Category Archives: editing

Why? Because it’s a complete sentence.

Posted on November 3, 2011 | 9 comments

A colleague was wondering whether, in something such as the title of this post, the b in because should be lower-cased, since Because it’s a complete sentence isn’t a complete sentence.

Of course, lower-casing the b wouldn’t result in the formation of a more complete sentence, and it would make a difference in how it could be read – a lower-cased follow-on after a question tends to imply that what follows is an explanation or addendum to the question, whereas a capital tends to indicate a response. But the important point I want to make today is that Because it’s a complete sentence actually is a complete sentence.

A complete sentence has a subject (sometimes implied) and a predicate. In this sentence, it is the subject and is a complete sentence is the predicate. Nor is there in reality a rule that a sentence can’t begin with a conjunction; that’s actually just a superstition invented a couple of centuries ago by people who didn’t understand what they were talking about (notably one Robert Lowth, who vandalized English teaching quite badly in 1762 with a book of inane invented superstitions that caught on). It was no problem for Shakespeare or the translators of the King James Bible, among other true standard-setters.

But the sense of the sentence is incomplete, one may protest! It requires something to have come before! Um, so? We have no issue with beginning sentences with other discourse markers that relate them to previous sentences (However, it’s a complete sentence – no one calls that incomplete, but you couldn’t start an essay with it; it requires a preceding sentence), and we have no issue with such things as pronouns that refer to entities in other sentences (most of the times we use he, she, or it we are referring to an entity established in a different sentence, so the sentence is not self-sufficient). The fact that a sentence in isolation is semantically incomplete does not make it syntactically invalid.

(It occurs to me that a church can be quite a good place to let opening conjunctions pass unremarked, even at the very start of a passage. A famous hymn begins “And can it be that I should gain an interest in my saviour’s blood?” A common Christmas reading from the Bible starts “And in that country there were shepherds.”)

Meanwhile, no one seems to have qualms about Why? even though it is clearly less complete than the sentence that followed.

It’s true that certain registers (tones, contexts, levels of use) tend to exclude the use of conjunctions at the start of sentences; this is because someone made up that “rule” and the people who established those registers tended to adhere to it. But registers also shift over time in what they allow, and even formal writing is gradually coming back to match ordinary English – and the English of Shakespeare and other greats – in this respect.

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How come it can’t be used?

Posted on October 25, 2011 | 12 comments

I’m reading a text on minimalist syntax right now, borrowed from the library. One of the previous readers has been of the self-appointed editor type – a sort of person generally looked on by real editors about the same as vigilantes are looked on by real law enforcement officers. For instance, everywhere the author has put combined together or merging together, this person has struck out the together with black pen. (Strictly speaking, things A and B could each be combined with other things and not together, although it’s true that combined when used of two things normally implied “together” unless stated otherwise.)

On page 65, there’s an extra bit of ink: the phrase how come it can’t be used to answer A’s question has had cross-outs, writing in and an arrow to change it to why can’t it be used to answer A’s question.

Sigh. Yes, the how come phrasing is more words. Yes, it’s less formal. But it’s not incorrect. And clearly the author wanted that less formal phrasing – more casual and also less pointed. Does it suit the tone of the book? Indeed it does, as it happens. Strange as it may seem to some, adding words can (depending on the words) have the effect of relaxing prose and making it more friendly.

But the vigilante seems to be someone who just has a couple of bees in his (or her) bonnet. Obviously he/she/it is not especially thoughtful or careful. After all, the next sentence gets by unaltered: The answer which we shall give to this question here is that… A person dedicated to concision could cross out most of that to make The answer is that… but that would be less precise even as it’s more concise. It could be The answer in this instance is that… but that would change the tone. Either would be consistent with the other changes the vigilante has made, but neither relates to a specific prescriptivist hobby-horse, so it gets a pass.

