Is singular they really OK?

Is singular they really OK?
Dear Member,
If you’ve been paying attention to online industry articles, you’ve read a lot about something called singular they.
We’ve covered it frequently on the blog . The issue is twofold:
3
Common-gender use: Which pronoun do we use to refer to a single person whose gender is unknown?
3
Common-number use: Which pronoun do we use to refer to a noun that is singular but represents a group?
One possible answer to both these questions is to use a form of they, as in Someone left their book on the table
and Everyone should take their seats now. Many copyeditors shudder at such usage, but Jonathon Owen walks us
through why it may not be as bad as we think. Before you determine that Copyediting has lost all respectability,
read Jonathon’s article.
From our contributors, you’ll find
Currents: Mark Farrell discusses current usage of the exclamation point.
Technically Speaking: I review useful apps for copyeditors.
In Style: Norm Goldstein stylizes fashion terms.
— Plus Mark Peters shares something from the OED in Word Resource Roundup, I look at adjective order in
Grammar on the Edge, and I answer a lot of little nagging questions in Ask the Editor.
Don’t forget that you can e-mail questions to me ([email protected] ) anytime.
Cheers,
Erin Brenner
Editor
Copyediting
[email protected]
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Evaluating Manuscripts and Editing
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Thursday, October 18, 2012
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Ten Tips for Copyediting Business Texts
Thursday, November 15, 2012
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Thursday, October 18, 2012
EVALUATING MANUSCRIPTS
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Editors are often challenged to edit at different levels, with
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TEN TIPS FOR COPYEDITING
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90-Minute Audio Conference | with Merrill Perlman
What’s the difference between the national debt
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Trademarks: what they are,
the numbers when reporting on the stock market?
If you edit business stories but have little business
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what they aren’t, and why you
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Bankruptcies: chapter and verse and common pitfalls in editing text about them
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World Bank and IMF: what they
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Review and is an adjunct assistant professor at the Columbia
University Graduate School of Journalism. Perlman retired
after 25 years at the New York Times, where she most
recently served as director of copy desks, responsible for
managing more than 150 copyeditors. She has developed
and presented seminars for the New York Times, the American Copy Editors Society,
the Dow Jones News Fund, the Poynter Institute, news publications nationwide,
journalism conventions, private companies, and law firms.
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3RESOURCES
3IN DEPTH
Can copyediting be
learned—or taught?
by Ruth E. Thaler-Carter,
Contributing Writer
The case for singular they
The fifth step is about Profit
or Loss. Profit or Loss tells
you how much profit you
made for the month, if you
broke-even, or how much
you over-spent.
Gender-neutral language can sometimes
be a problem for writers and editors, and
one of the most seemingly intractable
issues is the question of gender-neutral pronouns. It is often lamented that English lacks a suitable gender-neutral pronoun, and
many have tried over the years to coin something to fill the gap
(at one of my former jobs, we facetiously used werf), but so far
none have succeeded. For many years the standard solution was
to simply use forms of he to refer to either men or women, as in
Someone left his book on the desk, but this has fallen out of favor
over the past several decades with the rise of feminism and the
push for gender equality. Whatever your feelings on the supposedly gender-neutral he, its decline has once again left an unfortunate gap in the language.
Some argue that the best solution is to use singular they,
which is already common in speech. But writers are frequently
cautioned against using it, and editors are typically instructed
to remove it. The usual advice is to replace a singular they with
the conjoined he or she or to recast the sentence with a plural
noun for they to refer to. Thus Will everyone please take their
seats becomes Will everyone please take his or her seat, or A person should brush their teeth at least twice a day becomes People
should brush their teeth at least twice a day.
The problem is that he or she can quickly become tiresome if
overused, as in If a student wishes to change his or her schedule,
he or she must present his or her photo ID at the registration office, and recasting a sentence as a plural doesn’t work when the
subject must be singular, as in Someone left their book on the desk.
While you can change the first to Students who wish to change
their schedules must present their photo IDs at the registration office, you simply can’t say Some people left their book on the desk
without unacceptably altering the meaning.
Increasingly, authorities are starting to accept singular they in
print, though there’s still a great deal of resistance to it. The American Heritage Dictionary notes that singular they “is widespread
and can be found in newspapers, magazines, and other edited
publications.” A growing minority of the dictionary’s usage panel
accepts singular they when referring to genderless nouns, and a
majority now accepts it when referring to indefinite pronouns
such as anyone and everyone. As New York Times associate managing editor for standards Philip B. Corbett said, “There’s a growing tendency to accept ‘they’ or ‘their’ to refer to an indefinite
or singular antecedent, and this solution seems likely to win out
eventually.” Perplexingly, though, Corbett recommends avoiding it until that unspecified time. If its acceptance is growing and
See page 11 for the answer.
C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2
The e-mail discussion group
Copyediting-L (CEL) recently
tackled the issue of whether
writers can be taught to
notice the finer details of
language and to self-edit.
The topic arose when
Heidi Kenyon, content
strategist and copywriter at
Toolhouse Inc., described a
colleague as “a great writer
[who] simply can’t see errors the way I can.” Kenyon’s colleague frequently
confuses words: breached
for broached, peace for
piece, and lye for lie. She apparently has no idea what
she is doing wrong as she
writes. She is probably using a spell checker, perhaps
with autocorrect enabled,
which would explain why
her wrong word choices are
spelled right; her writerly
instincts are good, but she
lacks editing or proofreading instincts.
C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 8
THE QUIZ
How many errors do
the following sentences
contain?
by Jonathon Owen
Inside
3
Inside Joke
4
Grammar on the Edge
Ordering your adjectives
5
Currents
Surprise! The exclamation point is welcome in
today’s fast-paced communications
6
Ask the Editor
3 first-in-command
3 onsite
3 citing references
3 the moon and the Mars
3 forte
3 investigation against
3 advise + direct object
9
Technically Speaking
App-ealing editing solutions
11
The Quiz Answer
12
Word Resource Roundup
OED Online’s quarterly
updates
In Style
Fashionable style
3 TK
In the December 2012–
January 2013 issue:
Setting editing rates
3IN DEPTH
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PA G E 1
inevitable, why avoid it? And how are we
supposed to know when it’s finally OK to
use it?
The real problem with most of the
recommendations against using singular
they is that they get some basic facts
about grammar and the history of the
English language wrong. First, they treat
it as a relatively recent innovation that is
infiltrating written language from spoken
language. Second, they claim that it’s
simply ungrammatical to use a plural pronoun to refer to something grammatically
singular. I’ll show why both of these arguments are wrong, or at least not as strong
as some would like to think.
