Quote:
Originally Posted by graycyn
And that's possibly an upcoming question, LOL! I do have a title that is NOT YET eligible for MobileRead, but the author died in 1955, so if I stay this side of the dirt, as Hitch says, maybe.
Another children's title, but one absolutely riddled with two word combos that today would be compound words. It's positively annoying to read after a while.
Black birds, camp fire, thunder storm, sage brush and the like. But a black bird is not necessarily the same thing as a blackbird! But y'all got a few years before I need to know whether to modernize or not!  |
Depends on how consistent how frequent and when it was. However generally I'd leave it original.
Rule 1: Consistent. Same global rules, except per speaker. A particular character might have a dialect. That should be internally consistent.
Rule 2: The black bird. The Maltese Falcon comes to mind. Some separate words that exist as compound are not the same thing, so no "Replace All" click in editor. You know about that, but some are subtle. Like into is still sometimes in to and sometimes can be validly some times.
Rule 3: if it's frequent old usage in the entire book leave it as it is, like Shakespeare or some other things it's what it is.
Rule 4: If things like to-day are infrequent and it seems like poor proof reading you can silently "fix it", but maybe not if a pre-1914 print run.
Rule 5: Even if things are left archaic, I think it's acceptable to do proofreading corrections that could have been done on the galleys and somehow didn't. But list them in notes at the end in case you're wrong!
Rule 6: Minor Inconsistent punctuation and spelling, if you are really sure, can be silently fixed, but see 5.
Rule 7: Don't Transatlantic edit. Establish if it's using British, US, Canadian, South African, Australian or NZ rules. Note that UK and Ireland today and in the past does use either double or single quotes for dialogue. Irish publishing more so, but for an aside the un-spaced pair of em dashes is largely USA and UK & Ireland uses (and always did) a pair of en dashes surrounded by spaces.
For my own use I use double quotes for dialogue and the UK system of spaced en dashes for asides. But I'm in Ireland
The USA tends to always use an Oxford comma in lists and UK & Ireland may
1) Not at all
2) puts it in only to reduce ambiguity
3) rarely always does it.
It's mostly by publisher and era. like the single vs double quotes. Do it consistent with style of book.
Oddly obsolete hyphens annoy me more than word pairs that are commonly compound, especially more modern books.
Also things may have changed at different times in different regions.