Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Check-in, typos, and [sic]

Well hello to alllll my many and multitudinous readers out there! And is there indeed a difference between "many" and "multitudinous"...? Only the few might hazard a guess. By the way, I'll try to catch these typos, but there are sometimes gonna be instances of multiple letters or characters in my posts, and this is due to the settings of the repeat speed on my new Dell laptop, which if I slowed down anymore would be aggravating but which manages to insert an extra character if I'm not VERY careful and nimble.

Also: In time, maybe more readers of this blog will be editors themselves and I'll post with their interest more in mind (although I myself have no desire at all to follow an editing blog). I could get into, for example, the ways whereby a well-written document takes the caring editor as long to finish as one that’s badly writtten (there's that speed-typo!), yet with a doc that’s very, very well-written, to the point where the editor almost questions his or her service to it, he/she just has a good ol' time, and even though he/she cares about the paper, the project gathers a breakaway speed and one is happily done in record time. Meanwhile, another Q & A from recently...

In some of the quotes you put sic, I apologize but I'm not familiar with that term. Would you clarify this for me, please?

That's Latin which writers or editors use when the word or phrase that comes before it is incorrect grammatically or, most likely, spelling-wise. We do it when we don't really have the right to change it ourselves, like in a quote, so we use [sic] to indicate "this was in the original and we're leaving as is." I suspect that some of your case-study quotations were transcribed wrongly, so you can probably fix a number of them yourself if you feel the authority.

Okey-doke, "everyone"? Bye for now. -NP

Monday, January 19, 2009

More Q & A...

Lifeliong Learner left a comment on one of the posts, asking the following:
Can you explain the proper use of dashes and hyphens?

Well now, sure I can, but trade secrets are hard to come by. Too much could be said about this subject so I'll restrict myself here.
Hyphens: They join words which, after a while, everyone sort of agrees should be joined. Often, those two words, "everyone" will later agree, should just go ahead and become closed up, and then you'll want to skip the hyphen and make one word out of two. Hyphens also are crucial in joining certain words on a case-by-case basis, but perhaps we'll get into adjectives and modifiers later. The little line on your keyboard after 0 (zero) is a hyphen. In the days of typewriters one would enter two of these consecutively to make a proper dash. So it would look like one longer line broken in the middle. This is still done, but in MS-Word you can go to Insert, Symbols and find the...
"Em Dash": Which gives you an even longer, and unbroken, line. This is what we mean by a good old regular dash -- something to separate one thought from another, usually in the manner of simple offsetting. Word will insert the em dash with no space on either end, following the trend for decades of saving space. What's interesting is how this appears to be changing recently. You can even see newspapers (who are always fussy about space) leaving a space on each end of the dash, thus giving the eye an easier, more opened-up journey along the page.
En Dash: Just time enough here to give a fun example of this shorter dash, the last most anyone will ever need to wrry about. This is also found in Insert, Symbol and usually is used for ranges -- for example, page ranges. Okay: "He took the Boston-New York flight." What, is there now a city called Boston-New? No. And even though we may all know what this one means, properly we need an en dash instead of that hyphen up there. Why? It has to do with the fact that New York is made of two words. If "he" took the Boston-Chicago flight, he'd arrive safely with the hyphen.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Unnecessary words

Here's a classic case: "The reason why I did it was..." You don't need the "why." Another case using the same type of statement: "The reason for this is because..." Again, stick to reason, drop "because." It's redundant. You can substitute "that" for many examples. "The reason for this is that I..." If you like "why" or "because" (and what's not to like?), there are obviously ways of inserting them properly. Happy writing, everyone.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

But how do we begin?

From time to time I will grant readers a look at an actual question put to me by someone whose project I've edited. You will see my answer as well, although some funny stuff may get added here before I hit "Post." So, a first Q & A:

Q. There were a couple of edits that seem to violate generally accepted rules, as
far as I remember them - e.g. beginning a sentence with "And" or
"But" -- isn't that to be avoided?

A. It depends on the material. Back in the old days it used to be avoided without question. Now writing has changed. Many nonfiction works employ this, and you probably read examples every day without really noticing. It takes a smart editor to know the rules enough to "break" them. And I wonder whom I could be talking about. But I digress...

Editing

www.thelastdraft.com
There it is, right up there... I'm a freelance copy editor. Some people aren't familiar with that term these days (after all, it's getting fairly old), so I also call what I do text editing. I specialize in punctuation. This is my first blog experience and it's supposed to get my website more exposure. Anyone wanna talk hyphens?

The Punctuator makes his mark

Wow, my own blog. Dare I call it a new day? New days mean another cuppa, so pardon -- I'll be back when the brewing's done.