Copy Edit du Jour: Breaking up isn't hard to do

Yesterday I showed a writer friend this passage* from an article I was copy editing about a young couple's courtship:

Supporting each other through their education and in their career dreams has been a vein running through their 10-year relationship that continues today as Jones pursues her dreams of becoming a licensed psychiatrist.

After graduating from the New York-based Cornell University where Wilson earned a degree in chemistry and Jones earning multiple degrees in accounting, mathematics and psychology, Wilson realized that he did not want to pursue a career in chemistry. He enrolled in NYU to earn another bachelor degree in civil engineering. During this period, Jones decided that she wanted to enter medical school and thus began taking pre-med courses at Princeton.

My friend was shocked. "You really have your work cut out for you," she said. On the contrary, I said. Fixing troubled prose like this usually means just 1. looking for ways to break up unwieldy sentences, 2. looking for unnecessary information that can be cut, and 3. cleaning up wrong verb tenses and awkward constructions. Here's how it looked when I was done.

Throughout their 10-year relationship, the two have supported each other’s education and career goals. Both graduated from Cornell University, Cosby with a degree in chemistry and Jones with multiple degrees in accounting, mathematics and psychology. Soon after, Wilson realized that he did not want to pursue a career in chemistry. He enrolled in NYU to earn another bachelor’s degree, this one in civil engineering. Jones decided that she wanted to enter medical school and began taking pre-med courses at Princeton.

Here, bit by bit, is what I did and why.

Supporting each other through their education and in their career dreams has been a vein running through their 10-year relationship that continues today as Jones pursues her dreams of becoming a licensed psychiatrist.

The main clause of this sentence says "supporting each other has been a vein." Gerund subject, bland verb, abstract complement. I liked what the writer was trying to say here, but she failed to pull it off. So, rather than structure the whole sentence in service to the "vein" idea, I figured it was better to make "supporting" an action instead of a subject: "They have supported each other."

The clause "... that continues today as Jones pursues her dreams of becoming a licensed psychiatrist" contains some worthwhile information -- Jones is working toward a new goal and Wilson's still supporting her. But all that will become clear in the sentences that follow. And in an already unwieldy sentence, the clause was doing more harm than good. So I cut it and let the facts speak for themselves.

The next sentence was a mess:

After graduating from the New York-based Cornell University where Wilson earned a degree in chemistry and Jones earning multiple degrees in accounting, mathematics and psychology, Wilson realized that he did not want to pursue a career in chemistry.

The tense shift is the most glaring problem: "where Wilson earned and Jones earning." But the structure here is bad, too. There's a ton of info crammed into that subordinate clause "After graduating ..." The sentence is supposed to be about Wilson, but writer also used this "after" clause as a place to cram in some info about Jones. It's just too much. So I broke it up into two sentences, one about their education (Both graduated from Cornell University, Wilson with a degree in chemistry and Jones with multiple degrees in accounting, mathematics and psychology) and the other sentence about Wilson's decision (Soon after, Wilson realized that he did not want to pursue a career in chemistry).

The next sentence was almost fine:

He enrolled in NYU to earn another bachelor degree in civil engineering.

I changed bachelor degree to "bachelor's" -- mainly because that's our style. But there was a logic problem, too. "Another bachelor's degree in civil engineering" suggests he already held a civil engineering degree. That wasn't what the writer meant, so I inserted "this one in" for clarity, ending up with: He enrolled in NYU to earn another bachelor's degree, this one in civil engineering.

The final sentence was structured okay, but contained some lard:

During this period, Jones decided that she wanted to enter medical school and thus began taking pre-med courses at Princeton.

"During this period" is unnecessary -- not worth the extra words. And "thus," in my humble opinion, has no business in a feature article. Out it went.

Little fixes aside, this passage mostly needed its sentences broken up. And when you see how making a gerund like "supporting" into a real verb like "support," and when you see how information in an "after" clause can be made into a separate sentence, breaking sentences up is very easy to do.

* I disguised the passage by changing some details.

The More I Think About Short Sentences ...

... the more I realize I have more thinkin' to do.

Here's the first sentence of a novel I just started reading. (The name of the character has been changed.)

The play—for which Jane had designed the posters, programs and tickets,
constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and
lined the collection box in red crepe paper—was written by her in a two-day
tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch.

Now, if this landed on my desk as the first sentence in a feature article, I would rip it to shreds. A 32-word insertion between the subject and the verb? That whole insertion teetering on the past perfect verb "had designed"? A list separated by commas ("posters, programs and tickets") WITHIN a list separated by commas within that insertion? Then, after working through the insertion, finally getting to the main verb of the main clause to find it's passive ("was written by her")? Then, just for measure, a participial phrase tacked on the end ("causing her to miss ...")?

But see, here's the thing. This is not the work of some hack writer schelepping $200 feature articles for an advertorial section of the Polukaville Post. It's the first sentence of a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice novel, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a Booker Prize finalist.

Swap out "Jane" for "Briony" and you have the first sentence of Ian McEwan's "Atonement."

I haven't read enough yet to assess whether McEwan's mastery of the language in general and the sentence in particular is, overall, good or bad. But I have a feeling he didn't get all those prizes for nuthin'.

So, what does this tell us about the adage "short sentences are best"? I haven't decided yet. I still greatly prefer short sentences. But I can see a clear difference between the long sentences constructed by novice feature writers and long sentences like the ones I see in the New Yorker and ones written by Cormac McCarthy, Truman Capote, and Ian McEwan.

Some hacky stuff I come across might read like: "After realizing that the walking of the dog had already been done by her mother, on this particular Sunday after getting out of school, Beulah happily informed her family of the impending visit of her beau." There's a real difference between crap like this (which I just made up as example) and those masterful long sentences. But I'll be damned if I can sum it up in a neat little package—yet.

