What It's Really Like To Be A Copy Editor

[neilmarr]

Well understood, Marilyn. There was actually an organisation in the UK once whose members used to go around with pens, chalks and paint brushes, correcting bad grammar and spelling on signs. In this case, I could care less. Must admit, I'm a bit of a nit-picker, a grammar nazi. Goes with the territory. Hoots. Neil

[Worldwalker]

One of my other pet peeves: people who think quotation marks emphasize a word, not negate it.

I saw you out with your "wife" last night.

[MacEachaidh]

As a non-American, I'm bemused by the trend in modern US English towards adjectives taking the place of adverbs ("do it quick" rather than "do it quickly"), verbs taking the place of nouns ("I got an invite in the mail") and nouns taking the place of verbs ("How will this impact us?"). I can't help myself; I give a little shudder every time.

Speaking of which ... "anal-retentive"??!! With or without the hyphen, in the version of English I learnt it should be "anally-retentive". But maybe I'm just being closed-minded.

[MacEachaidh]

Originally Posted by Richard Herley

One for the obsessive-compulsives (does it require a hyphen?) among us ... What It's Really Like To Be A Copy Editor by Lori Fradkin.

Thanks for sharing that, Richard. I really enjoyed reading it.

One question: is it just me, or did she mess up the tenses of the verbs in a few phrases? You can't say everything in simple present and simple past, with occasional side-trips into the present continuous. There's a reason for other verbal tenses to exist, even though so-called "plain English" says we should use them as infrequently as possible.

An example: Lori said "I pretty much knew I wanted to go into journalism since I served as an editor on my high-school newspaper, the Three Penny Press, but what exactly I wanted to do changed throughout the years." To me, that doesn't quite make sense -- you can't use a simple past tense to convey an ongoing state or action that has continued from a specific point in the past up until the present. If I'd been Lori's copy-editor, I would have suggested "I had pretty much known I wanted to go into journalism since serving as an editor on my high-school newspaper, the Three Penny Press, but what exactly I wanted to do had changed throughout the years" as a much clearer construction.

Does anyone else see what I'm saying?

[Richard Herley]

Originally Posted by MacEachaidh

Thanks for sharing that, Richard. I really enjoyed reading it.

Originally Posted by MacEachaidh

Does anyone else see what I'm saying?

I see exactly what you're saying, but we are in a tiny and doomed minority!