

One might consider handwriting as a technology — a way to make letters — and conclude that the way of making them is of little moment. But handwriting is bound up with a host of associations and connotations that propel it beyond simply a fine-motor skill. We connect it to personal identity (handwriting signals something unique about each of us), intelligence (good handwriting reflects good thinking) and virtue (a civilized culture requires handwriting).

So perhaps you might want to think twice before giving up your fountain pen for good! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Kirkus’s new owner is Herb Simon, “the owner of the Indiana Pacers, the NBA team, and chairman emeritus of Simon Property Group, a shopping mall developer,” according to the New York Times. Plans are for Kirkus to continue to be published “as a print magazine while beefing up its digital offerings.”

“With the growth of e-books and e-reading devices, no one can really see the future of publishing. But turmoil like this creates opportunities,” said Simon in the NYT article. “At a time when even the definition of a book is changing, my love of books makes me want to be part of the solution for the book publishing industry.”

Simon is apparently just as interested in publishing as he is in sports: he is already the owner of an independent bookseller (and we love independent booksellers!).

So there is hope in these changing times, and your next book in prepublication may yet see the light of day in the new and possibly improved Kirkus Reviews. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

A lot of people use RSS to subscribe to blogs. Here’s the quick-and-dirty Wikipedia take on it. Instead of having to remember to visit a blog every now and then to see what’s new there (and who can remember?), you can use an RSS reader. It will notify you when there’s a new listing.

Both the Mozilla Firefox browser and the Mozilla Thunderbird mail and news client have RSS tools, as do many other browsers. I use Safari, and the blogs I subscribe to just show up in a blogs folder, looking very much like a mail folder. Each blog is its own subfolder, and the blog article titles show up like email messages.

Try subscribing to blogs that you read, and you’ll both save time and get more information. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Okay, yeah, so I’m a Mac girl, and of course my cult believes that the world will be saved by the Macintosh. But a new product offering hope to those of us who spend our days sitting in a room and writing?

Bear with me for a moment here. Let me take you back to the beginning of the century, when record labels suddenly realized that musicians could make a perfectly good living without them. Creation and recording? Online. Distribution? Online. Marketing? Online. And while the music consumer in me loved the change (iTunes rocks, let’s face it), the author in me said, hey, wait … at least there’s still an income stream here for musicians. The song itself isn’t the product: the concerts, the t-shirts, those have become the products. Musicians can thumb their noses at the establishment and still pay the rent. But what about authors? Come on, who’s going to spend $75 for a favorite author’s face on a sweatshirt? Or pay $150 to go to a reading?

Ain’t going to happen.

So along with other writers I’ve been watching events unfold with some trepidation. And while I will admit to owning a Kindle and having become addicted to the ease of download and portability, I also have concern about the monolithic control of Amazon. So I was interested in this article by Eliot Van Buskirk in Wired magazine (and thanks to my friend Pete Tedlie for turning me on to the article!):

Wired.com’s Brian Chen and Dylan Tweney were right about Apple launching a book store to complement the iPad. The new iBook store will work pretty much the same as iTunes, functioning as one of 12 new apps that come installed on every tablet, and allowing users to choose books from a growing catalog. People who may never have contemplated actually buying an e-book before might consider it, now that it’s something they can do on their shiny new tablet. Authors and book publishers will have a larger market to pitch to, and they could take more risks on lower-selling authors, given the low cost of distributing e-books.

Still, books have not fared well during the growth of other electronic media and will face the same stiff competition on the iPad that they face elsewhere. Either way, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos should feel a bit tense today facing new competition from an extensible device that also does e-books and can be had for less than the price of a DX Kindle.

I was able to perceive some hope there. I have an acquaintance who makes a very nice living, thank you very much, exclusively writing ebooks. Right now the only categories that afford that kind of income are erotica and romance, but where they lead others may follow.

And anytime more people have books accessible to them, it’s a Good Thing. Consider the possibilities of the future, and then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!