style sheets

S Is for Style

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 2 Comments

Over the years of working with English as an editor and writer I’ve learned to be careful of the words “right” and “wrong.” When asked if something is right or not, I often begin with “It depends” — on your intended audience, on context, on which side of “the pond” (aka the Atlantic Ocean) you’re on, and so on.

We talk about the “rules of grammar” as if they’re hard, fast, and uncompromising, but they aren’t. Even the basic ones have their exceptions. Take “subject-verb agreement.” The subject should always agree with its verb in number, right? Most of the time, yes, but some nouns can be singular or plural depending on how they’re being used. Some examples: couple and family take a singular verb when referring to the unit, but a plural verb when its members are being emphasized.

The same principle applies to majority and many other words denoting groups of persons, places, or things: is it referring to the group as a whole or to its constituent parts? (Tip: Is it preceded by the definite article the or the indefinite a(n)?

  • The majority has voted to replace the bridge.
  • A majority (of participants or whatever) are coming to the party.
Arbiters of style, in hardcopy

Which brings me around to style. Style is far more flexible than grammar, and for this very reason publications, publishers, and academic disciplines adopt distinctive styles. These are often based on one of the major style guides. Most U.S. publishers use the Chicago Manual of Style, often with their own additions and exceptions. Most U.S. newspapers and periodicals start with the AP Stylebook. (AP stands for Associated Press, a nonprofit news agency that dates back to the mid-19th century.) Other common styles include MLA (Modern Language Association), which is especially popular in the humanities, and APA (American Psychological Association), widely used in the social sciences.

I’m on a first-name basis with Chicago, having been using it since 1979, and I have a nodding acquaintance with AP. A significant difference between the two is in how they handle numbers. Chicago generally spells out numbers through one hundred. AP spells out one through nine but uses figures for 10 and up. Another is in the use of italics: Chicago employs them in a variety of ways, notably for titles of books, films, and other full-length works. AP style doesn’t use them at all. Before the digital age, italics couldn’t be transmitted “over the wires,” so AP style developed without them (and without boldface, for the same reason).

Unsurprisingly, Chicago, MLA, and APA styles devote a lot of attention to citations. All three are widely used by academics, whose writing is based on previously published work or unpublished work that can be found in manuscript collections. (Chicago began as the style guide of the University of Chicago Press. Though it’s widely used by trade publishers and even fiction writers, its scholarly origins are obvious in the chapters devoted to quotations and citation style.)

It’s no surprise either that AP devotes virtually no attention to footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographies. Reporters may quote from public documents, but their primary sources are interviews and public statements. They may have recorded backup, or they may rely on notes scribbled the old way in a notebook.

So what does this mean to you? The top two lessons I’ve learned over the years as a writer and editor are (1) right and wrong, correct and incorrect, are shiftier than one learns in school, and (2) nevertheless, rules and conventions are important. The better you know them, the more command you’ll have over your writing — which is a big plus when you decide to stretch, bend, or break them.

For U.S. writers of general nonfiction, creative nonfiction (e.g., memoir), and fiction, the Chicago Manual of Style is a good place to start. No, you don’t need to read it straight through. (I never have, and there are a couple of chapters that I’ve rarely ever looked at.) The further you get from scholarly nonfiction, the more flexible you should be about applying its recommendations. As I keep saying, these are guidelines, not godlines.

When I’m working, I usually have three dictionaries — Merriam-Webster’s, American Heritage, and Oxford/UK — open in my browser, along with the Chicago Manual of Style. I subscribe to the AP Stylebook and consult it from time to time. This reminds me continually that even “the authorities” differ. For colloquialisms and current slang, Google is only a click away.

I just realized that I haven’t said a thing about style sheets. Fortunately I wrote about them at some length a few years ago: “What’s a Style Sheet?” Short version: A style sheet is for keeping track of all the style choices one makes when copyediting a manuscript. It includes general choices about the styling of, e.g., numbers and the use of quote marks and italics. It also includes words, dozens of words: unusual words, words that aren’t in the dictionary, words for which there is more than one spelling. In biographies and history books, the list of personal names might be as long as the word list. When I turn in the completed copyediting job, my style sheet goes with it. When I receive a proofreading job, I get the copyeditor’s style sheet too.

For writers, keeping a style sheet is a handy way to maintain consistency, especially in a novel or other book-length work. It can also remind you to check the spelling of names and places. Publishers don’t encourage authors to submit style sheets with their manuscripts, but I wish they did.

Editing on Paper

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 6 Comments

When I started editing for a living, “editing on paper” was about as noteworthy as swimming in water — like what else was I going to edit on — parchment? calfskin?

Now most editing is done on a computer screen. Editing on paper is a novelty. Some editors I know won’t do it. Quite a few of those a generation younger than I, and those who started editing professionally in middle age, have never done it.