But first, a little background. As
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English
Usage explains, the phenomenon commonly known as singular they is actually
two closely related phenomena. One is
common-gender use, and the other is
common-number use. The commongender use is more frequent and garners
the most attention. This is the use of they
for singular referents whose gender is
unknown or unspecified. The commonnumber they is used with referents that
are grammatically singular but stand in
for whole groups, as in these lines from
Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
’Tis meet that some more audience
than a mother,
Since nature makes them partial,
should o’erhear
The speech, of vantage.
Here the plural pronoun them refers
grammatically to a mother, but it really
means “mothers.” You could make the
pronoun agree by changing it to her, but
Polonius means that nature makes all
mothers partial, not just Gertrude. Since
the common-number they doesn’t draw
much attention, I’ll focus on the common-gender use, though I’ll continue to
use “singular they” as a blanket term.
History
As the Shakespeare quote shows, singular
they is not a modern innovation or a mere
product of the feminist movement. The
Oxford English Dictionary, “the definitive record of the English language,” has
examples of singular they dating back to
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1526. It’s found in the King James Version of the Bible and the works of not
just Shakespeare but also Jonathan Swift,
Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Edith Wharton,
and W. H. Auden.
A common response to this evidence
is that these literary greats knew the
rules well enough to know when to break
them. Another response is that everyone
makes mistakes and that use by even the
best writers isn’t enough to make it acceptable. But these responses start from
the assumption that singular they is an
error in an attempt to justify continued
opposition to it. Like so many rules, however, the one proscribing singular they
comes to us from 18th-century grammarians who were attempting to standardize
the English language on a Latin model. In
this way, the ban on singular they belongs
in the same category as the bans on split
infinitives and stranded prepositions.
It was the American grammarian Lindley Murray who first attacked singular
they and prescribed generic he, and others soon picked up the attack. (Even 200
years ago, people found he or she clunky
and inelegant.) An 1850 Act of Parliament even legally prescribed generic he
over he or she or they. By the 20th century, singular they had been mostly driven
out of the written language, though of
course it survived all this time in speech.
And as the names listed earlier show,
some writers blissfully ignored the stricture against singular they and carried on
using it anyway. Simply put, Shakespeare
didn’t break this rule because he had mastered it; the rule hadn’t been invented yet.
For Shakespeare and many others, there
was no reason to avoid singular they because it wasn’t wrong.
But why did speakers start using singular they in the first place? Because it
fills an important niche. Having a genderneutral singular pronoun is very handy,
and it’s difficult to create a new pronoun
out of thin air. Anyone can coin a new
noun or verb, but pronouns are what
linguists often call a closed class—they
don’t typically admit new members. In
fact, the most recent additions to the personal pronouns are she and they, which
replaced the original Old English pronouns
heo and hie, respectively, in the 12th and
13th centuries, and its, which replaced
the original neuter genitive form his in
the 16th century. As the case system of
Old English started to disappear, heo and
hie started to sound almost identical
to he, which could have caused a great
deal of confusion. In response, speakers
borrowed they from Old Norse speakers who had settled along the northeast
coast of England. Its was coined because
speakers began to feel uncomfortable
using his for both masculine and genitive
objects. It’s still a bit of a mystery where
she came from.
Singular they came in response to a
similar need. As English lost its grammatical genders, speakers began to use
a system of natural gender instead. The
gender-neutral it began to be seen as dehumanizing, leaving the infamous gap. He
and she were both gender-specific, and
the conjoined he or she has always been
clunky. They, however, was already gender-neutral without being dehumanizing,
and it was even a third-person pronoun.
And as I’ll show later, the grammatical
number mismatch isn’t as big a deal as
some have made it out to be.
Historical usage can only tell us so
much, though. After all, language is always changing, and what was correct
centuries ago may not be correct today.
Some have expressed concern that acceptance of singular they will be the beginning of the end of numerical agreement
in English, but I firmly believe that this
concern is misplaced.
Grammar
The biggest objection to singular they
is that it’s ungrammatical—a plural
pronoun simply doesn’t agree with a
singular antecedent, right? If we accept one grammatical mismatch, where
do we draw the line? Fortunately, it’s
not as simple as that. There’s another
plural personal pronoun that English
has used as a singular for centuries:
you. It started life as a plural, contrasting with singular thou, but it began to
be used as a formal singular pronoun
in the 13th century. If you’ve studied
any European languages, you’ve probably encountered this phenomenon
before. For example, French uses vous
as a formal singular second-person pronoun, even though it’s normally a plural
second-person pronoun, and German
uses Sie, which is not just plural but also
third person. When you address a single
person formally in German, you literally
call them they. To make matters even
C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 3
Copyediting | October–November 2012
2
3IN DEPTH
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PA G E 2
more complicated, the French also often use the singular third-person indefinite pronoun on (usually translated as
“one”) to mean “we.” Thus you can say
“On y va!” (literally “one goes there”)
to mean “Let’s go!”
In English, the purely singular
second-person form, thou, fell out
of common use by the 17th century,
leaving us with a plural pronoun pulling double duty. If pressing a plural
pronoun into service as a singular were
going to destroy our language’s sense
of grammatical number, it would have
happened over 400 years ago. Far from
being an absolute and inviolable law,
grammatical number is a flexible and
even fluid concept. The beautiful thing
is that language doesn’t come crashing
down around us, leaving us all grunting
and gesturing wildly in hopes of somehow being understood.
What’s a copyeditor to do?
The grammar and history lesson is all
well and good from a linguistic point of
view, but what are editors supposed to
do? Isn’t it our job to resist questionable
usage until it becomes standard? As I
said earlier, this reasoning is problematic. Saying “We can’t use it yet because
it’s not acceptable” is essentially the
same as “We can’t accept it yet because
it’s not acceptable.” It’s circular reasoning. If copyeditors are the gatekeepers of
the language, then we have the power to
make it acceptable. Lamenting the lack
of a gender-neutral pronoun while actively resisting the best and most natural
option is at least a little disingenuous.
And it may not be as unacceptable as
some people say. In a recent Q&A on the
Chicago Manual of Style Online site, the
Chicago staff wrote, “The growing acceptance of they as a singular pronoun
is in response to a need for a genderneutral pronoun that avoids the use of
he to mean he or she.” Though they say
that rewriting a sentence to make it plural is often a good option, they note that
this doesn’t always work, as in the earlier example Someone left their book on
the desk. “In those contexts,” they say,
“many language experts now approve of
the use of they.” And as a writer friend
of mine remarked to me, “If [I] had
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wanted to use plural nouns in the sentence, I would have written it that way in
the first place.”
