I think someone needs a vacation…

Thanks to The Stranger Slog for pointing out this hilarious Q&A from The Chicago Manual of Style Online:

Q. Is there a period after an abbreviation of a country if it is terminating a sentence? “I went to U.K..”

A. Seriously, have you ever seen two periods in a row like that in print? If we told you to put two periods, would you do it? Would you set your hair on fire if CMOS said you should?

The editor of the Chicago Manual of Style’s monthly Q&A is Carol Fisher Saller. I enjoyed (and recommend) her book, The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (Or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships With Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself).

See my earlier blog post, The writer’s bookshelf (part 3), for more about The Chicago Manual of Style book and website.

As a bonus, I’ll leave you with another of Saller’s classic Q&As:

Q. Oh, English-language gurus, is it ever proper to put a question mark and an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence in formal writing? This author is giving me a fit with some of her overkill emphases, and now there is this sentence that has both marks at the end. My everlasting gratitude for letting me know what I should tell this person.

A. In formal writing, we allow both marks only in the event that the author was being physically assaulted while writing. Otherwise, no.

The Washington Post discovers that fewer copy editors = more errors

Craig Silverman at Regret the Error has an excellent post about an important but underreported problem– the increasing number of errors in newspapers caused by the decreasing number of copy editors:

Just over two years ago, the public editor of the Orlando Sentinel wrote a column alerting readers to the fact that the paper had experienced a spike in the number of corrections. He was clear about the cause of the increased errors:

When the Sentinel tightened its financial belt back in June, it lost a wealth of seasoned veterans, many of them editors. Those journalists not only wrote headlines and captions. They also scrutinized the work of reporters — correcting spelling, straightening out syntax, double-checking facts — before publication.

With fewer people to do that now, less of that important work gets done, and the result is more published errors.

Yesterday, the ombudsman of the Washington Post wrote basically the same column:

…Growing numbers of readers are contacting the ombudsman to complain about typos and small errors.

“As a virtually lifelong subscriber, I am disheartened by the increasingly poor quality of the editing of The Post,” wrote Richard Murphy of Alexandria. If typos can’t be caught by a spell-checker, “then The Post should restore a couple of copy editor positions. You have cut that staff too much.”

The Post’s copy editors are among the best I’ve worked with during nearly four decades in the newspaper business. But they’ve been badly depleted by staff cuts as the money-losing paper struggles to control costs. Those who remain are stretched thin while The Post expands to a 24-hour news operation in print and online.

Between early 2005 and mid-2008, the number of full-time copy editors dropped from about 75 to 43 through buyouts or voluntary departures. It has declined further since then, but Post managers won’t provide precise figures beyond saying that six took a recent buyout offer. The need is so critical that most are being hired back on contract through at least the end of the year, and part-timers are taking up some of the slack.

Copy editors are the unsung heroes of newsrooms. Unknown to the public, and often underappreciated by their colleagues, they’re the last line of defense against a correction or, worse, a libel suit…

“By definition, you’ll see more errors when there’s reduced staffing,” said Bill Walsh, the A-section copy desk chief. On a typical weeknight a few years ago, Walsh said, the three copy desks handling national, foreign and business news could rely on perhaps 20 editors. Those desks have since been combined into one desk, headed by Walsh. Today, he said, “there are some shifts where I’m looking at seven or eight people total.”…

These papers are by no means the only ones experiencing a spike in errors due to the loss of bodies on the copy desk. Adding to the problem is the fact that the move online means papers are churning out more content than ever before. Yet copy editors — and magazine fact checkers — are being shown the door.

Carl Sessions Stepp examined how some newsrooms are coping with this challenge is his recent article, “The Quality-Control Quandary,” It’s a must-read. I fear, though, that few organizations are rethinking their quality control process and means of verification. They’re just trying to do more with less. It’s a recipe for disaster.

I looked at this issue in a recent essay I wrote for Harvard’s Neimen Reports….