I still do it on request. In fact, I just started a paper copyedit for a trade publisher client. It’s a 700-page nonfiction baby, with a short bibliography, no endnotes, and a 65-page “essay on sources.” I’m adequately supplied with red pencils and Post-its, and I still know copyeditor’s and proofreader’s marks as well as I know the alphabet.

My work nook. It’s much more cluttered than it was when I took this picture.

My little workspace — a comfy recliner, a lapdesk with my laptop (her name is Kore) on it, flat surfaces on either side — no longer lends itself to editing on paper. To my left, for instance, is a short row of editorial essentials: Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed.; The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed. — the newer 17th edition is on the floor next to my chair); Words Into Type; and Amy Einsohn’s Copyeditor’s Handbook.

Trouble is, the editorial essentials I use most often — which is to say “continually” — are online. My subscription to Merriam-Webster’s gives me access not only to the Collegiate but to the vastly larger Unabridged.

When I left my first staff editor job — in the publications office of the American Red Cross in Alexandria, Virginia — in (gasp) 1981, my colleagues gave me as a parting gift a copy of the Unabridged, formally Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. It’s far too unwieldy for regular use. It needs to sit on its own lectern, where you don’t have to wrestle it into your lap. This was indeed the setup in the Red Cross publications office: “Web 3” rested on its pedestal at one end of the editorial section and the venerable “Web 2” — Webster’s New International Dictionary, second edition — sat at the other. We editors each had the current edition of the Collegiate (IIRC it was the 9th) in our cubicles.

Arbiters of style, in hardcopy

I also subscribe to the Oxford dictionaries, which include not only British English (BrE) and the U.S. variety (AmE), but several other languages as well (Spanish, French, German, Italian, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, and Portuguese). Oh yeah, and access to Hart’s Rules, a popular BrE style guide, among other useful tools.

The American Heritage Dictionary doesn’t require a subscription for its online edition, though I’d happily buy one if it did because I use it a lot, and about a year ago I finally broke down and subscribed to the online Chicago Manual of Style because they were offering a good deal when the 17th edition came out in print.

You can imagine how much space all these reference books would take up in hardcopy, and did I say that I live and work in a studio apartment? Not to forget the geographical, biographical, and bibliographical resources that I use for routine fact-checking. My style sheet for a just-completed job included six and a half single-spaced pages of personal names alone, every single one of them verified by me. In the pre-digital days, I would have required access to a research library to accomplish this, and it wouldn’t have been expected: a common publisher’s guideline for copyeditors runs something like “check facts as long as it doesn’t add appreciably to your billable time.”

The digital age has contributed to considerable mission creep on this one. Checking names, dates, and even quoted material doesn’t add appreciably to my billable time, so I do a lot more of it than I did in the old days. The big challenge is keeping it from adding appreciably to my non-billable time. From childhood I’ve been one of those people who goes to look something up in a dictionary or encyclopedia, falls down the research rabbit hole, and emerges an hour or two later having learned all sorts of neat stuff that may or may not include whatever I was looking up in the first place. The World Wide Web laughs at “billable time.”

Social media is, if anything, even worse. I belong to several editing-related groups on Facebook. This is where I go to find answers that aren’t in the dictionaries or style guides, like “Is this sense of ‘set off’ common in the U.S.?” Pretty soon, though, I’m responding to another editor’s query, or checking up on breaking news, or reading an interesting commentary that a friend recommended. Rabbit holes and looking-glasses everywhere!

Gizmo with beer can. I have been a T. E. Lawrence fan since I was about 9. My taste for beer is relatively recent.

So when I edit on paper, Kore the laptop sits on her lapdesk on the floor at my feet, usually with the lid closed. To wake her up every time I want to check a name or date would absolutely add appreciably to my billable time and wreck my concentration too. So I flag the things I want to look up on Post-it notes and do it all in batches.

For access to dictionaries, I use Gizmo, my little tablet. I guess I could use Gizmo for fact-checking too, but the small screen and the virtual keyboard are not my friends, so I don’t.

Logging words, names, and style decisions in my style sheet is likewise clunkier when I edit on paper. (Aside: If you aren’t on a first-name basis with style sheets, check out my 2014 blog post on the subject: “What’s a Style Sheet?” You may already be keeping one without calling it that. When it comes time to work with an editor, your editor will be seriously impressed if you give her/him a style sheet. Trust me on this. )

When I edit in Word, it’s easy to flip back and forth between manuscript and style sheet, and to copy and paste words and names from one to the other. When editing on paper, I start my style sheet on paper, then when Kore’s back on my lap for a look-up session I create a Word file for it, print it out, log new words and style choices on it as they come up, then add them to the Word file at the next opportunity. And repeat, repeat, repeat till the job is done.