This brings up an interesting point:
sometimes a writer intends to use singular they. It’s a natural solution to a
vexing problem, and it’s been used by
some of the best writers of the past
five centuries. Readers are increasingly
comfortable with it, and authorities are
beginning to accept it. If a writer wants
to use singular they, why shouldn’t we
let them? n
Jonathon Owen has worked as a copyeditor, typesetter, and production artist for
over 10 years. He is finishing a master’s
degree in linguistics, and his thesis explores
the gatekeeping effect of copyediting on
Standard English. He also writes about linguistics and usage at www.arrantpedantry.com.
Get more language news.
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inside joke by Sage Stossel
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Copyediting | October–November 2012
3
GRAMMAR ON THE EDGE
by Erin Brenner
Ordering your adjectives
Copyeditors are always on the lookout for
an adjective train before a noun, seeking to
avoid a pileup by cutting unnecessary adjectives or breaking up the train by recasting
the sentence:
John was puzzled by the fresh, warm
French bread loaf he found in the abandoned building.
John was puzzled by the warm loaf
of French bread he found in the abandoned building.
There are times, though, when we need
to keep all the adjectives in the train to avoid
derailing meaning:
You can also try swapping the order of
the adjectives:
French warm bread
sunny warm day
Again, if the meaning changes with the order, you’re dealing with cumulative adjectives.
Otherwise, they’re coordinate adjectives.
The tests aren’t perfect, though, as Neal
Whitman demonstrates in “Ordering Your
Adjectives ” with little green bag. Swap the
adjective order, and the meaning stays the
same but sounds wrong to our ears. Insert
and between them, and you get the same result. Green and little aren’t cumulative adjectives, then, but they don’t sound right, either.
Whitman suggests putting the adjectives
after the noun and inserting and:
The bag is little and green.
I ordered a pale blue wool coat for my
nephew.
At that point, we have to decide what order the adjectives should go in. Yes, there’s a
standard way to order adjectives, even those
separated by commas.
Adjective choices
Prenominal adjectives (adjectives that
come before the noun) are usually one of
two types: coordinate or cumulative. Coordinate adjectives independently modify
the noun they precede; that is, they don’t
modify each other: a warm, sunny day.
Cumulative adjectives not only modify
the noun they precede but also create a
new idea. In other words, the adjective
closest to the noun modifies the noun
and forms a new unit: French bread. The
adjective preceding the new unit modifies
the whole unit: warm French bread.
How do you know which kind of adjective you have? Most of us are familiar with
the idea of placing and between the adjectives as a quick test:
warm and French bread
warm and sunny day
If the meaning changes with the addition
of and, you’re dealing with cumulative adjectives. If it doesn’t, you’re looking at coordinate adjectives.
WWW.COPYEDITING.COM Although you might trip over a little
and green bag, the bag is little and green
sounds right. We can say with a degree
of certainty that little and green independently modify bag.
So why does green little bag sound
wrong?
Determiner
Quality
A
colorful
Size
Age
small
An
excellent
Five
beautiful
Origin
silver
Japanese
old
young
silk
scarf
wooden
doll
car
athlete
balloons
yellow
aging
gray
Those
nice
brown
Two
mean
cotton
Job seekers recently read about these
positions on the Copyediting Job Board:
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reelance Earth Science Editor, ELSS Inc.
3 Editor, Health Progress, Catholic dress
house
Italian
teenage
large
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Health Association
Noun
American
The
21
Material
red
big
Her
Color
new
That
My
Adjective order
Are green and little actually cumulative adjectives? If they’re not, why does order matter so much?
Unfortunately, the answers to those questions aren’t totally clear (Whitman’s article
gives more details). But linguists do know that
adjective order sometimes matters quite a bit,
even when the adjectives aren’t cumulative.
The good news for copyeditors is that we
don’t have to know if green and little are coordinate, cumulative, nonsubsective, subsective fixed order, or something else (I promise
I did not make up those categories). We
simply have to recognize when the adjective
order sounds jarring and put the adjectives
in proper order.
So what’s proper order?
Several years ago, Copyediting’s former
editor, Wendi Nichols, shared a table in a Tip
of the Week (no longer available) that gave
an order of adjectives that she used in her
lexicography work (see below).
I’ve found this chart useful over the years.
For those few situations where I had a sentence with an adjective that didn’t fit one of
Nichols’s categories, I ordered the adjectives
I could and played with the remaining adjective until the order sounded right to me. n
shoes
girls
green
tables
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Museum of Art
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Copyediting | October–November 2012
4
CURRENTS
Surprise! The exclama­tion
point is welcome in today’s
fast-paced communications
by Mark Farrell
The panoply of punctuation marks contains a range of symbols that writers can
choose from to suit their style. In a pensive mood? The semicolon might do, or
maybe a question mark. A period can be
a symbol of bold confidence, and dashes
can be used when you’re feeling expansive. The apostrophe is strictly reserved
for matters where form follows function.
But the exclamation point—well, it’s often
eschewed, and those who overuse it risk
becoming the object of scorn and ridicule
among serious readers. In many documents and texts, it’s completely off limits.
There’s no place for it in technical documents, user manuals, or the like, except to
express the occasional note of warning.
There’s often no room to convey emotion,
be it joy or anger, without the exclamation
mark. Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald
accused writers who used exclamation
points of laughing at their own jokes.
It seems that British cool rules the
English-language landscape when it
comes to punctuation choice. The
Spanish language doesn’t shy away from
exclamation points; they—and question marks—are used twice, inverted at
the beginning of a sentence and rightside up at the end. While that doesn’t
necessarily mean that the exclamation
point is used more frequently in Spanish
sentences, it virtually guarantees that
the mark will be used more often than
in English texts and gives writing in that
language a muy caliente feel (as do diacritical marks such as tildes).
But with the advent of electronic communication over the past few decades,
and accelerating more recently with the
development of text messages and instant
messaging, a platform has emerged in
which the exclamation point may have
found a niche in the English language
where it’s not only welcome but quite
often necessary.
The nature of e-mail communication is such that it’s difficult to convey
the intended feeling without using an
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exclamation point, even if it is merely to
convey satisfaction or a positive state
of mind. Sure, the smiley face emoticon
can often substitute for the exclamation point, but such symbols can quickly
become overused. Moreover, recipients
of such messages have come to expect
some sort of emotional cue to accompany the text.