Here are the related links:

July 5, 2009 column by Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander, “Fewer Copy Editors, More Errors”

April/May 2009 article in the American Journalism Review by Carl Sessions Stepps, “The Quality-Control Quandary”

Craig Silverman’s essay in the Nieman Reports (Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard), “Reliable News: Errors Aren’t Part of the Equation”

Craig Silverman’s “Regret the Error” blog and his column in the Columbia Journalism Review

Wikipedia “feuding, fighting and vandalism”

Today’s New York Times had an article about Wikipedia’s  “lamest edit wars” (whether Lucky Charms cereal is sold in Ireland, whether the Death Star is 120 or 160 kilometers in diameter) and the recent decision by the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee to block editing from all I.P. addresses owned or operated by the Church of Scientology:

It is an interesting twist about Wikipedia that the most controversial, most heavily trafficked articles — on abortion, politics, virgin birth — are often the most accurate and vandalism-free. Not that people aren’t trying to cause mayhem. It’s just that the frequent visits ensure that vandalism is quickly removed, aided by automated tools that can recognize crude writing before it ever appears.

Leave these high-traffic thoroughfares, however, and things can get a bit sketchier. A few wrong turns and you may find yourself deep in Hatfield-and-McCoy territory. Entrenched enemies engage in combat over the wording of topics so obscure — Armenian historians from the first millennium, for example, or breakfast cereals — that you may wonder: so much fighting over this?

But it is exactly the obscurity that makes these Wikipedia articles ripe for feuding, fighting and vandalism…

I wish the article had discussed Wikipedia’s flaws more critically rather than just as a source of amusement. Wikipedia– the first (and often only) place many people go for information, whose articles appear on the first page of most Google searches– is inherently unreliable and rife with errors, bias, and intentional vandalism, and the quality of individual articles and the information in them varies wildly. I’m not mollified by the fact that most vandalism may eventually be noticed and corrected– at any given time you have no idea whether what you are reading is accurate and who wrote or edited it.

Much of the article concerns the little-known Wikipedia Arbitration Committee:

The Scientology decision, which received plenty of news coverage, brought the Arbitration Committee (or ArbCom) to public view. No doubt, most users of Wikipedia had no idea that there was a court of last resort for disputes on the site.

Tens of millions of people around the world use Wikipedia, but few users — even the most frequent editors — can say how or why it works. The two members of the committee I interviewed agreed that the committee was not vital to Wikipedia’s continued operation… but they said that having a way to ban people of bad faith made the site more friendly, more efficient and more welcoming to new editors.

Wikipedia users elect the panel members, and Mr. Matetsky reports that he is the only active lawyer among them…  He says he often is opposed to outright bans — he abstained on some of the sanctions in the Scientology case — because “to a user who is banned, Wikipedia is ‘the encyclopedia anyone can edit,’ except for you.”

The discovery that Wikipedia is not the anarchic paradise some might imagine can be a shock. Others see hypocrisy, evidence that there is a class of users who control what appears there, people who benefit from Wikipedia’s huge public clout with little public scrutiny.

So I found it rather ironic to read minutes later that a Wikipedia Arbitration Committee member, David Boothroyd, was forced to resign over the weekend for “sock-puppeting,” according to the UK’s Independent newspaper:

A “guardian of the truth” on Wikipedia, the global internet encyclopedia, has been caught up in an embarrassing scandal after it was revealed that he created bogus online identities to change entries on the system.

David Boothroyd – a London councillor by day, a cyber policeman by night – has been forced to resign from Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee after his alias editing gave rise to a major conflict of interest.

The Labour councillor’s fall from grace comes two years after he fought off stiff international competition to win a coveted seat on the 15-strong committee, which is responsible for settling hundreds of editorial disputes every day.

His membership of “ArbCom” was no longer tenable after it emerged that he had committed one of the most serious crimes in cyberspace: sockpuppeting – the use of multiple online identities to create the illusion of support for a point of view, person or organisation.

