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.)

Copy Edit du Jour

From an article I'm editing:

Santa Cruz also offers year-round golf, riding the dunes in a four-wheel ATV, horseback riding, surfing, body boarding or fishing from its 1,100-foot pier.

There's an issue here that's cropping up so much lately I'm starting to wonder: Is it happening more? Or did I fail to notice it before?

The issue I'm talking about: "or."

The town doesn't offer surfing, body boarding or fishing. It offers surfing, body boarding and fishing. I wonder whether this happens because the list got so long that the writer forgot how the sentence was structured.

Just an interesting little mental blip is all. I changed "or" to "and."

Call Me King Christie Dickens

I just learned of a website that analyzes a sample of your writing to tell you which famous writer you write like. Supposedly it analyzes "your word choice and writing style" to make the comparison.

I have no idea how much effort the creators put into making it scientific, but it's definitely fun. A chapter from my last book in which I wax philosophical about pudding shakers was compared to the work of Agatha Christie. A sappy column I wrote after Vonnegut died scored me a Stephen King comparison. And two paragraphs from my brand-new book (which I just got in the mail today!) was written in the style of Charles Dickens.

But here's the funny thing: The book is called "It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences" -- a play on Dickens! And, no, the excerpt did not include those words or any other Dickens stuff. Spooky.

Here's the site: http://iwl.me/

Copy Edit du Jour

Two major aspects of the infrastructure revitalization will include revamping education and healthcare systems.

Changed to:

The education and healthcare systems will be revamped.

In the last couple years, I've come to despise structures that say an "aspect" of something is something else: "One fun aspect of the day camp is getting to catch your own fish."

Why not just make the main clause a simple human subject+real action structure? "Kids get to catch their own fish."

OED's Definition of 'Siphon'

According to this article, the Oxford English Dictionary had a faulty definition of "siphon" for 99 years.

Having worked in publishing for so long, I don't think that's stop-the-presses surprising. If authors and journalists and highly regulated oil-extraction companies and everyone else can make errors, there's no reason that lexicographers responsible for the enormous OED should be any different.

What interests me more about this article is how it's written. The second sentence is "Siphons don't work, it turns out, because of atmospheric pressure, as the OED has been saying since 1911."

Here's another way to say that. "Since 1911, the OED has been saying that siphons work because of atmospheric pressure. That, it turns out, is not true."

But, no. The writer relegated the most important piece of information in the whole article to a subordinate clause: "AS the OED has been saying." That annoys me. The placement of "it turns out" annoys me, too. Usually, that phrase cues the reader that something they already know about "turns out" to be wrong. But in this article, you learn that something "turns out" to be wrong before you learn what that something is.

Maybe I've been copy editing too much lately, thereby focusing too much on little issues like this, but I find all this rather irksome.

Chopper's Delight

Came across this in my copy-editing work today:

Recovery time varies but is approximately about one week.

I bow down in awe of the inefficiency. I enjoyed this so much I was almost reluctant to change it. On the other hand, razing it was pretty enjoyable, too. It now reads:

Recovery time is about one week.