“The text message and the
exclamation point are made for
each other.”
Writing in the New York Times , Aimee
Lee Ball quoted Eats, Shoots & Leaves
author Lynne Truss as saying the acceptance of new standards for e-mail communication happened “as if by common
consent.” Truss thinks extended use of
the exclamation point is a way to keep
readers’ attention.
Ball also found a champion of the
exclamation point in Walter Kirn, author
of Up in the Air, who said, “The text message and the exclamation point are made
for each other, and I’m glad they finally
found each other.”
Despite what some see as the need
for exclamation points in short electronically transmitted messages, its detractors are still out there. In a recent article
published in the Boston Globe , author and
former social media coach Judy Dunn
had this to say about the mark: “When
you overuse it, it takes the power out of
it. So what am I supposed to be excited
about if it’s everywhere? If everything is
exciting then nothing is exciting, because
it’s all the same.”
Ben Yagoda, writing in the New York
Times blog Draft, noted a recent tweet
by comedian Steve Martin: “Today, @
SteepCanyon and I play with the Boston
Pops! I must be excited, because I used one
of my few remaining exclamation marks.”
But electronic messages are a world
unto their own, complete with a different set of rules and their own conventions, which don’t necessarily apply to
traditional, more formal types of writing.
Those who insist on applying traditional
rules to electronic messages are bound to
be disappointed, needlessly aggravated,
and ultimately left behind.
Editor and writer Allyson Peltier of
Pikesville, MD, notes that text messages
and the like exist in a fast-paced environment where the point is getting your
message across as speedily and efficiently
as possible. “Part of the point of texting,
especially, is that it’s quick, so texters rely
on a variety of techniques to get their
message across clearly, including abbreviations, emoticons, and, shall we say, a
more creative use of punctuation,” Peltier
wrote in an e-mail message.
Still, Peltier doesn’t necessarily trust those
on the cutting edge of these new techniques
to distinguish between what’s appropriate
in an instant message and what is needed in
formal writing. “It’s naive to think that the
younger generation—who are learning formal writing while they simultaneously grow
up texting—instinctively understands the
importance of keeping these distinct styles
and approaches separate. Written communication is a learned skill, and if we don’t
explicitly teach students the rules, they won’t
know them. I have several schoolteacher
friends who see the kind of punctuation that
would be common and acceptable in a text
message making its way into school papers
for precisely this reason.”
Peltier sees this as an opportunity
for a new teaching paradigm that would
address the various platforms we use for
writing in today’s world. Some textbooks
I’ve used to teach writing classes for
grade-school students now provide lessons in writing electronic messages.
“We have to adapt the way we teach
to the modern world,” wrote Peltier. “To
me, the solution seems to be addressing the different venues for writing that
today’s student encounters and teaching
the rules for each (e.g., why you’d use
three exclamation points in a text versus
when to use them in an essay), rather
than trying to get texters to start using
formal punctuation and grammar.”
Writing in the information age is
bound to undergo some form of transformation, and it remains to be seen how
drastic the effect on formal writing will
be. But I remain optimistic that the basic
structure will remain intact and that the
two will continue to distinguish themselves appropriately. n
Copyediting | October–November 2012
5
ASK THE EDITOR
by Erin Brenner
Something I read recently featured discussions about top company
leaders—the first-in-command and the second-in-command. What
is the proper plural for these words?
The author chose first-in-commands and second-in-commands; I
thought firsts-in-command and seconds-in-command seemed right.
Perhaps the determining factors are the hyphens that combine
three words into one term, thus the -s after command is correct.
This has been bugging me. Which is correct?
Linda
Cambridge Project Resources
The general rule is to pluralize the main noun in the compound, as
in fathers-in-law and attorneys-at-law. It’s a good idea to check your
dictionary, however. The longer these compounds are around and the
more frequently they’re used, the more we think of them as one unit
and start putting the -s or -es at the end of the whole term, as with
time-outs and chaise longues.
First-in-command and second-in-command aren’t so common
as to be listed in most dictionaries, so I would follow the general rule
and pluralize first and second. If those sound too odd to an author,
you might suggest writing around the problem; first-in-commands and
second-in-commands would be incorrect.
I’ve always spelled on site as an open compound after the verb (We
arrived on site yesterday) and hyphenated it in the attributive position (on-site treatment of contamination). The American Heritage
Dictionary (AHD) now lists onsite and offsite as the only spellings for
these as adjectives and adverbs, so I infer that the one-word spellings
now predominate in the language. But the only examples given are
in the attributive position (“onsite monitoring of a production run”;
“offsite waste treatment operation”). Do you think the editors’ intent
is to spell these as one word in all cases? The Oxford Dictionaries
Online gives only the hyphenated spellings.
We produce a variety of technical documents written by multiple
authors, and they seem to use all possible spellings for on site and off
site. We need to decide on consistent rules and find a solid reference
we can point to for spelling. Any ideas?
David Foster
Technical Writer and Editor
S. M. Stoller Corp.
If your house dictionary doesn’t give clear guidance or if you don’t
like the form it gives, you can justify a consistent style by following
another resource, such as
3
3
3
your house style or usage guide;
industry standards;
popular usage in mainstream media.
The key is to be consistent and to be able to cite an authority, as
you’ve noted.
The 5th edition of AHD is the newest American dictionary
WWW.COPYEDITING.COM
and has undergone extensive updating since the previous edition.
That’s a good reason for following its spelling rule for a term that’s
been in flux. AHD prefers the solid spelling for onsite and offsite,
whether the term is used as an adjective or an adverb. Since no
other restrictions are mentioned, it’s fair to assume that this is the
preferred spelling for all cases.
It’s worth noting, however, that on-site and off-site are the more
popular forms in published writing, according to the Corpus of
Contemporary American English (COCA), and that on-site and offsite
are more popular in Google News:
Term
COCA (2008-2011)
onsite
103
Google News (08/10/12)
8,970
on-site
275
81,400
offsite
15
9,800
off-site
50
5,640
You might check to see which forms are more popular in the
technical-writing field and follow those.
I would definitely either use the hyphen in both forms or drop it
in both forms to keep everyone from pulling their hair out in confusion. There’s plenty of evidence for spelling the terms either with or
without the hyphen.
I am a new entrant to Pakistan’s English print media as a copyeditor.
Today while reading newspapers, I came across “The counsel cited
references from a book …” To me, the phrase citing references is repetitious. What’s the difference between a citation and a reference?
Arsalan Altaf
Subeditor
Dateline Islamabad
The terms are similar, but in most academic contexts, they have specific definitions.