Word processors make style sheet maintenance so much easier because they can alphabetize long lists in a second or two. (I’m not going to even try to explain the grid system many of us used in the old days.) But once you’ve edited electronically, the biggest drawback of going back to paper is the lack of CTRL+F (Command + F on a Mac): the Search function. Once upon a time, if, say, the spelling of a name seemed slightly “off”, I could often find the earlier spot where it was spelled differently, even if I hadn’t noted the page number in my style sheet. Thanks to CTRL+F this facility has largely, though not completely, atrophied. I can now confirm my hunches in seconds. If I want to change an earlier style choice (often about hyphenation or a variant spelling), I can easily revisit and revise all previous instances.

So when I edit on paper, the publisher’s production editor provides an electronic copy of the manuscript. I edit on paper, but I search in Word. The same goes for proofreading: I generally mark up the hardcopy, but I have the PDF on my laptop in case I need to search, which I will, multiple times, before the job is done.

Sturgis’s Law #10

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 2 Comments

Some while back I started an occasional series devoted to Sturgis’s Laws. “Sturgis” is me. The “Laws” aren’t Rules That Must Be Obeyed. Gods forbid, we writers and editors have enough of those circling in our heads and ready to pounce at any moment. These laws are more like hypotheses based on my observations over the years. They’re mostly about writing and editing. None of them can be proven, but they do come in handy from time to time. As I blog about them, I add them to Sturgis’s Laws on the drop-down from the menu bar. Here’s Sturgis’s Law #10:

“Consistent hyphenation” is an oxymoron.

According to Sturgis’s Law #5,  “Hyphens are responsible for at least 90 percent of all trips to the dictionary. Commas are responsible for at least 90 percent of all trips to the style guide.”

Arbiters of style.

No, that 90 percent figure isn’t based on any survey, much less a scientific study or even systematic observation of my own practice. Good editors and writers are always looking things up. But commas and hyphens seem to provoke an anxiety that needs frequent reassurance even when we really do know our stuff.

Funny thing, I was blogging about commas only last week — and quoting Sturgis’s Law #5. So hyphens seem to be a logical next step.

And yes, it is OK to use “hyphens” and “logical” in the same sentence. If you understand the logic behind hyphenation, you won’t spin yourself into a tizzy whenever dictionaries and style guides disagree.

Which they do. A lot.

Hyphens can do many things, but the two biggies are joining and separating. Hyphens are so clever that they occasionally do both at the same time.

A hyphen can fuse two words capable of standing alone into a compound that incorporates both: I’m a writer-editor. The pond looks blue-green.

It can join a prefix or suffix to a root word: an anti-intellectual movement, a business-like attitude. In the former example, the hyphen is also separating the two vowels. Except in skiing and taxiing and maybe a few other words that I can’t think of at the moment, i‘s rarely occur side by side in English, so it looks pretty weird when they do.

Several common prefixes end in e — re- and pre- come immediately to mind — and when they run up against another vowel, misreadings can happen. I can’t look at reignite without initially seeing reign. Plenty of writers have no problem with reignite, but if an author prefers re-ignite, I have no problem with it.

In some cases the separation is crucial. Consider the difference between coop and co-op.

The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS), the style guide I use most often, has a long section on hyphenation. In the 16th edition, which has just been superseded by the 17th, it’s section 7.85. It is very, very useful. Plenty of hyphenation decisions can be, in effect, automated: Always use them in some cases (e.g., second-floor apartment, forty-one); never use them in others (e.g., grandmother, northeast).

In other cases, though, there’s plenty of gray area. CMS’s recommendations rely almost entirely on patterns: adjective + participle, gerund + noun, and so on. It suggests hyphenating most compounds when they occur before a noun — a well-rounded education — but leaving them open after a noun: Her education was well rounded.

What CMS and many copyeditors don’t acknowledge often enough is that the words themselves make a difference, and so does the intended audience. CMS does advise taking “readability” into consideration, but what’s readable and what isn’t depends a lot on context. Some noun + noun compounds are so familiar that inserting a hyphen when they appear before a noun looks like overkill. Yeah, “high school student” could be read to mean a school student on drugs, but when was the last time you saw it used that way?

On the other hand, “running shoe store” could conjure unintentionally hilarious images in enough readers’ minds that “running-shoe store” seems the better option.

CMS recommends that adjectives formed with half- be hyphenated before or after a noun but that nouns so formed be open. OK up to a point, but half sister strikes me as odd because all those half- relationships are words in their own right. Besides, if stepsister is one word, why should half sister be two? This is why “consistent hyphenation” is an oxymoron.

It’s also why I think writers and editors are well within their rights to impose some consistency and logic on hyphenation in a particular work, even if this involves deviating from the recommendations of dictionary or style guide. The American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) lists policymaker as one word. In Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate (MW) it isn’t listed, which means it’s two words. AHD has both policymaking and policy-making. CMS would probably suggest policymaker for the noun (by analogy with shipbuilder) and policy-making when it precedes a noun. But what if you’ve got people who make policy and people who make decisions in the same paragraph?

