Posts
by Sheila Connolly
I've always enjoyed rules. It's nice to have something to follow, to know where you stand, to have a standard to meet. Writing was no exception when I was young.
Since I am of a certain age, I was taught a variety of rules for spelling, grammar and punctuation. You know, the trusty "i before e except after c," and one my mother passed on to me, "a preposition is a word not to end a sentence with" (joke there, people). Dependent clauses, independent clauses. Does anybody else remember diagramming sentences? What was that all about?
Spelling is holding its own, save for all those made-up words that keep popping up and gaining acceptance more and more quickly. And how many words have shifted their use? Like impact. When I was young, impact was a noun. Impacted was something that happened to a bad tooth. Now impacted is a verb. And likewise friend: once that too was a noun, and now we friend people on Facebook all the time.
But mostly I wrestle with punctuation. As a writer shepherding books into print, we have to submit our work to not one but two editors (not even counting the proofreader), both of whom feel free to tell us how things are supposed to be done. Which is usually not the way we did it. The first editor tells you that your characters are stiff and unsympathetic, and your plot resembles moldy Swiss cheese, and can you please fix it by next Tuesday?
Assuming you survive that battering, your writerly voice intact, the manuscript makes its way to the copy editor (in case you're wondering, Webster's says that must be two words, no hyphen). Danger, danger! The copy editor is responsible for cleaning up all your "errors" in spelling, grammar, and punctuation (and occasionally she nails you for repeating a word or phrase too often). She sends you a multi-page (Webster's has no opinion about that word, so I'm leaving the hyphen there) set of instructions telling you what you were supposed to do (which of course you didn't do, since you've been living in a cave since 1982 trying to write a book and you never got the memo about grammar changes).
Many of these changes I'm willing to accept, because I really don't feel strongly about them, and I hope they serve to make the text easier to read. But some just rub me the wrong way, no matter how many times I see them. Take "too," for example. I'm supposed to use a comma before a terminal too. Like, "you come, too." That just looks wrong to me.
Or hyphenating adverbs. I swear I can hear in my head some long-ago English teacher saying, "if you use a two-word term as a modifier, you should hyphenate it." This is enshrined in my memory. Like "newly-minted coin." Newly-minted is a single term, isn't it? Nope. Not now. I have it in writing that I may not do that. Unless, of course, the first word is "half." I am graciously allowed to say "half-witted copy editor."
My latest bugaboo is italicizing. Internal thoughts are italicized. I'm good with that. Foreign phrases are italicized. No problem. (But when does the phrase cease to be foreign and become part of our daily language? Like déjà vu? Hoi polloi? But that's for another day.) Book and newspaper titles are italicized. Fine by me.
What's burning me up now is whether a form I've used for years is now apparently a copy editor's no-no (Webster's approves that hyphen): the quotation marks within a sentence. In the past, I would say, I stashed my "bounty" in a safe place. The quotes there signified that I was using the term "bounty" sarcastically or with tongue wedged in cheek. The "bounty" might have been the last cupcake in the box, so the phrase was not meant to be taken literally.
Now I'm told I have to italicize that. I stashed my bounty in a safe place. I don't like it. In this context, italicization means to me that the word is meant to be emphasized (as you might hear it in your head) within the sentence. The copy editor's introduced italicizing looks wrong to me. It sounds wrong to me (see the difference?).
I have this image of editors and copy editors as nice, young (well, younger than I am) women who were English majors in college. I've met a few, and some of them are my daughter's age. Therefore I have to assume that they grew up with a different set of standards than I did. Life goes on. I accept that.
BUT! I'm guessing that the majority of my readers are closer to my age than to theirs. So when those readers read a paragraph with those weird italicized words, they're going to stumble. They're going to stop, if only for a microsecond, and say "huh?" (Not huh, I hope.) And that's going to take them right out of the reading, break the flow, disrupt their immersion in the story. It will work against all that we as writers have tried to create.
