Copy Edit du Jour

"A display of the collection will be on site in the main pavilion"

Changed to ...

"The collection will be on display in the main pavilion."

Copy Edit du Jour

The road leads you through flourishing rainforests, flowing waterfalls,
plunging pools and dramatic seascapes.

Changed to:

The road leads you through flourishing rainforests AND PAST flowing
waterfalls, plunging pools and dramatic seascapes.

Any road that leads you through pools isn't much of a road. (I'm still thinking on "flourishing" and "plunging." I'm not too keen on those, either.)

Some Bad Sentences Just Coming Lookin' for You

I wasn't even reading this AP story about a derailed chair lift at a Maine ski resort. I was just skimming it when this sentence jumped out at me:

"Jay Marshall, hunkered down in a cold wind while on a lift next to the broken one, said that his lift was moving but that the broken one was not."

Um, if he's on a lift next to a broken one, do you have to tell us that the broken one wasn't working? For that matter, do you have to tell us that one that's not the broken one was working?

And isn't "hunkered down in a cold wind while on a lift next to" a little inelegant? Letting go of "hunkered down in" might have helped:

" ... enduring the cold wind as he rode a lift next to the broken one."

Then again, maybe not. It might be best to just cut the whole sentence. After all, who cares if a guy on a moving chair lift noticed that a broken chair lift wasn't moving?

But then you get to the next sentence and see you've been led down the wrong path.

"Jay Marshall, hunkered down in a cold wind while on a lift next to the broken one, said that his lift was moving but that the broken one was not. There was a 'loud snapping noise' after the lift restarted, he said, then screams."

Aha. So the we see that Marshall was talking about something that happened earlier. But the verb "was," written in the same tense as "hunkered," made it sound as though Marshall's lift was motionless as he was hunkered down and talking to the reporter. Shifting from simple past tense ("was") to past perfect (i.e. "had been") would have saved us the confusion: Hunkered down in a cold wind, Marshall said that the lift next to his had stopped working (at some point prior).

Skimming the rest of the article, I see it's quite well written. (Even good writers let a clunker slip in now and then. That's why they have editors.) But its lone bad sentence just reached out and grabbed me. I hope this isn't the start of a trend. I'd hate to think what would happen if bad sentences starting banding together and coming after editors.

What Was Stieg Thinking?

In some blog posts I did a while back shredding Stieg Larsson's prose, I couldn't help but wonder what had gone through his mind and the mind of his editor. Some recently published e-mail exchanges shed some light on this very question.

Excerpted here by the Wall Street Journal, the back-and-forth between Larsson and his editor, Eva Gedin, include two points I find particularly interesting.

First, Larsson knew his prose needed editing. "My texts are usually better after an editor has hacked away at them," he wrote.

Second, his editor seemed to like his pre-editing writing. "I'm pleased to hear that you think the books are well written."

Fascinating.

Tumbleweeds Can't Edit

A day after I posted about an error in the Los Angeles Times, my friend Carolyn Howard-Johnson blogged about another error in the Times — a mix up of "descent" and "decent."

And that reminds me: A Times business story I was reading last weekend had "fun" in place of "fund."

The L.A. Times has laid off a lot of people in the last few years — partly out of necessity, partly to compensate for some bad business moves. The paper's downtown office, once bustling and exciting, now seems a prime location for tumbleweeds.

The inevitable result: typos.

Copy Edit du Jour

While both Jane Doe and John Public grew up in South Florida, their love story
began in Los Angeles.

This writer managed to use two of my biggest peeves in the first two words of an article!

For one, I hate loose uses of "while." As a synonym for "though" or "although," it can be sloppy and confusing. As for "both," that's more a personal prejudice. Often it's just wasted ink. In the cases in which "both" is useful, like this sentence, writers often put it in a less-than-ideal location. Here's what I did to the passage.

Though Jane Doe and John Public both grew up in South Florida, their love story
began in Los Angeles.

Copy Edit du Jour

At present, the university has 15 schools and 52 departments.

... changed to ...

The university has 15 schools and 52 departments.

Feels so good to do that ...

Words I'm Looking Up (One in an occasional, cleverly named series on words I'm looking up)

predominately

Came across this recently in my editing work. I was editing marketing copy, so I just assumed the writer made a mistake. I started to change it to "predominantly," but then stopped and looked it up.

predominate

to have ascendancy, authority, or dominating influence (over others); hold sway
to be dominant in amount, number, etc.; prevail; preponderate

Related forms:
predominately: adverb

In other words, predominately is a lot like predominantly.

I changed it anyway.

Copy Edit du Jour

The school receives funding from the Jones Foundation, which is dedicated to fostering lifelong learning.

changed to:

... which promotes lifelong learning.

Again, it’s a newspaper thang.

Moments in Copy Editing

"The student body here is very diverse," said John Doe, the school's director of academic programs and outreach. "The student body is a clear reflection of the Los Angeles populous — a testament to our commitment to diversity."

.
.
.
.
.

I changed "populous" to "populace." Now, I realize this may have been obvious to many of you. But bear in mind that the passage appeared near the end of a very long and tedious story and it slipped by at least one editor before it got to me.

Aaah, sassifyin' ...

(As always, the excerpt was disguised to keep me outta trouble.)

The Queen of Extreme Editing

Say, here's a fun fact I just came across -- something that will strike awe in the heart of every editor who has ever taken a name like the California Institute for the Study of Polyunsaturated Fats on Rodents and Other Small High- and Low-Productivity Mammals and Some Reptiles to and chopped it down to just "the institute."

I'll present it in the form of a little trivia quiz. According to Wikipedia, whose name is this: María Rosario Pilar Martínez Molina Moquiere de les Esperades Santa Ana Romanguera y de la Najosa Rasten?

Answer: Someone who pared her whole identity down to just two syllables. You know her as Charo.

And, on behalf of editors everywhere, I say bravo and coochie-coochie.

Wonderings and Googlings (Wherein I wonder about words, then I Google them)

"it doesn't faze me" = 612,000 hits
"it doesn't phase me" = 1,740,000 hits

Some of the latter are, no doubt, people explaining how to use the word "faze." But one appears to be a bona fide error by an AP writer that got past an AP editor then past a Charleston Daily mail editor.

Either way, I'm shocked that the "phase" version occurs almost three times as often as the one with "faze."