AHD defines citation as “a quotation of or explicit reference to
a source for substantiation, as in a scholarly paper.” According to
The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS), a citation identifies “the sources of direct quotations or paraphrases and of any facts or opinions
not generally known or easily checked.” To cite a quote or fact is
to somehow give its source.
There are many ways to cite quotations and information, depending
on discipline and style, one of which is a reference and reference list.
A reference, says AHD, is
3
3
3
3
A note in a publication referring the reader to another passage or source
The passage or source so referred to
A work frequently used as a source
A mark or footnote used to direct a reader elsewhere for
additional information
A reference in CMS is the author and date of the material in question put in parentheses. A reference list appears at the end of the
C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 7
Copyediting | October–November 2012
6
3ASK THE EDITOR
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PA G E 6
document. The reader can use the reference
to identify the original work. To reference
something is to give the source information.
Without context, it’s difficult to say if
cite and references are being used literally or
more loosely. Going by just the snippet given,
I’d say that the counsel quoted the references
that the book lists and listed the information
to find the book itself. If that’s the case, I
don’t think cited references is repetitive.
Do you have any ideas on why it is the
Moon but not the Mars?
Emma Dewhurst
Ten Stories High
UK
Proper nouns can be created from what
the Longman Grammar of Spoken and
Written English calls “arbitrary designations,” such as Tom and Mars. They don’t
have a lexical meaning that is specific to the
objects they describe. This type of proper
noun is used without a determiner (a, the)
and doesn’t vary in number.
But proper nouns can also be created
from lexical words, such as common nouns,
as with the Merrimack River and the moon
(or the Moon, depending on which style
you follow). These lexical words generally
describe the objects they refer to (river,
moon) and take the definite article, although
they don’t vary in number or definiteness. It’s not a Merrimack River but the
Merrimack River. In other words, the name
and the object share characteristics. Moon is
a common noun that means “a natural satellite that revolves around a planet,” which
is what our moon is. What’s more, it’s the
only one we have. If we had more than
one, we probably would have given them
arbitrary designations or more descriptive names to tell them apart: Io or the
Southwest Moon. We have the same situation with sun/the sun and earth/the earth,
although in the latter case we can talk about
our planet as Earth or the Earth.
I’d like for you to look at the pronunciation of forte, meaning “strength.” It
is from the French and is pronounced
“fort.” Forte, meaning “loud,” is from
the Italian and is pronounced “for-tay.”
So, how did the French word capture the
Italian pronunciation?
Douglas Starr
WWW.COPYEDITING.COM
We borrowed the French word fort
(no e), meaning “strong point of a sword
blade,” in the 1640s, according to the
Online Etymology Dictionary . By the 1680s,
it had also come to mean “strong point
of a person.” The original term would be
pronounced “for” in French. Forte, then, is
actually a corruption of the original French
term, no matter how we pronounce it.
The e was added in the 18th century,
most likely under the influence of the Italian
forte. That is also most likely what influenced
the pronunciation of the French word as well.
The key is that English is neither French
nor Italian. When English borrows words
from other languages, its speakers are under
no obligation to keep the original pronunciation or spelling. The same can be said of
other languages when they borrow foreign
words. In this case, we’ve changed both.
All the dictionaries I checked list both
pronunciations as standard for forte. AHD
notes that the two-syllable pronunciation is
“probably the most common pronunciation
in American English and was the choice of
74 percent of the Usage Panel in our 1996
survey.” Garner’s Modern American Usage
puts the two-syllable pronunciation at Stage
5 of its Language-Change Index, meaning
it’s fully accepted by language users.
That said, the older (and, we now know,
just as incorrect), single-syllable pronunciation is also still considered standard. A
speaker may choose to use either, although
the two-syllable pronunciation seems to be
more popular.
Today while reading the newspaper, I came
across this sentence: “The minister ordered
to start an investigation against Nawaz
Sharif.” Should it be “investigation into
cases against Nawaz Sharif”?
Arsalan Altaf
Subeditor
Dateline Islamabad
An investigation is “a careful examination
or search in order to discover facts or gain
information,” according to AHD, while a
case is, “a situation that requires investigation, especially by a formal or official body”
or “the facts or evidence offered in support
of a claim.”
The real problem is against. You can
make a case for or against someone or
something, but when you investigate, you
don’t yet know if the results will be for or
against the person or thing. An investigation
should be neutral, but against is clearly negative. Into would work here:
The minister ordered to start an investi-
gation into Nawaz Sharif.
Another problem is to start. Who is to
start the investigation? To start an investigation … needs an actor. If the actor is clear
to readers already or isn’t important in the
context, you can drop to start:
The minister ordered an investigation
into Nawaz Sharif.
I do a lot of editing and keep finding
advised used without a direct object: “Your
agent advised that she would review…” I
want to say “Your agent advised us that she
would review…” Is not including the direct
object a new usage?
Susan E Cherry-Bergesen
Corporate Communications
Troy, MI
As a transitive verb meaning “to offer
advice to; counsel,” advise is followed by
an infinitive or a that-clause, with or without a direct object:
advised him to study abroad
advised that we should reconsider the idea
The Longman Grammar of Spoken and
Written English demonstrates that advise can
be followed immediately by the that-clause
or by a direct object and then the thatclause, and the Oxford English Dictionary
shows this has been the case since 1393.
Comparing advised that he should and
advised him that he should in Google Ngram
Viewer , we see that both phrases are used
in books, but the version without the
direct object is now used less frequently
than it once was, while the version with
the direct object (him) has been relatively
stable over time.
Either form, then, is correct. Look at
the surrounding context. Is it clear who is
receiving the advice? If not, include the direct
object. If it is clear, leave the text alone.
DO YOU HAVE A QUESTION
FOR ASK THE EDITOR?
Send your questions to Erin at editor@
copyediting.com . We reserve the right
to edit reprinted letters for length.
Copyediting | October–November 2012
7
3RESOURCES
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PA G E 1
Kenyon asked, “How can I help her?
Is there a way to teach copyediting? Is
it simply attention to detail? Why do
errors jump out at some people and not
at others? … C an editing be taught, or is
it instinctive?”
I know similarly good writers who
don’t seem to realize that they have
problems with grammar and spelling.
I’ve always found it hard to understand
that blind spot and have wondered
where I got my eye for errors and ability
to self-edit.