It may be that trimming the sentence would be an improvement. That’s a judgement call. But it’s not the sort of judgement evinced by our vigilante, who is simply making sporadic attacks of black ink to swat bees in the bonnet.

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What would you need in order to know if this is right?

Posted on October 24, 2011 | Leave a comment

A colleague asked about a sentence such as “What additional information would you need in order to determine if XYZ will actually happen?” Should the will also be would?

The answer is that it depends. Is the possibility of XYZ happening also contingent or hypothetical? If it’s something that may or may not happen regardless of whether you make a determination in advance, then “will” is preferable:

If you were a weatherman, what information would you need in order to determine whether it will be cloudy tomorrow?

On the other hand, if XYZ’s occurrence is hypothetical, then “would” is correct:

If you were obsessed with a star, what information would you need to determine if he/she would accept your proposal of marriage?

It’s possible to have a hypothetical with bearing on a real event, so we can’t insist on concord between the conditionals without looking at the sense.

Incidentally, some people will insist that you should always shorten in order to to plain to. In fact, while there are places where the shortening can be accomplished to good effect, there are others where bare to would be ambiguous:

These are the dishes I need in order to cook. [Without these casseroles and plates, I can’t cook.]

These are the dishes I need to cook. [I need to cook these dishes.]

And how about if versus whether?  While whether is more formal and has no possible ambiguity, if is very well established in such usage, and has been used by far better authors than the ones who will tut-tut you for using it. Again, consider tone and clarity.

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Fun with find & replace: trailing punctuation

Posted on October 12, 2011 | 2 comments

A colleague found herself faced with a formatting problem: the book she was working on required trailing punctuation (commas, periods) to match the formatting of the word they trailed (bold, italic). This can be hard to spot, and tedious to do by hand. She was working in MS Word. Was there a way to do it in find-and-replace using wild cards?

The answer is yes, and it involves one of my favourite F&R subterfuges, the dummy character.

It’s a bit of a nuisance that Word can specify formatting only over a whole search term, not part of one. But dummy characters help get around that:

1. Replace all bold whole words with the same word plus a special character used nowhere else in the document (a per-thousand sign or a pilcrow or a double dagger or whatever, but it has to be used nowhere else).

The find field will look like this: (<*>)
It will have “Use Wildcards” and “Font: Bold” specified for it.
The < and > mean start and end of word; the * means any number of characters; the ( and ) define it as a single term.

The replace field will be like this if your special character is ξ:  \1ξ
(Replace ξ with whatever character you use.)
The \1 refers to the first (and in this case only) defined term from the Find field.

2. Search all instances of that character followed by a comma or a period (or whatever trailing punctuation you want to change – but only one at a time) and change them to bold.

This is just changing ξ. (or whatever special character and whatever trailing punctuation) to bold, no wild cards needed (make sure to remove the format specification on the Find field). In fact, don’t use wild cards; . is a special character in wild cards (you’d need to make it \.).

3. Delete all instances of the special character.

In other words, find ξ (or whatever your character is) and replace it with nothing – completely empty cell, not even a space. Make sure to remove all formatting specifications.

4. Do the same but with italic rather than bold formatting.

The bolding and italicization should be done as separate steps. Reduces possible confusions, and also handles bold italics neatly.

This can also be used for preceding punctuation, e.g., opening quotes. The variation is trivial and is left as an exercise to the reader. 🙂

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Chez what?

Posted on October 5, 2011 | 2 comments

A colleague who works on French and English texts was musing lately on French place names such as “Chez Pierre” and how in English we would deal with a place name starting with a preposition – her example was “At Pete’s Place.” Could we say “The party is at At Pete’s Place”?

