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.)

Great Moments in Copy Editing

Admission is $17 for adults, $10 for children ages 5 to 12. One child per adult under 5 is complimentary.

From the 'How Not to Do It' File ...

Recently, a friend was digging around in a bookstore and found this passage in an old novelization (a paperback based on a movie as opposed to a movie based on a book).

“His gaze darted around nervously, as if apprehensive that somehow, in some insane fashion, someone would suddenly manage to pop out of hiding and surprise him.”

My friend did not tell me the writer's name. But she did mention that, despite this dazzlng prose, she "suddenly managed" to put the book down.

All This Scratchin' Is Makin' Me Itch

It's official. I'm now cuckoo nutty about sentences. After years of copy editing and obsessing about sentence structure, I passed into the realm of cuckoo nutty this morning when I read this first sentence of a Reuters story:

A loss in server connectivity that caused the New York Stock Exchange to halt trades in about 240 companies has been restored.

Now, normal people might read this and think, "Holy cow! I never realized how fragile are the financial processes on which our whole economy depends!"

Many others, especially in parts where I grew up, might read this and think, "Holy cow! I clicked the wrong link. I was looking for a TMZ story about Jon and Kate."

But I, cuckoo nuttier than all, think, "A loss has been restored? "

More Bad Wording from the World of Copy Editing and News Headline du Jour

I edited a rather problematic article the other day about a new music venue. It contained some good examples of the ways that wily words can mutiny. Here (disguised, as always) is one example:

“The Blues Room holds high stakes for its performers by having the reach of a global audience through onsite TV and radio production broadcasting facilities.”

One problem with this sentence is that the writer relied too heavily on a “by” phrase to introduce a lot of information. But MY biggest problem with this sentence is “the reach of a global audience.” Here, the writer just took a powder -- stopped paying attention to her own words.

What is “the reach of a global audience”? Sounds to me like the distance that audience can reach. That's not what she meant to say. She was talking not about the audience's ability to reach but the venue's ability to reach (an audience). So she should have written, “because it can reach a global audience” or something like that.

I see this type of thing a lot with novice feature writers. They let their words squirm out of their grasp and lose their meaning. This writer wanted to mention the venue’s “reach.” She had this word in her head as a noun and she just refused to abandon it even after it abandoned her.

* * * *

News headlines often crack me up. The dropping of "is" and other forms of "to be" along with the dropping of many articles and prepositions can sometimes dilute a headline to the point of meaninglessness. Add to that extreme space constraints headline writers face and you end up with stuff like this headline from yesterday's L.A. Times (with original line breaks intact).

'Hour of

Power'

Crux of

Schism

Ah, yes, the old "crux of schism" angle. What an attention-grabber.

Wait, it just got funnier. I searched the L.A. Times website for the article to link it here, and saw the same article with the headline, "Schullers' rift centers on 'Hour of Power.'" But that's not how it showed up in the print edition yesterday. I guess that proves the headline writer was actually competent and our "Crux of Schism" hed was truly the result of space constraints. I guess I should have titled this post:

Tight

Page

Space

Crux of

Stinker

Hed

One That Almost Got Away (A copy editing tale)

Came across this sentence in a story I was editing. It was a quotation.

"Separating out the variables quickly clarifies to job hunters concerned about earning power [and] which fields pay most."

It contains a mistake that got past a wire editor, then a section editor. It got past me. It got printed on a proof page. Then I looked at it on paper and that's when I finally saw the mistake.

Breaking down the sentence:

Subject: separating out the variables
Verb: clarifies
Prepositional phrase: to job hunters concerned about earning power
Object of verb: which fields pay most

The writer inserted "and" because she thought that "which fields pay most" was part of the prepositional phrase — something job hunters are concerned about. Seeing it on paper and without the benefit of hearing the speaker's intonations, she didn't see that the speaker meant it as the object of the verb. The speaker meant that the act of separating "clarifies which fields pay most."

The mistake is the inserted "and."

The long prepositional phrase inserted after "clarifies" threw the writer and me and at least two other editors. So it just goes to show you ...

Well, I don't know what it goes to show you. But, whatever it is, I hope it made reading this worth your time.