Seeing neither forest nor trees
Kenyon’s colleague is an example of the
fact that, as graphic designer Michael
Brady, owner of Michael Brady Design,
noted, “Many people don’t see their own
mistakes, partly because they made them
in the first place and may think they are
correct, and partly because they ‘know’
the meaning of what they are writing
and may breeze right by a mistake that
someone else, not familiar with what is to
come, will see.”
That fits my theory that writers see
what they meant to say in their own work
and can be more objective—and eagleeyed—about other people’s work. But
can they learn to self-edit?
Nature or nurture?
While the consensus seemed to be that
copyeditors are born rather than made, CELmates did see a case for both possibilities.
“Surely it’s both,” responded freelance
writer and copyeditor Lynn David Newton.
“Much can be taught in classes, conveyed
in good books on the subject, and, most
of all, … learn[ed] through experience. … I
never set out to be a copyeditor. … Nonetheless, throughout my working life, tasks
that fall into the category of text editing
have been an almost-daily occurrence for
me. And it seems that I’ve always been
‘good at it.’”
Newton said he taught himself along
the way, leading to having “finally acquired a job in which copyediting was a
formally declared part of it. … Although
I never took a copyediting course, … I’ve
managed to supplement [that informal
learning] by reading a shelf full of books
on the subject.”
Social science editor Laurie Rendon
WWW.COPYEDITING.COM
said, “I think the learner needs to love,
love, love words and language first. It
might not be an instinct, but I do believe
it starts early.” She recalled her father
telling her the Latin roots of words and
the meanings of names and explaining the
history of various languages. “If we asked
a question, we were often told to ‘look it
up,’ so we became very familiar with dictionaries and encyclopedias,” she said, a
familiar experience among list members.
“I still regard the English language as a
beautiful, giant puzzle and manuscripts as
word puzzles.”
Good writers who can’t edit their
own work are a common experience for
technical writer Mike Pope. “It seems
clear to me, even if I cannot cite empirical evidence, that some people simply
do not recognize spelling mistakes,” he
said. “I am convinced that no amount of
study or attention will necessarily make
a hopelessly careless speller into a crack
copyeditor. … Spelling skills and other attributes like intelligence, competence, and
literary taste are … orthogonal.”
Independent book editor and designer
Dick Margulis is convinced that at least
the ability to spell is genetic. “I know of
too many families—including my own—
in which one parent and one child spell
very well and the other parent and other
child—intelligent, successful, even scholarly—cannot spell to save themselves,”
he said. “Trying to teach someone with
that particular genetic difference to be a
copyeditor would be fruitless.”
One challenge is that, as editor and
writer Susanna J. Sturgis said, “‘Editing’
covers a range of skills, and it’s a rare
editor who has all of them. … Attention
to detail is important, and along with
it the ability to remember those details
and keep them organized in one’s head.
Training and practice can certainly
improve one’s focus, [especially] for extended periods of time, but deep down,
one has to believe—or be willing to believe—that details are important. Some
people don’t, and don’t want to. They’re
more interested in the big picture than in
its minute component parts. It’s hard to
learn a skill when [you] really [don’t] believe it’s useful.”
My view is that instinct—honed by
early training—plays a huge role in copyediting, along with a willingness to learn.
That may be at least partially something
we absorb from parents who love to read,
use language well, and encourage us to
do the same, even if it never occurs to
them to suggest that we become editors
when we grow up.
That caring element is also a big factor. I am a writer first, and one reason
I’ve developed my editing and proofreading skills is that I deeply care about my
writing being done right.
What makes an editor?
In classes for Writers and Books and the
Editorial Freelancers Association , I suggest that an editor or proofreader must
have an excellent knowledge of spelling, grammar, punctuation, and usage
and a sharp eye for consistency and
accuracy; be detail-oriented, organized
in his or her workspace and approach,
self-effacing (the author’s voice rules; if
your ego needs bylines, be the writer),
and tactful when dealing with authors;
and have a tolerance for jargon (in
some disciplines) and a good memory
for new facts, the cross-pollination of
information, style guidelines, and the
ways things are done in different parts
of a manuscript.
Some of these seem to be innate; others may be learned and honed.
For freelance editor Katherine Scott,
“talent and aptitude—and interest—are
strong preconditions for just about any
outstanding or even common, gardenvariety professional-level achievement.”
No discussion of what makes a copyeditor would be complete without input
from Amy Einsohn, author of The Copyeditor’s Handbook . Einsohn thinks some
people can become editors if they have
developed a certain foundation: “The
best editors-in-training already possess
a strong command of English grammar,
usage, diction, and spelling; an understanding of the different registers of
language; and an interest in how English
continues to change. Newcomers also
need an untiring eye, a well-tuned ear, a
solid sense of logic, and what I call ‘editorial clairvoyance’: the ability to intuit
what a writer is trying to say and what
readers are likely to infer.”
How to help your writer
CELmates agreed that some non-editors
could be trained, at least to some extent.
Like the light bulb, though, they have to
want to change.
C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 1 0
Copyediting | October–November 2012
8
TECHNICALLY SPEAKING
App-ealing editing solutions
(5th ed.) . The dictionary’s full text,
by Erin Brenner
I gave an audio conference in August on
building your digital library , offering a lot
of links and teaching attendees how to
find and evaluate new resources, with a
focus on websites. As copyeditors, we sit
(or stand) at our main computers most
of the time. Everything we need is in easy
reach, online and off-. But sometimes
we work away from our desks and main
computers or—quelle horreur!—the
Internet is down. Yet deadlines loom.
The answer? Apps for your smartphone
or tablet computer that don’t require
Internet access.
Note: I’ll focus on Apple and Android
products because they have the majority
of market share.
The Big Three
Every industry seems to have a Big
Three—three companies, products, or
services that dominate the field. In copyediting, the Big Three are your dictionary,
style guide, and usage manual. They are
your first line of defense. They are the
resources you go to first.
Dictionaries were easily copyeditors’ favorite apps in an unofficial poll I
conducted via social media, as well they
should be. Dictionaries do more than
give us spellings and definitions. They
offer grammar notes; usage advice; etymologies; information on measurements,
geography, and other common facts;
maps; and more. Having a dictionary
with you whenever and wherever you
work is vital. It’s even better when you
don’t have to lug a tome around or count
on Internet connectivity to access the
desired information.
The three main American dictionaries
have applications for your smartphone
or tablet:
3
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate
Dictionary . This dictionary is available
free for both Apple and Android platforms (ad-supported) or for a small
fee that removes the ads and includes
extras, such as images.
3
The American Heritage Dictionary
WWW.COPYEDITING.COM
3
including usage notes, is available as
an app for about $25. See my review
in the February–March 2012 issue of
Copyediting for more on this product.