A log of publicly available page edits exposes several changes to Tory leader David Cameron’s Wikipedia entry by Mr Boothroyd under the alias of Sam Blacketer, including changing the picture to one “not carrying saintly overtones”.

New York Times style rules: “Consistent, Sensitive and Weird”

Today’s New York Times column by public editor Clark Hoyt discusses the Times’ idosyncratic and sometimes controversial style and usage rules. For example, the Times does not capitalize acronyms over four letters (they only capitalize the first letter), so while the rest of the world uses NAFTA, the Times alone uses Nafta. The example cited in the column was Navy SEALs, which the Times insists on printing as Navy Seals, despite objections from readers and the Navy:

Cmdr. Greg Geisen, the spokesman for the Naval Special Warfare Command, said SEALs is the name of the outfit, and “we would never, ever, ever in any way, shape or form spell it capital s, small e, small a, small l.” But, he added, “if The New York Times doesn’t want to be accurate, that’s O.K. No one here is going to get irate or offended over it.”

I agree with Hoyt that the Times should change its acronym policy:

I would also make it SEAL. I think the rule on acronyms is too rigid; it leaves The Times virtually alone in calling UNESCO Unesco, UNICEF Unicef and, my personal pet peeve because I am a fan, NASCAR Nascar. Maybe people who read only The Times are used to these, but most people in the Internet age get news from many sources, and The Times stands out as weird and maybe clueless.

The original intent of the rule was to limit the number of all-caps acronyms “looking like pieces of kitty litter all over the newspaper,” said Craig Whitney, the standards editor. But he said that may be less relevant on the Web, and “it is not written in stone that we will always adhere to that rule.”

It’s good to know I’m not the only one annoyed by many of these unusual style choices:

Many Times readers do get offended and irate over style issues like this one, and the complaints often involve an accusation that the newspaper is being disrespectful. In the last few weeks, I have heard from readers who think The Times is showing disrespect every time it refers to the president as Mr. Obama, and from others incensed that the newspaper used the word midget in a news article.

Each case illustrates the challenge of maintaining a consistent style in a changing world, where some people read political motives into simple usage conventions, where words once thought acceptable become objectionable, and where other words once objectionable become part of everyday language. A newspaper has to have rules, the linguistic equivalent of driving on the right side of the road and stopping at red lights, to avoid chaos for readers.

At The Times, a lot of consideration goes into usage issues, and they are often more complicated than they seem at first blush. Why not just call Seals SEALs? Well, what about Yahoo, which wants an exclamation point after its name? What about a rock group with a name containing an obscenity?

Though some of its rules seem eccentric or charmingly old-fashioned, like calling people Mr., Ms. and Dr., The Times does change, if usually slowly.

If only we could convince the Times (and other newspapers) to use the serial comma (also known as the series comma or the Oxford comma). I’m a big fan of the serial comma, and the Chicago Manual of Style now “strongly recommends this widely practiced usage, blessed by Fowler and other authorities…, since it prevents ambiguity.”  Here’s an example from the Times that shows what can happen without the serial comma: “By train, plane and sedan chair, Peter Ustinov retraces a journey made by Mark Twain a century ago. The highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.” Perhaps the most famous example of why the serial comma should be used is this apocryphal book dedication: “To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.” (For the origins of these two examples, see this 2006 Language Log post and this 2003 Language Hat post.)

Oops! The New York Times prints a fake letter

I nearly choked on my tea this morning while reading the editor’s note on the letters page of today’s (December 23rd) New York Times:

In Monday’s newspaper, we published a letter over the name of the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, criticizing Caroline Kennedy. This letter was a fraud and should not have been published. Mr. Delanoë’s office has since confirmed that he did not write it.

Printing the letter, which also appeared on nytimes.com until it was removed, violated the standards and procedures of The New York Times editorial department.