With certain prefixes, like pro- and anti-, separating the prefix from the root with a hyphen calls a little more attention to the root. Consider pro-choice and prochoice, anti-choice and antichoice. In this case I’m all for the hyphen, but when an author hyphenates something that I probably wouldn’t, there’s a distinct possibility that s/he’s seeing or hearing a distinction that I don’t.

Most non- words can be safely closed up, but with new or unfamiliar coinages, a hyphen can be helpful. A recent author used non-state actors several times. Fine with me. British English tends to hyphenate more non- words than its American counterpart: NGO is spelled out non-governmental organization, not nongovernmental organization. If a U.S. author wants to do likewise, fine with me.

I’m proud to call myself a HARPy — HARP stands for Hyphens Are a Reader’s Pal. When I come across a hyphen that doesn’t follow the “rules” of the guiding dictionary or style guide, I ask, Is it useful? Does it get in the way? Is it consistent with the author’s other preferences? Sometimes I’ll consult CMS, MW, AHD, and the UK English section of the online Oxford Dictionaries. If it passes muster, I’ll enter the spelling in my style sheet so I’ll remember it if it comes up again, and so the proofreader will realize that this was a conscious choice, not a mistake.

Wield hyphens with confidence. They’re helpful little buggers, and nothing to be afraid of.

 

T Is for That

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / Leave a comment

That is a handy and versatile word. It can be an adjective:

That puppy followed me home.

Or an adverb:

Are you that sure of yourself?

Or a pronoun, standing in for a person, place, thing, event, or anything else that is clear from context:

That is the way we’ve always done it.

Or a conjunction:

She insisted that we show up on time.

Or a relative pronoun, which is sort of a cross between a pronoun and a conjunction:

Any map that shows my road as two-way needs to be updated.

In the grammar and usage section of the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS), Bryan Garner puts it more elegantly: “A relative pronoun is one that introduces a dependent (or relative) clause and relates it to the independent clause. Relative pronouns in common use are who, which, what, and that” (CMS 16th ed., section 5.54).

Here’s where things get interesting, maybe a little confusing, and sometimes even contentious. These “dependent (or relative) clauses” can be either restrictive or nonrestrictive, or, as they’re sometimes called, essential or nonessential. Borrowing from CMS again: “A relative cause is said to be restrictive if it provides information that is essential to the meaning of the sentence. . . . A relative clause is said to be nonrestrictive if it could be omitted without obscuring the identity of the noun to which it refers or otherwise changing the meaning of the rest of the sentence” (CMS 16, section 6.22).

Here’s a restrictive clause:

The novel that we’re reading this month can be found in the library.

And here’s a nonrestrictive one:

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which we’re reading for class, was published in 1985.

Here’s where the contentiousness comes in. Have you in your travels come across the “which/that distinction”? I don’t believe I was aware of it before I got my first editing job, in the publications office of a big nonprofit in Washington, D.C. My mentor was a crackerjack editor with decades of experience in New York publishing. Thanks to her I’ve been able to more or less support myself as an editor all these years. She was a stickler for correct usage, and as her apprentice I internalized most of her thou shalts and thou shalt nots.

High among the thou shalts was Thou shalt use only “that” for restrictive clauses and only “which” for nonrestrictive clauses, and “which” must be preceded by a comma.

This is the which/that distinction, and like many another novice editor I became a zealous enforcer of it. Worse, I became a tad smug about it. As I like to say, “everyone’s the hero of their own story,” and for copyeditors, whose brains are crammed with rules and guidelines, this sometimes leads to a conviction that it’s our esoteric knowledge that stands between us and the collapse of civilization, or at least the English language.

In other words, I looked down my snoot at any writer who used “which” for restrictive clauses.

Until I noticed, before too many years had passed, that writers of British English (BrE) regularly used “which” for restrictive clauses without their prose collapsing into a muddle.

And that speakers of American English (AmE) often don’t make the distinction in conversation.

Hmmm. By this point, the which/that distinction was so ingrained that I applied it without thinking in my own writing and in editing as well. This stands me in good stead in U.S. trade publishing, where which/that is still a thou shalt in many quarters.  Nearly all of the AmE writers whose work I edit apply it automatically, so I don’t have to change anything.

With BrE writers, at first I’d diligently change all the restrictive whiches to thats, but then I started getting uneasy. The which/that distinction is a convention, not a rule. I wasn’t improving the prose in any way by enforcing it. Most important, by diligently enforcing a distinction that didn’t need to be enforced, I was pretty sure I was missing more important stuff. Like many other editors and proofreaders I learned early on that the mistakes I missed usually came in close proximity to the ones I caught. It’s as if the editorial brain takes a self-congratulatory pause after each good catch, and in that moment an obvious error can slip through.

So I stopped automatically changing all those whiches to thats. I’d note on my style sheet “which OK for restrictive clauses” so the proofreader wouldn’t flip out and think the copyeditor was asleep at the keyboard. So far the language hasn’t collapsed and my publisher clients haven’t dumped me, but it still feels a little daring so I look over my shoulder a lot to see who’s watching.