Four Opening Sentences from the New Yorker, Four Opening Sentences from the Atlantic

I'm fascinated with sentences. I'm also fascinated with the New Yorker. The latter not necessarily in a good way. And that's all the context I can offer to explain why today I'm asking you to compare some opening sentences from the Atlantic magazine to some from the New Yorker.

Here are the first sentences of four feature articles in the October 2008 Atlantic:

1. For a military accustomed to quick, easy victories, the trials and tribulations of the Iraq War have come as a rude awakening.
2. These are boom times for wind power.
3. In a much-ridiculed speech at the 1996 Republican National Convention, Newt Gingrich hailed beach volleyball as the embodiment of all that makes America great.
4. June was the deadliest month for the U.S. military in Afghanistan since the invasion in October 2001.

Now here are the first sentences of three feature articles and one 'Talk of the Town' piece in the Sept. 8, 2008, New Yorker.

1. Alec Baldwin, who stars in "30 Rock," the NBC sitcom that has revived his career and done noting to lift his spirits, has the unbending, straight-armed gait of someone trying to prevent clothes from rubbing against sunburned skin.
2. Early in 2007, when David Petraeus became Commanding General of United States and international forces in Iraq, he had in mind a strategy to manage the political pressures he would face because of the unpopularity of the war, then four years old, and of its author, George W. Bush.
3. In the autumn of 1998, when Karl Rove was contriving to make Governor George W. Bush President and to build a lasting Republican majority, he came upon "The Catholic Voter Project," a study of voting behavior in national elections since the Kennedy-Nixon contest of 1960.
4. Rosalind Wyman--seventy-seven years old; doughty feminist; political fund-raiser and philanthropist; hostess to J.F.K., Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, and Hollywood types too numerous to count; youngest elected member of the Los Angeles City Council (at the age of twenty-two); first woman to run a national political convention (the Democrats in San Francisco, 1984)--may well be the most indomitable member of Hillary Clinton's Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Suits.

Now, I know that a number of you may be looking at this and trying -- perhaps without sufficient linguistic expertise -- to understand the dynamic at play. So allow me, if you would, to offer my professional-wordsmith assessment:

What the f***?!?!?

There's a lot of good stuff said about the New Yorker -- much of it true. Many people also find the magazine pretentious. But, seems to me, the well-heeded viscera might tell of something else. Something a little toxic. As if the act of opening a copy of the New Yorker were distant cousin to the act of receiving a snake bite.

I can never quite nail down what's "wrong" with this magazine. For one thing, I don't read it enough to fairly assess it on even a superficial level. But it's always seemed to me as if they're mocking their readers. They start with a piece of conventional wisdom (like "short sentences are good"), openly defy and transcend it, then serve it up to their readers as if it were evidence of their readers' inherent superiority. But deep in the heart of an anthropomorphized New Yorker, the magazine know it's just a gimmick. So the joke's on the readers.

I'm not even willing to say that the above New Yorker sentences are bad. On the contrary, at times they seem very effective (as do many similarly leviathan-like sentences throughout the Alec Baldwin piece). Other times, the sentences seem almost to serve no purpose other than to prove the writer is so agile he can set up hurdles just for the joy (and spectacle) of clearing them.

Of course, everything I'm saying is biased by jealousy over the fact that I can't get published in the New Yorker. Give me a byline there and I'll change my tune real quick-like. But even adjusting for my jealousy, it's clear that there's something funky going on that the word "pretentious" doesn't quite capture.

* * *

P.S. This issue of the Atlantic has at least one article that begins with a New Yorker-esque length sentence. But nowhere near enough to balance with the New Yorker's. The Alec Baldwin article, for example, was riddled with long sentences that heaped modifier upon modifier upon parenthetical insertion. Also, there were lots of quotations that really begged for prior set-up but didn't get explained until after the closing quote. These post-quotation quotation set-ups were jarring enough that, in the end, I decided they didn't work. They came off not as showy but as inept.

Why Didn't I Think of This Marketing Trick?

Apparently, the new novel "The Rotters' Club" by Jonathan Coe contains just 13,955 words.

Oh, but all 13,955 of them form just one sentence. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/reports/archive/arts/sentence.shtml

I'm withholding judgment until my inner copy editor puts down her Uzi.

Must. Learn. To write. Shorter. Sentences.

I've been doing a lot of copy editing in the last year. It's satisfying work. The bad kind of satisfying. The drunk-on-self-righteousness kind of satisfying. The "this sentence is a pile of crap and I and only I can whip it into a work of art but not without first nursing some very unkind thoughts about the writer" kind of satisfying.

Power-drunk-jerk stuff.

Okay, I'm being a little hard on myself. I'm not that big a jerk. But I do enjoy getting angry at clunky, fatty, inefficient sentences. I enjoy pummeling them into submission. I enjoy the little rush of outrage I get in the process.

Here's what I don't enjoy so much these days: Looking at my own writing.

Don't get me wrong. I can write some good sentences. Elegant and efficient. But I also excrete some colossal steamers. And it's making me mad.

Here's how thoughts come out of me.

When I consider whether it's important to write short
sentences I can't deny that, in more skillful hands, long sentences are, indeed,
often quite effective and, when used as a form of artistic license, can
serve as a form of Cormac McCarthy-esque poetry-as-power sort of device.

Here's how I want that to come out of me:

Yes, some long sentences kick ass.

I suppose the good news is that I'm catching more problems in my own sentences. The bad news is that I don't want to catch them. I want to write sentences perfectly in the first damn place. I can only hope that, slowly, that's what I'm learning to do.

In the meantime, I should probably lighten up on the freelancers I edit who don't know a dangler from a dingleberry.

Nah. That's not gonna happen.