It is our practice to verify the authenticity of every letter we publish. Like more of our letters these days, this one arrived by e-mail. We sent an edited version back to the writer of the e-mail and did not receive a response.

At that point, the letter should have been set aside. It was not.

The Times has expressed its regret to Mr. Delanoë’s office for the lapse in judgment that led to this error. We now express those regrets to our readers.

We will be reviewing our procedures in an attempt to ensure that an error like this is not repeated.

Here’s the link to the The New York Times web page containing the text of the original letter and the online version of the editor’s note, which differs slightly from the printed version.

I know the newspaper industry is in serious financial trouble, but hiring a few fact-checkers might save a lot of embarrassment.

Spell-check is evil, but funny: The Cupertino Effect

I enjoyed Cory Doctorow’s BoingBoing post on the Cupertino Effect, “the technical term for a correct word that is consistently erroneously replaced by spell-checkers.” He links to Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words newsletter, which describes the origin of the term and gives some choice examples:

An automated spelling checker attached to a word-processing program is one of the curses of our times. In the hands of an inexperienced, over-hasty or ignorant user it readily perpetrates dreadful errors in the name of correctness. One example appeared in a piece in the New York Times in October 2005 about Stephen Colbert’s neologism truthiness: throughout it instead referred to trustiness, the first suggestion from the paper’s automated checking software….

In 2000 the second issue of Language Matters, a magazine by the European Commission’s English-language translators, included an article by Elizabeth Muller on the problem with the title Cupertino and After.

Cupertino, the city in California, is best known for hosting the headquarters of Apple Computers. But the term doesn’t come from the firm. The real source is spelling checkers that helpfully include the names of places as well as lists of words. In a notorious case documented by Ms Muller, European writers who omitted the hyphen from co-operation (the standard form in British English) found that their automated checkers were turning it into Cupertino. Being way behind the computing curve, I’m writing this text using Microsoft Word 97, which seems to be the offending software (more recent editions have corrected the error); in that, if you set the language to British English, cooperation does get automatically changed to Cupertino, the first spelling suggestion in the list. For reasons known only to God and to Word’s programmers, the obvious co-operation comes second.

Hence Cupertino effect for the phenomenon and Cupertino for a word or phrase that has been involuntarily transmogrified through ill-programmed computer software unmediated by common sense or timely proofreading.

A search through the Web pages of international organisations such as the UN and NATO (and, of course, the EU) finds lots of examples of the canonical error. A 1999 NATO report mentions the “Organization for Security and Cupertino in Europe”; an EU paper of 2003 talks of “the scope for Cupertino and joint development of programmes”; a UN report dated January 2005 argues for “improving the efficiency of international Cupertino”. And so on.

Other notorious examples of the Cupertino effect include an article in the Denver Post that turned the Harry Potter villain Voldemort into Voltmeter, one in the New York Times that gave the first name of American footballer DeMeco Ryans as Demerol, and a Reuters story which changed the name of the Muttahida Quami movement of Pakistan into the Muttonhead Quail movement.

My favorite example is the 2006 Reuters article about bees, captured in Craig Silverman’s Regret the Error blog:

With its highly evolved social structure of tens of thousands of worker bees commanded by Queen Elizabeth, the honey bee genome could also improve the search for genes linked to social behavior….

Queen Elizabeth has 10 times the lifespan of workers and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day….

Update: A new Cupertino reported in the Huffington Post:  “Burka Abeam” for Barack Obama in a newspaper photo caption.

Want more? Regret the Error has an entertaining list of 2008’s most notorious media errors and corrections.

The writer’s bookshelf (part 4)

This is the fourth in a series of posts about the references writers and editors should have on their physical or virtual bookshelf.

Usage Guides

Usage guides explain issues of confused or disputed use of the English language. The best ones provide historical perspective on usage problems, give advice on present-day usage, and provide quotations to illustrate usage and show changes over time. 