Garner notes that the restrictive that is used “in polished American prose,” but that “in British English, writers and editors seldom observe the distinction between the two words.”

Says the usage note in Merriam-Webster’s:

Although some handbooks say otherwise, that and which are both regularly used to introduce restrictive clauses in edited prose. Which is also used to introduce nonrestrictive clauses. That was formerly used to introduce nonrestrictive clauses; such use is virtually nonexistent in present-day edited prose, though it may occasionally be found in poetry.

In its much lengthier usage note, American Heritage comes round to more or less the same conclusion: “But this [restrictive] use of which with restrictive clauses is very common, even in edited prose.” The whole note is an excellent introduction to which/that and restrictive/nonrestrictive. Check it out.

Proofreading Poetry

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / Leave a comment

Me and my IWD sign, which says “The common woman is as common as the best of bread / and will rise.” I am, you may have guessed, a regular bread baker. Photo by Albert Fischer.

I’ve been thinking about this because, you guessed it, I recently proofread a book-length collection of poems.

Prompted by the poster I made for an International Women’s Day rally on March 8, featuring a quote from one of Judy Grahn’s Common Woman poems, I’ve also been rereading Grahn’s early work, collected in The Work of a Common Woman (St. Martin’s, 1977). So I’ve got poetry on my mind.

A 250-page book of poetry contains many fewer words than a 250-page work of fiction or nonfiction, but this does not mean that you’ll get through it faster.  Not if you’re reading for pleasure, and certainly not if you’re proofreading. With poetry, the rules and conventions generally applied to prose  may apply — or they may not. It depends on the poems, and on the poet.

Poetry also offers some tools that prose does not, among them line breaks, stanza breaks, rhyme, and meter. (These techniques and variations thereof can come in very handy for prose writers and editors, by the way.) The work I was proofreading also includes several “concrete poems,” in which the very shape of the poem on the page reflects and/or influences its meaning. “Sneakers” was shaped like, you guessed it, a sneaker; “Monarchs” like a butterfly; “Kite” like a kite.

Errors are still errors, of course. When the name Tammy Faye Baker appeared in one poem, I added the absent k to “Baker” — checking the spelling online, of course, even though I was 99 percent sure I was right. Sometimes a word seemed to be missing or a verb didn’t agree with its subject. In a few cases, the title given in the table of contents differed somewhat from the title given in the text.

Often the matter was less clear-cut. English allows a tremendous amount of leeway in certain areas, notably hyphenation and punctuation, and that’s without even getting into the differences between British English (BrE) and American English (AmE). Dictionaries and style guides try to impose some order on the unruliness, but style guides and dictionaries differ and sometimes even contradict each other.

If you’ve been following Write Through It for a while, you know that I’ve got a running argument going with copyeditors, teachers, and everyone else who mistakes guidelines for “rules” and applies any of  them too rigidly. See Sturgis’s Law #9, “Guidelines are not godlines,” for details, or type “rules” into this blog’s search bar.

Imposing consistency makes good sense up to a point. For serial publications like newspapers or journals, consistency of style and design helps transform the work of multiple writers and editors into a coherent whole. But each poem is entitled to its own style and voice, depending on its content and the poet’s intent. Short poems and long poems, sonnets, villanelles, and poems in free verse, can happily coexist in the same collection.

What does this mean for the proofreader? For me it means second-guessing everything, especially matters of hyphenation and punctuation. Remember Sturgis’s Law #5? “Hyphens are responsible for at least 90 percent of all trips to the dictionary. Commas are responsible for at least 90 percent of all trips to the style guide.”

But dictionaries and style guides shouldn’t automatically override the preferences of a poet or careful prose writer. The styling of a word may affect how it’s heard, seen, or understood. When  I came upon “cast iron pot,” my first impulse was to insert a hyphen in “cast-iron,” and my second was No — wait. Omitting the hyphen does subtly call attention to the casting process; my hunch, though, based on context, was that this was not the poet’s intent. I flagged it for the poet’s attention when she reads the proofs.

Another one was “ground hog.” I can’t recall ever seeing “groundhog” spelled as two words, though it may well have been decades or centuries ago. However, in the first instance “ground hog” broke over a line, with “ground” at the end of one line and “hog” at the beginning of the next. In prose such an end-of-line break would be indicated with a hyphen, but this poet generally avoided using punctuation at the ends of lines, instead letting the line break itself do the work, except for sentence-ending periods. “Ground hog” recurred several times in the poem, so consistency within the poem was an issue. It was the poet’s call, so again I flagged this for her attention.