What are we supposed to do? Write to make the little copy editors happy? Or write to make our readers happy?
Since I am of a certain age, I was taught a variety of rules for spelling, grammar and punctuation. You know, the trusty "i before e except after c," and one my mother passed on to me, "a preposition is a word not to end a sentence with" (joke there, people). Dependent clauses, independent clauses. Does anybody else remember diagramming sentences? What was that all about?
Spelling is holding its own, save for all those made-up words that keep popping up and gaining acceptance more and more quickly. And how many words have shifted their use? Like impact. When I was young, impact was a noun. Impacted was something that happened to a bad tooth. Now impacted is a verb. And likewise friend: once that too was a noun, and now we friend people on Facebook all the time.
But mostly I wrestle with punctuation. As a writer shepherding books into print, we have to submit our work to not one but two editors (not even counting the proofreader), both of whom feel free to tell us how things are supposed to be done. Which is usually not the way we did it. The first editor tells you that your characters are stiff and unsympathetic, and your plot resembles moldy Swiss cheese, and can you please fix it by next Tuesday?
Assuming you survive that battering, your writerly voice intact, the manuscript makes its way to the copy editor (in case you're wondering, Webster's says that must be two words, no hyphen). Danger, danger! The copy editor is responsible for cleaning up all your "errors" in spelling, grammar, and punctuation (and occasionally she nails you for repeating a word or phrase too often). She sends you a multi-page (Webster's has no opinion about that word, so I'm leaving the hyphen there) set of instructions telling you what you were supposed to do (which of course you didn't do, since you've been living in a cave since 1982 trying to write a book and you never got the memo about grammar changes).
Many of these changes I'm willing to accept, because I really don't feel strongly about them, and I hope they serve to make the text easier to read. But some just rub me the wrong way, no matter how many times I see them. Take "too," for example. I'm supposed to use a comma before a terminal too. Like, "you come, too." That just looks wrong to me.Or hyphenating adverbs. I swear I can hear in my head some long-ago English teacher saying, "if you use a two-word term as a modifier, you should hyphenate it." This is enshrined in my memory. Like "newly-minted coin." Newly-minted is a single term, isn't it? Nope. Not now. I have it in writing that I may not do that. Unless, of course, the first word is "half." I am graciously allowed to say "half-witted copy editor."
My latest bugaboo is italicizing. Internal thoughts are italicized. I'm good with that. Foreign phrases are italicized. No problem. (But when does the phrase cease to be foreign and become part of our daily language? Like déjà vu? Hoi polloi? But that's for another day.) Book and newspaper titles are italicized. Fine by me.
What's burning me up now is whether a form I've used for years is now apparently a copy editor's no-no (Webster's approves that hyphen): the quotation marks within a sentence. In the past, I would say, I stashed my "bounty" in a safe place. The quotes there signified that I was using the term "bounty" sarcastically or with tongue wedged in cheek. The "bounty" might have been the last cupcake in the box, so the phrase was not meant to be taken literally.Now I'm told I have to italicize that. I stashed my bounty in a safe place. I don't like it. In this context, italicization means to me that the word is meant to be emphasized (as you might hear it in your head) within the sentence. The copy editor's introduced italicizing looks wrong to me. It sounds wrong to me (see the difference?).
I have this image of editors and copy editors as nice, young (well, younger than I am) women who were English majors in college. I've met a few, and some of them are my daughter's age. Therefore I have to assume that they grew up with a different set of standards than I did. Life goes on. I accept that.
BUT! I'm guessing that the majority of my readers are closer to my age than to theirs. So when those readers read a paragraph with those weird italicized words, they're going to stumble. They're going to stop, if only for a microsecond, and say "huh?" (Not huh, I hope.) And that's going to take them right out of the reading, break the flow, disrupt their immersion in the story. It will work against all that we as writers have tried to create.
What are we supposed to do? Write to make the little copy editors happy? Or write to make our readers happy?