Usage can cover a wide range of issues, such as grammar, syntax, commonly confused words, capitalization, alternative spellings, and idioms.  Here are a few examples of common usage issues:

• they/them/their as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, as in “A person can’t help their birth.”
• “alright” vs. “all right” 
• “shall” vs. “will”
• “that” vs. “which”
• “it is I” vs. “it is me”
• “less” vs. “fewer”
• “different than” vs. “different from”

My favorite usage guide is Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. After I bought the book, I showed it to my husband, but he didn’t show much interest at the time. The next day he happened to ask me a usage question, so I grabbed the book and read him the answer. He took the book from me and started to browse through it, and ever since the book has lived on the reference shelf in his office. He even included it in his end of 2007 recommended books list for the Chasing Ray blog, and this is what he wrote:  

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage- Forget Strunk and White’s flimsy little style pamphlet. What you’ve got here is nearly a thousand pages of distilled commentary on the most vexing grammar and usage questions of our time, such as whether it’s OK to say that one thing is different than another, or whether “my friend and I” can be used as the object of a sentence. The way you judge such a book, of course, is by seeing how often it supports your side of an argument, and so far, the Dictionary has been right every time.

You can browse some sample pages using Amazon.com’s “Look Inside” feature. For those readers who took issue with the David Foster Wallace quote calling utilize a “puff-word,” here is the M-W entry for utilize, which expresses a different view:

Usage writers dislike utilize because they regard it as a needlessly long and pretentious substitute for use. They generally recommend either that it be disdained altogether or that it be used (not utilized) only when it has the meaning “to turn to practical use or account.” That is, in fact, almost invariably the meaning of utilize in actual usage:

“Scientific knowledge, for example, is developing exponentially–faster perhaps than our culture can… utilize it wisely.” –Milton S. Eisenhower, Johns Hopkins Mag., February 1966.

“…women who want to work at jobs that utilize their full potential.” — Bella S. Abzug, Saturday Rev., 7 Aug. 1976.

Use could certainly be substituted for utilize in any of these passages, but not without some loss of connotation. Utilize is a distinct word having distinct implications. More than use, it suggests a deliberate decision or effort to employ something (or someone) for a practical purpose. Its greatest sins are that it has two more syllables than use and that it ends with the dreaded -ize. It is a common word, nevertheless, and every indication is that it will continue to be one. 

 

Another good usage guide is Garner’s Modern American Usage by Bryan A. Garner. Garner includes both word entries and essays addressing larger questions of usage and style. You can browse a few pages on Amazon.com, and Garner’s website has reviews and links to two sample pages from the work.

Here’s an interesting sample entry:  

Cummings, E.E. The poet Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962), a shy man, early in career used the lowercase i for the first-person singular pronoun. (This habit, now commonplace in Internet exchanges, was highly unusual.) Cumming’s critics then began referring to him sarcastically in print as e.e.cummings. The practice stuck, and that was how his name appeared on book covers. Does this mean we should all use lowercase letters in spelling his name? Those most familiar with the man think not, and they use ordinary capitalization. Norman Friedman, the founder and then president of the E.E. Cummings Society, summed up the poet’s “philosophy of typography” this way: “that he could use caps and lowercase as he wished, but that when others referred to him by name they ought to use caps.” Spring: The Journal of the E.E. Cummings Society, 1992, at 114-21. Nor is it true that Cummings legally changed his name to lowercase letters. That story appeared in the preface to a biography about Cummings, but his widow angrily denied it.

In contrast with M-W, Garner has little to say about utilize:

use; utilize; utilization. Use is the all-purpose noun and verb, ordinarily to be preferred over utilize and utilization. Utilize is both more abstract and more favorable connotatively than use.

 

There are, of course, other usage guides. Fowler and Follett each have their fans (some are particularly attached to the old 1965 second edition of Fowler, which is very British). As I’ve said before, you should compare different references, find those you like, and use them.

The writer’s bookshelf (part 3)

This is the third in an ongoing series of posts about the references writers and editors should have on their physical or virtual bookshelf.