One last example: Reading aloud a poem whose every line rhymed with “to,” I was startled to encounter “slough,” a noun I’ve always pronounced to rhyme with “cow” (the verb rhymes with “huff”). When I looked it up, I learned that in most of the U.S. “slough” in the sense of “a deep place of mud or mire” (which was how it was being used here) is indeed generally pronounced like “slew.” The exception is New England, which is where I grew up and have lived most of my life. There, and in British English as well, “slough” often rhymes with “cow” in both its literal and figurative meanings. (For the latter, think “Slough of Despond.”)

All of the above probably makes proofreading poetry seem like a monumental pain in the butt, but for me it’s a valuable reminder that English is remarkably flexible and that many deviations from convention work just fine. At the same time, although I can usually suss out a writer’s preferences in a book-length work, I can’t know for sure whether an unconventional styling is intentional or not, so sometimes I’ll query rather than correct, knowing that the writer gets to review the edited manuscript or the proofs after I’m done with them.

The other thing is that while unconventional stylings may well add nuance to a word or phrase, they rarely interfere with comprehension. Copyeditors sometimes fall back on “Readers won’t understand . . .” to justify making a mechanical change. When it comes to style, this often isn’t true. My eye may startle at first at an unfamiliar styling or usage, but when the writer knows what she’s doing I get used to it pretty quickly.

The above examples come from Mary Hood’s All the Spectral Fractures: New and Selected Poems, forthcoming this fall from Shade Mountain Press. It’s a wonderful collection, and I highly recommend it. Established in 2014, Shade Mountain Press is committed to publishing literature by women. Since it’s young, I can say that I’ve read and heartily recommend all of their titles, which so far include three novels, a short-fiction anthology, and a single-author collection of short stories. All the Spectral Fractures is their first poetry book. I rarely mention by title the books that I work on, but Rosalie said it was OK so here it is.

Orthographic Musing

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 1 Comment

In the novel-in-progress excerpt I took to my writers’ group last night, one character (Glory’s mother, Felicia, for anyone who’s keeping track) spoke of a onetime band member who had ODed.

That’s the way I spelled it: ODed.

Several of my fellow writers thought it should be OD’d. That made sense too.

At my writers’ group meetings, we bring enough copies for everybody — at the moment we’re seven, with the eighth on sick leave — then the writer reads aloud while everyone else marks up the hardcopy. My Monday morning tasks include opening the active file (draft2.doc), going through the marked-up copies, and making revisions, corrections, or notes as needed or desired.

So I came to “ODed”, remembered what the others had said, and changed it to “OD’d”.

Being terminally curious, I then had to look it up. Being an editor, I had to look it up in three dictionaries, not one.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate (online) gave both “OD’d” and “ODed”.

American Heritage said “OD’ed” — with both the -ed and the apostrophe.

Oxford, both the UK/World and the US editions, had “OD’d”.

This drives some writers and editors crazy. Not me. I love it. The variation reminds me that when it comes to orthography, there’s often a right way and a wrong way to spell a word, but other times it depends. It’s “sceptic” in British English (BrE), “skeptic” in American English (AmE), but neither one is wrong. Newspapers and magazines usually have a house style that, in the interest of consistency, specifies a preference in cases where several choices exist.

Publishers do too, but the better ones generally allow more variation than magazines and newspapers. Books don’t have to be consistent with each other. They should, however, be internally consistent. If “OD’d” comes up more than once, spell it the same way each time. Make your choice, enter it on your style sheet, then stick to it. (Style sheets are a copyeditor’s best friend and secret weapon. Wise writers use them too. For more about style sheets, check out my blog post “What’s a Style Sheet?”)

While writing the above, I took a break to look up “orthography”. Here’s Merriam-Webster’s first definition: “the art of writing words with the proper letters according to standard usage”. I see two loopholes I could drive my car through: “proper” and “standard usage”. And that’s OK (okay?). MW calls it an “art”, after all, and in art the right answer is often “it depends”.

So what am I going to do about ODed / OD’ed / OD’d? For now I’m going with “OD’d”, but that may change.

Master Proofread

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 9 Comments

I just finished a master proofread, and boy, was it a doozy.

The master proofreader reads proof against copy, line for line, word for word, character for character. It requires intense focus. This is exhausting.

Don't drive yourself crazy looking for the typo, OK?

Don’t drive yourself crazy looking for the typo, OK?

In a master proofread, errors fall into two categories: printer’s errors and editor’s alterations. Both are flagged and corrected in the margin with conventional proofreader’s marks. If the compositor didn’t follow the manuscript precisely, the proofreader marks the correction “pe” (printer’s error). When the proofreader catches something that the author, editor, and copyeditor missed, she marks the correction “ea” (editor’s alteration) or something similar.

When authors make changes in proof, they’re called, big surprise, author’s alterations and marked “aa.”

The distinction is made between printer’s errors and editor’s or author’s alterations because print shops correct their own errors for free. When authors or editors make changes at the proof stage, they generally get charged for them. Some writers have an irresistible desire to fiddle with their prose at the proof stage. Often the desire is somewhat easier to resist if they know it’s going to cost them money.