Part of the issue, of course, is that in English we don’t normally use that kind of prepositional construction in place names. But a parallel could be found in a synopsis of Of Human Bondage or perhaps if you looked into Into the Woods or cast your eyes on On the Waterfront, and perhaps glanced at At Fault (by Kate Chopin)…

You can’t get away from the fact that At is part of the name. If you don’t like the at-at, then rewrite! But short of going out with a chainsaw and cutting the At off the sign (as one colleague suggested), you can’t change the name of the place – articles (a, the) may be dispensable, but articles are specifiers on noun phrase heads, whereas prepositions are heads of prepositional phrases, and you can’t cut off heads so glibly. (An argument may be made as to the role of the prepositional phrase as a case proxy for its complement noun phrase, but we can’t avoid the overt syntactic realization and its entailments.)

And anyway, heads though they be, prepositions are usually unstressed except at the beginning of a name, so it’s not quite so awkward, as we have seen above.

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Are you one of the only people bothered by this?

Posted on September 6, 2011 | 40 comments

A while back, a fellow editor encountered an instance where someone “pointed out” that one of the only doesn’t make sense and should be one of the few.

Well, geez, who knew it didn’t make sense? I’ve always understood it. It’s a well-established idiom. But some people find it irksome: to them, only can only mean “one” – they may have that as a feature of their personal version of English, but likely they learned it from someone else “pointing it out” – and so for them one of the only is not just wrong but annoying (as “errors” you just learned can seem to be: a reaction that has much more to do with in-group and out-group than with clarity or effective communication).

What there really is here is a failure of analysis. The same sort of analysis leads some people to say anyways is illogical, when in fact the s isn’t a plural, it’s a survival of the genitive. In the case of one of the only, only means “without anything else.” You can say “there are only three people I know who can do this” and it’s not wrong. To say it must mean “one” flies in the face of established usage.

The difference, therefore, is that one of the few focuses on small quantity, while one of the only focuses on limitation. That’s a subtle difference in focus worth preserving.

So, for instance, a waitress at brunch said to me not long ago “This is one of the only new menu items we have.” My wife and I understood it. And the effect would have been different if she had said “one of the few new menu items” or “one of a few new menu items.”

Now, evidently there are some people who do not have this usage in their repertoire, and are resistant to adding it. This would be one of the factors that ensure many varieties of English usage. If you use one of the only you need to be aware that some people may respond adversely to it.

But the argument often made for replacing one of the only with one of the few, that it’s imprecise, is actually holding that it’s more precise to conflate two senses – one focusing on small numbers, the other on limitation and exclusivity – in one form, and to require every expression to focus not on the limitation and exclusivity but on the small number. That seems to me a little bit like legislating the value of pi to be 22/7 for the sake of precision.

Remember: the moment someone starts in on a common word or expression and says it’s not logical, reach for your references and see what bit of linguistic history or understanding the person is overlooking. Also ask yourself exactly when English became a logical and consistent language. (Hint: it never did.)

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Well Begun Is Nearly Done: Desktop publishing workflow at warp speed

Posted on June 4, 2011 | 2 comments

Presented at the 32nd annual Editors’ Association of Canada conference, Vancouver, May 29, 2011

It’s a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. The three humans, two droids, and one wookiee on the Millennium Falcon are being attacked by Imperial cruisers. They can escape by jumping into hyperspace. But the pilot, Han Solo, is taking time getting coordinates from the navi-computer. As laser blasts hit, Luke Skywalker shouts, “Are you kidding? At the rate they’re gaining…”

And Solo replies, “Traveling through hyperspace isn’t like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?”

 

It’s this week, in an office all too close to home. A project is on a tight deadline. You have the workflow and the people lined up, but you’re taking time making sure that everything is set up the right way in the layout… and the source file… As the telephone is ringing off its hook, your project manager shouts, “Are you kidding? We don’t have time for niceties like that! Just make it happen!”

And you reply, “Desktop publishing isn’t like using a typewriter. Without setting it up the right way, we could get nailed and waste hours redoing everything when the client wants to change some element of the look late in the game. And you know they will. And that would take us way over time and budget, wouldn’t it?”

 

You’ve probably heard your mother or teacher or some similar person say, “Well begun is half done.”