Webster’s New World Dictionary.
Although little work is being done on
this dictionary, you can get it as an
app for your Apple or Android device
for a few dollars. This is a great thing
for journalists because Webster’s New
World Dictionary is the house dictionary
for many newspapers.
company, but your files are also more visible and are at greater risk of attack.
None of the apps allow you to track
changes, probably the one feature copyeditors use most. You’ll need to either do
without tracking your changes or compare
documents in Word when you’re back at
your main machine.
You have to decide what your needs are
and which products fit them. A few of the
most common apps:
3
Unfortunately, none of the most
popular style guides or usage manuals
are available as apps, although many are
available online for an annual subscription, including The Chicago Manual of
Style, The Associated Press Stylebook,
AMA Manual of Style, Garner’s Modern
American Usage (through Oxford
Dictionaries Pro), and Merriam-Webster’s
Dictionary of English Usage.
Microsoft Office substitutes
Like it or not, Word is a copyeditor’s most
valuable program. It’s difficult to find an
acceptable alternative, never mind an app
that’s robust enough to do what we need it
to do. But some free and paid options are
available, with paid apps offering more features. (The choice really depends on what
features you need. If you don’t need all the
bells and whistles, why pay for them?)
Most apps allow you to store your files
locally or in the cloud—that is, on the
software owner’s servers, accessible via an
Internet connection. Which storage method
you use depends on your comfort level
with cloud services and your desire for privacy. Cloud computing allows you to work
on files no matter what Internet-enabled
device you’re on, making it incredibly
convenient and flexible. You can also easily share files this way with whoever needs
access to them. But, as Rich Adin points out
in a recent blog post , with cloud software,
you’re dependent on having an Internet
connection to reach your files, although
you could take the extra step of backing
them up locally. Additionally, you’re trusting your files’ security to someone else.
These companies likely have better security than you do unless you work for a big
3
3
3
Quickoffice and Quickoffice Pro .
Possibly the most well-known mobile
Office substitute, Quickoffice comes
as a free app on many devices and
as a downloadable paid app for
Apple and Android devices. It’s now
owned by Google, which means if
you’ve ever used Google Docs, you
can easily access those files with
Quickoffice. Files are stored locally
and can be uploaded to a cloud
storage service or e-mailed to a
desired recipient. The suite includes
Quickword, Quicksheet, Quickpoint,
and QuickPDF.
Google Drive . Google Docs, the wellknown online alternative to Office, is
now Google Drive. The big difference
seems to be that Drive now supports
audio and video files as well as Office
and Acrobat files. You can get a free
app for your Android device or an
inexpensive one for an Apple device.
This is a good free option for Google or
Android devotees.
Documents to Go . This paid app supports Office (but not Acrobat) files
and allows you to upload files to several file-sharing services, e-mail them,
or send them to your desktop using
the desktop app.
ThinkFree Mobile . ThinkFree Online is
a free browser-based software suite
similar to Google Drive, OpenOffice,
and others. It even has a trackchanges function in its word processor! The mobile app works in concert
with the online software, although
the track-changes feature is absent.
It’s available only for certain Android
devices. Check the website to see if
yours is compatible.
C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 1 0
Copyediting | October–November 2012
9
3TECHNICALLY SPEAKING
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PA G E 9
Adobe Acrobat substitutes
Acrobat is such power-hungry software that it doesn’t seem as though
it would work well as a mobile app.
And forget heavyweights InCopy and
InDesign. You just don’t want to work
with these programs on a small screen.
But you can do some limited work on
PDFs with the right app. In addition to
choosing Quickoffice, Google Drive, or
ThinkFree, you can opt for Acrobatonly apps for reading, editing, and
sharing PDFs.
3
3
3
3
PDF Expert . Readdle’s Apple-only app
allows you to annotate, highlight, and
fill in PDFs for a small fee.
ezPDF Reader PDF Annotate Form .
Unidoc’s Android app also allows you
to annotate, highlight, and fill in PDFs
for an even smaller fee.
Adobe CreatePDF. You can purchase
an Apple or Android app to convert
other files into a PDF. This is handy if
you want to send a document to a client but don’t want him fussing with it.
Adobe Reader X . If you just want to
read a PDF, download one of Adobe’s
free apps.
Easy reading
Readability and Pocket are two free apps
for your browser and mobile device to
make reading on the go easier. Here’s
the setup: While surfing the web on your
main computer, you come across a long
article you want to read later. Save it to
your Readability or Pocket account. Later
you can go to your account page and read
3RESOURCES C O N T I N U E D F R O M PA G E 8
“You could encourage her to look words
up when in doubt,” said Rendon of Kenyon’s colleague, “but she probably doesn’t
even know when to doubt her knowledge.
Meanwhile, there are lots of resources
for commonly misspelled words.”
In an Editorial Eye newsletter article,
Einsohn quoted Wallace Stegner’s opinion on whether creative writing could
be taught as applying equally to editing:
“(1) It can be done. (2) It can’t be done
to everybody.”
Errors like those by Kenyon’s colleague
“may have been caused by her failure to
WWW.COPYEDITING.COM
the story without the ads or navigation.
Or, you can send the story to your mobile
device to read at your leisure, again in a
stripped-down, printer-friendly format.
Games
We wouldn’t be word geeks if we didn’t
love word games, right? To play with
others, make sure to check out the überpopular Words with Friends and Scrabble ,
both of which are free. Available solo
word games include word searches,
crossword puzzles, and acrostics. Here
are a few:
3
3
3
3
Word Search (Android, free)
Word Search Free (Apple, free)
NY Times Crosswords (Android, free)
NY Times Crosswords (Apple, free)
3
Crostix (Apple, paid)
Conclusion
Arguments abound about whether being
tethered all the time really makes us
more efficient workers and whether we
really do a good editing job this way. I
don’t have an answer to that; every situation is different. But being a company
of one, I have experienced times when
being able to quickly research something
or edit something while away from my
desk meant solving my client’s problem
when it was still a problem, not when
it was too late. You have to decide for
yourself how to best manage your time
and workload. These tools can help make
any necessary work easier when you’re
not at your desk. n
The Copyediting blog
How do you handle a terse client? What
do you do if your boss expects you to
edit 10,000 words in an hour? Get
answers to these questions and more
on the Copyediting blog .
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proofread (or to proofread carefully),”
Einsohn said. “If she has reached adulthood without having learned the difference between ‘peace’ and ‘piece,’ she can
learn to improve her spelling by studying
lists of confusable words, but she will have
to overcome many years of inattention
and bad habits. That’s a tall order.”