Fortunately the only person who has to translate this into type is me.

Fortunately the only person who has to translate this into type is me.

Before the digital age, typewritten manuscripts had to be completely rekeyed by the compositor. Good compositors are uncannily accurate, but when an entire 300-page ms. has to be retyped, errors are inevitable.  (Good compositors often correct obvious typos on the fly, but their only compensation for this is the gratitude of proofreader, editor, and author.)

These days, most mss. are submitted and edited electronically. Each version is “cleaner” — more free of errors — than its predecessor. The manuscript never has to be completely rekeyed, so at least in theory the proofs never have to be read against the edited ms. The proof still has to be read, however, ideally by a fresh set of eyes that have never seen the copy before. This is called “cold” or “blind” reading.

Most of the proofreading I do is cold reading.  (I’ve blogged elsewhere about why I like proofreading.) I never see the edited manuscript, so I don’t know what shape it was in when the copyeditor got it or how the author responded to the copyeditor’s changes. I’m the safety net. I’m supposed to catch whatever wasn’t caught earlier.

I’m also looking for formatting glitches, like weird end-of-line hyphenation (you don’t want “therapist” to break as “the-rapist,” or one-syllable words to break at all), “stacks” (when three or more consecutive lines end with a hyphen), and widows and orphans (these are variously defined, but basically they’re instances where a word or even a whole line winds up on a different page from the rest of its paragraph).

I do very few master proofreads these days. The last one was less than arduous: reading second-pass proofs against first-pass to make sure that all the corrections had been correctly entered and that the changes hadn’t messed up any line or page breaks.

So earlier this winter a publisher’s production editor (PE) asked if I’d be able to take on what clearly wasn’t your typical master proofread. Not only was the copyedit on paper (not common these days), but the author had done extensive rewriting after the copyedit. As the PE described it, it sounded like a compositor’s nightmare: “huge number of inserts in a hard-copy ms., no single file, author’s bordering-on-illegible handwriting.”

The 176 inserts — some of which were several pages long — hadn’t been copyedited, though the very capable PE had read them through and done some markup, along with making sure they were keyed to the manuscript so the compositor could replace old copy with new and keep everything in order. Where the author’s handwritten revisions on the original ms. were almost unintelligible, she’d written out the words so the compositor (and I) could read them.

To make it even more fun, both the PE and the book’s editor had written queries to the author on the ms., so part of my job was to copy these queries onto the proofs so the author can see them. These are marked “CQ,” which as I learned it stands for “carry query.” (Wikipedia notes that it actually stands for cadit quaestio, literally “the question falls,” which in legal writing and in some editorial venues means that the question has been settled. In my editing experience it means the exact opposite: the question hasn’t been answered.)

The first thing I did was lock Perfectionista in a closet where I couldn’t hear her carping. Perfectionista is my inner anti-muse who thinks perfection is a reasonable expectation and if I can’t achieve it I’m worthless. I was going to be simultaneously proofreading, copyediting, and looking out for continuity problems introduced by all the new text. No way was I going to catch everything. Once the proofs were corrected, there would be a second proofreading pass, both a master proofread and a cold read.  On jobs this messy, the safety net needs a safety net.

Blessing the PE for her meticulous work and the copyeditor for her comprehensive style sheet, which made it relatively easy to make all those inserts consistent with the copyedited pages that surrounded them, I made it through. Will the author have to pay for all those changes? I don’t know. The cost of implementing them — time spent by editor, production editor, compositor, and proofreaders — must be running well into the thousands of dollars.

The real moral of the story, dear writers, is this: Do your rewriting before your book goes into production, not after the manuscript has been copyedited.

Here’s what a fairly typical page of the copyedited, rewritten, and worked-over manuscript looked like:

ms page 2

What’s a Style Sheet?

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 3 Comments

I knew nothing about style sheets when I started copyediting books for trade publishers and university presses. Before long I thought style sheets were the greatest thing since mocha chip ice cream — well, almost.

So what’s a style sheet? More important, if you’re a writer, not an editor, why should you care?

English is a richly diverse language. British English (BrE) and American English (AmE) often spell the same word differently: spelt/spelled, labour/labor, tyre/tire. In AmE, some words can be spelled in more than one way, like ax and axe, or façade and facade. Others have variations that are pronounced differently but mean the same thing: amid and amidst, toward and towards.

And hyphens! Don’t get me going about hyphens. One of these days I’ll devote a whole blog post to hyphens. Sometimes a hyphen is crucial: consider, for instance, the difference between coop and co-op. Often the hyphen is helpful but not crucial. When I look at reignite, the first thing I see is reign. If an author wants to hyphenate it, re-ignite, that’s fine with me. For most readers, the hyphen in living-room sofa isn’t essential, but if the author has written it that way, I’ll generally leave it alone — and insert a hyphen in dining-room table if the author has left it open.