Well, when it comes to desktop publishing, well begun is really a lot more than half done. Continue reading →

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Such cases as these

Posted on April 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

A colleague had been discussing the difference between such as X and such X as with some friends, and asked for further insight from the rest of us. I gladly weighed in:

The first thing to note is that it’s actually a choice between X such as Y and such X as Y. But those two constructions are not the same thing, though they can mean similar things. Continue reading →

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“I can do that!”

Posted on April 9, 2011 | 4 comments

This is the text of a presentation I gave at The Writers’ Community of Durham Region’s monthly breakfast on April 9, 2011.

Have you ever seen A Chorus Line? I mean the Broadway musical or the movie that was made from it.

Now, there’s a show for a triple threat. You know, someone who can act, dance, and sing. There’s one great tapdance number in it – you might know it: “I’m watching sis go pit-a-pat, Said, ‘I can do that, I can do that.’”

That’s actually a pretty good guide to becoming a triple threat. In publishing. You know, writing, editing, design. By design I mean layout – desktop publishing. “I can do that” is also a good guide to getting to earn a living doing these things. And there’s a corollary: a good way not to get as far is to say, “I can’t do that. I won’t do that.” Continue reading →

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E.g., this kind of thing, etc.

Posted on March 28, 2011 | 2 comments

A point of uncertainty for many: when you have something listing examples, do you use etc. with e.g.? For example,

requirements for baking a cake (e.g., eggs, flour, sugar, etc.)

The answer:  use one or the other (or neither – see below), but not both. Each of them indicates you’re seeing a subset: e.g. translates (roughly) to “for example”, and etc. translates to “and more” or “and others”.

Faced with a sentence that uses both, I generally drop the etc., although in some contexts I’ll drop the e.g. And in some contexts I’ll use for example or for instance in place of e.g., or and more or and so on in place of etc. (I will not, of course, have for instance, flour, eggs, sugar, and so on, for the same reason as given above: you only need one – otherwise you’re saying and so on is an instance or example.)

When deciding which to drop, note that etc. may seem more hand-waving dismissive (as may and so on) and e.g. more high-toned or business-y; also, e.g. declares from the outset that the list is not exhaustive, whereas etc. waits until the end to show that there’s more, so there’s a difference in the flow of the argument.

Another thing to pay attention to is whether the list is definite or possible members of a set. Generally, you will find that etc. tends more to imply that the things listed are all definite members of a fixed set, whereas e.g. is more able to allow possible members of a set. Compare:

Choose some music you like (e.g., Pet Shop Boys, Metallica, Beethoven).

Choose some music you like (Pet Shop Boys, Metallica, Beethoven, etc.).

The second is more likely to imply that you like all three of the artists listed, whereas the first tends more to allow that they’re just examples of music you might like.

And if we look back at the cakes, we can try both:

requirements for baking a cake (e.g., eggs, flour, sugar)

requirements for baking a cake (eggs, flour, sugar, etc.)

The first allows that you might bake a cake without one or more of the items listed, whereas the second tends to imply that they’re all requisites.

Oh, and what about i.e.? That’s from Latin for “that is”, and it means you’re presenting not an example – not a subset – but an amplification or restatement. Let’s look at our examples:

Choose some music you like (i.e., Pet Shop Boys, Metallica, Beethoven).

requirements for baking a cake (i.e., eggs, flour, sugar)

In the first case, it’s saying that those three are the music you like and the music you’re going to choose, and none other in addition. This is possible but unlikely. In the second case, it’s saying that you need nothing other than eggs, flour, and sugar to bake a cake. Heh… you try that and tell me how it comes out.

If you want to be less prissy, i.e. can be replaced by in other words. Also, there’s nothing in the logic of a sentence to keep you from using i.e. with etc., but it’s sloppy writing – better just to use e.g. and no etc. Oh, and often you can drop it altogether:

He named the three hottest women in film in his opinion (Cate Blanchett, Rosamund Pike, and Lucy Liu).

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