A writer could learn to self-edit by
making “one very slow (word-by-word)
final pass to catch … oversights,” and an
editor could give a writer tips about using
software effectively, Einsohn said. “Word
2010 puts a red squiggle under misspellings and a blue squiggle under words that
are spelled correctly but that might not
be the desired word in the context of the
sentence. The blue squiggles are often
totally off-base, but they might prompt a
shaky speller to think about ‘lye’ and ‘lie’
(and maybe to consult a dictionary?).”
At a certain point, though, you can’t
teach people how to spell and how to
recognize certain types of errors. You
can only try to get them to hire you to
fix those errors—and appreciate the
authors, colleagues, and publishers who
care about getting things right.
Ruth E. Thaler-Carter ( www.writerruth
.com) is an award-winning freelance
writer and editor and a frequent contributor to Copyediting. n
Copyediting | October–November 2012
10
THE QUIZ ANSWER
spend too much money” is a solid
compound. It should have been rendered as overspent.
The Quiz is on page 1.
This issue’s quiz contained four errors:
1. Profit or Loss. The correct phrase is
profit and loss, often abbreviated as
P&L. As our quiz sentences tell us, a
profit and loss details whether and when
an account made money, lost money, or
broke even. Because the phrase isn’t a
proper noun, it should be lowercased.
4. how much profit you made for the
month, if you broke even, or how much
you overspent. While not wrong, this series of clauses is clunky. We can smooth
it out by turning it into a series of verb
phrases that all share whether you: made
a profit, broke even, or had a loss.
Our revised sentences read:
2. broke-even. This represents a mix of the
phrasal verb and compound adjective.
The sentence needs a verb here, which is
spelled without the hyphen: broke even.
When the adjective form is needed,
the present tense is hyphenated: Tony
gambled to the break-even point.
3. over-spent. This word meaning “to
Copyediting
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Identifying details can be changed to protect the guilty. n
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The fifth step is about profit and loss.
Profit and loss tells you whether you
made a profit (had money left over),
broke even, or had a loss (overspent)
for the month.
The Copyediting blog
How do you handle a terse client?
What do you do if your boss expects
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Get answers to these questions and
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Copyediting | October–November 2012
11
Copyediting:
Because Language Matters
Vol. 24, No. 6
October–November 2012
WORD RESOURCE ROUNDUP
Editor
Erin Brenner
Contributing Editors
Mark Farrell
Norm Goldstein
Andrew Johnson
Paul R. Martin
Mark Peters
Cartoonist
Sage Stossel
Copyeditors
Andrew Johnson
Christine Parizo
Nancy Paschke
Editorial Advisory Board
Susan L. Blair,
Time (retired)
Bryan A. Garner,
LawProse, Inc.
Cheryl Iverson,
JAMA/Archives
Paul R. Martin,
The Wall Street Journal
Anne McCoy,
Columbia University Press
Martha Spaulding,
Harvard Business Review
Carl Sessions Stepp,
American Journalism Review,
University of Maryland
at College Park
Barbara Wallraff,
Copy Editor editor emeritus
Bill Walsh,
The Washington Post
VP/Digital Businesses
Kyle Crafton
Art Director
John Walters
The OED Online’s quarterly updates
by Mark Peters
The Oxford English Dictionary is the ultimate authority on the English language; its goal is to document
the entire history of English, from the far-flung past
to the ever-changing present. Steps toward that
unattainable goal are taken in March, June, September, and December with the publication of the OED
Online’s quarterly update, which immortalizes new
words and adds depth to previous entries. For the
lexically minded, these updates are like a Christmas
feast that comes four times a year.
The June 2012 update focused mainly on words
starting with two contrasting prefixes: sub- and
super-. I was equally excited to see terms I know,
like supervillain and super heavyweight, and terms I
don’t, like superparamagnetism, which is two levels
removed from magnetism. Each update also includes a discussion of key terms and trends by chief
editor John Simpson, putting the changes and additions into context.
Besides beefing up a section of the dictionary,
the updates include a smattering of new words
added throughout the OED. The recent update
included words such as half-caf, a coffee-centric
term; paywall, a barrier Internet readers must scale
with money; and retcon, short for retroactive continuity. When writers of a TV show, movie, or comic
retcon something, they change the story line’s past
by providing
a piece of new (and typically revelatory) information which imposes a different interpretation
on previously described events, often employed
to facilitate a dramatic plot shift or account for
an inconsistency.
In other words, they alter the story’s past to
change its present and future.
No retcons needed to justify adding the OED
quarterly updates to your calendar. The updates are
free, as is access to the terms linked in the updates.
You can pay for a subscription or go through a
library for free access to the rest of the site. Either
way, your word-nerd cred depends on it. n
Associate General Manager
Jenn Tanabe
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Fashionable style
by Norm Goldstein
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WWW.COPYEDITING.COM
A new section in the 2012 edition of The
Associated Press Stylebook lists 184 fashion
terms, from A-line, a “skirt that is narrow at
the waist, then flares out along a straight line
to the hem like a triangle or an A,” down the
alphabetical catwalk to zoot suit, an “exaggerated style of long jackets and full, high-waisted
pants worn mostly by young black and Latino
men in the 1940s.”
For those among us who think a runway is
only for airplanes, this section may seem like
overkill. But most of it is useful to copyeditors
who must deal with the jargon, considering
the obvious interest in the subject, such as the
heavy media coverage of fashion shows and
the industry’s substantial financial aspects.
Samantha Critchell, the AP fashion editor
who devised the guidelines, adds another element: “I see it as a tool for shoppers. … They’ll
be able to decipher the descriptions when they
buy online.”
Those descriptions include some—how shall
I put it?—less commonly used terms. Boucle.
Atelier. Bateau.
More helpful, however, are the names of
fashion houses, the bigger retailers, and wellknown designers. Louis Reard is included, for
example. The French creator of the bikini was
an automobile engineer by trade. Who knew?
I have a couple of nitpicks, though. An entry on gray gives no explanation. Presumably,
it prods writers and editors to stay away from
the British spelling, grey. Fortunately, that caveat is in the main section of the style book.
And where’s the entry on skorts?
The 2012 book also adds a new chapter on
broadcast terms and expands the social media
section with advice on how to use social media
tools for reporting.
The new edition also has 270 new or
updated entries, including the controversial—
meaning I disagree—acceptance of hopefully to
mean “it is hoped.” n
Copyediting | October–November 2012
12