A style sheet collects all such choices into one handy list: choices not only about how words are spelled but about how they’re styled. Hyphenation is often a matter of style rather than spelling. When do you spell out numbers and when do you use figures? Are abbreviations OK? When the dictionary notes that a word is “often capped” or “usually capped,” which does the writer prefer?

It’s a rare author who submits a style sheet with his or her manuscript. A recent job included Arabic and Urdu terms transliterated into English, and many personal and place names that are transliterated in myriad ways. The author did include a style sheet with his preferred spellings and stylings, and I was profoundly grateful. It saved me a lot of online research and second-guessing.

In fact-checking another recent job, a novel, I quickly discovered discrepancies between the names of some real-life places and the way my author was spelling them. Other names were faithful to the actual place. I’m still not sure whether these discrepancies were intentional or not. If the job had come with a style sheet, I would have known — and I wouldn’t have spent so much time trying (unsuccessfully) to verify the author’s versions.

Why should you, the writer, keep a style sheet?

Maintaining consistency in a novel or long nonfiction work is a challenge. Sure, if you’re working on the computer, you can use the search function to find earlier instances of a word or name — or you could just consult your style sheet. If you’re writing a series involving the same locations and characters, a style sheet will be even more useful.

Whether you self-publish or publish with a trade, academic, indy, or small press, your style sheet means your copyeditor doesn’t have to start from scratch. If she finds inconsistencies in the ms., she’ll be able to go with your preference instead of guessing what you want.

Several books that appear frequently in my "Primary References" section

Several books that appear frequently in my “Primary References” section

I find that keeping a style sheet makes me more conscious of my choices, whether I’m editing or writing. Plenty of choices are “six of one, half dozen the other.” Others are a matter of style: for instance, do you prefer diacritics in words like façade and résumé and naïve? And sometimes, especially with proper nouns, it’s a matter of right and wrong. In the very well written nonfiction book I just finished copyediting, Katherine Hepburn’s name was so spelled. I’ve seen it so often (mis)spelled that way, I didn’t have to look it up (but I did anyway): it’s Katharine, with an a. Before you enter a name on your style sheet, verify the spelling.

If you write fantasy or science fiction, with made-up names that can’t be verified online, a style sheet can be especially useful. Same goes if, in either fiction or nonfiction, you’re dealing with names from other languages, especially languages that don’t use the Roman alphabet. Transliteration systems differ. Accents and diacritics and other spelling conventions can be confusing to someone who doesn’t know the language.

You can organize your style sheet in any way that makes sense to you and whatever you’re working on. Here are the major categories and subcategories in the style sheet I made for a just-completed job, with a brief explanation of each. Most of mine follow a similar format.

Primary References

Here’s where I put whatever dictionaries, style guides, and other reference works I’m using. This keeps my word list (see below) under control: it means I only have to list spellings and stylings that differ from the dictionary’s or style guide’s recommendation.

General

This section is for style choices that apply to the whole book. Number 1 is nearly always “serial comma.” Number 2 usually specifies either “which/that distinction observed” or “which OK for restrictive clauses.” (Anyone want a crash course on the which/that distinction??)

This particular style sheet had subsections for Capitalization, Hyphens & Dashes, Quotes & Italics, and Slashes. Most also have a Numbers subsection, but not this one.

Words

Word lists can be short or long. They should include choices made where alternatives exist, e.g., axe rather than ax, or vice versa. They’ll probably include plenty of words where capitalization, hyphenation, the use of italics, or the styling of numbers is at issue. Their #1 purpose is to help me keep my choices and the author’s straight.

Among the words and phrases in my list were the following (with the reason I included each one):

Braille (can be lowercased)

carpe diem (like other foreign-language expressions listed in the dictionary, it’s usually not italicized)

coauthor (commonly hyphenated)

 decision-making (n.) (decision making and decisionmaking are also possible)

 not-yet-imagined, the (coinage by the author)

 rebbe (variant spelling of rabbi)

transparence (variant of transparency)

Trickster tales (Trickster capped as an archetype)

Western (cultural); western (n.; genre): compass directions are usually lowercased, except when they take on a more-than-geographical meaning. Eastern and Western may signify large cultural groupings. During the Cold War, they had political significance. (North and South are generally capped in reference to the sides in the U.S. Civil War.) And western the genre is sometimes capped and sometimes not. Could drive you crazy, no?

Names

Some copyeditors list the names of virtually every person mentioned in a book. As a proofreader, I don’t find such exhaustive lists useful. So I don’t list familiar names that are easily verified — unless they are frequently misspelled (like Katharine Hepburn) or the author is inconsistent. It can be hard to verify names with particles (von, van, de, etc.), partly because styling varies from family to family and because online references aren’t always as authoritative as they think they are. So it’s worth putting them on the style sheet.

serenity prayer

A good style sheet helps editors and proofreaders recognize what should be changed and what’s fine as it is.