Style Manuals

Style manuals are all about consistency in writing, editing, and publishing. Style includes rules for when to spell out numbers, how to deal with abbreviations and acronyms, which words should be capitalized, and punctuation issues (whether to use a serial comma, when to hyphenate compound words), to list only a few examples.

Anyone who writes or edits books in the U.S. needs The Chicago Manual of Style, the 15th edition (the current edition, extensively revised in 2003). The Chicago Manual of Style calls itself “the essential reference for authors, editors, proofreaders, indexers, copywriters, designers, and publishers in any field,” and that’s not an exaggeration. Though the main focus is on the needs of writers and editors of books and journals, the new edition was revised to assist ”the increasing proportion of our users who work with magazines, newsletters, corporate reports, proposals, electronic publications, Web sites and other nonbook or nonprint documents. Computer technology and the increasing use of the Internet mark almost every chapter.” If you are still using an older edition, you should upgrade to the 15th edition, as style preferences have changed over time.

The Chicago Manual of Style includes chapters on the parts of a published work, manuscript preparation and editing, proofs, rights and permissions, grammar and usage, punctuation, spelling and compounds, names and terms, numbers, foreign languages, quotations and dialogue, illustrations and captions, tables, mathematics in type, abbreviations, documentation, and indexes. It also includes appendixes on design and production (basic procedures and key terms) and the publishing process for books and journals.  A more detailed table of contents can be found on the CMS website (www.chicagomanualofstyle.org).

The Chicago Manual of Style is available in multiple formats: hardcover book (priced at $55, but available at a discount online), CD-ROM for Windows ($60), and web subscription ($30 per year at www.chicagomanualofstyle.org). The web version is fully searchable and has extra features, such as the ability to add notes, bookmark paragraphs, and create personalized style sheets.

There are also many specialized style manuals for particular types of publications:

• Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications
• Modern Language Association Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing
• Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law
• New York Times Manual of Style and Usage
• American Medical Association Manual of Style
• Scientific Style and Format: The Council of Science Editors Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers
• American Chemical Society Style Guide
• Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association
• United States Government Printing Office Style Manual
• The Bluebook: The Standard System of American Legal Citation

Publishers and companies will specify which style manual they use, and many also have in-house style guides or style sheets to reflect individual company preferences and create consistency throughout all of their written material.

The writer’s bookshelf (part 2)

This is the second in an ongoing series of posts about the references writers and editors should have on their actual or virtual bookshelf.

Dictionaries 

You should have– and use– a good dictionary. (You are only asking for trouble if you rely on spell-check.) A recent edition is preferable, as new words are added over time, and changes can occur in spelling, hyphenation, plurals, usage, etc. For example, the current edition of my dictionary lists the word “online” (both the adjective and adverb) as one word, no hyphen. The previous edition of the same dictionary published a decade earlier lists the word (adjective and adverb) as “on-line,” two words, with a hyphen.   

There are a number of good dictionaries out there, but many copy editors prefer Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition  (the most recent edition, revised in 2003), which is what I use. It is available in multiple formats: hardcover book (in various bindings, generally priced $22 to $27, but available online for $15 to $20), CD-ROM (which allows you to save the entire dictionary to your computer and easily search it without ever having to load the CD again), and web subscription (for $14.95 per year at www.merriam-webstercollegiate.com). You can also get them in combination– the edition of the book I bought included the CD-ROM and a free one-year subscription to the website for a total of $27 (less than $20 online).  

If you need an unabridged dictionary (most people don’t, though copy editors sometimes do), Webster’s Third New International Unabridged Dictionary is a classic, but it is expensive. It is available by web subscription at http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com for $29.95 a year.  

The mother of all dictionaries is, of course, the Oxford English Dictionary, which provides the meaning and history of over half a million words, past and present. The OED tells you when each word entered the language and provides over 2.5 million quotations illustrating word usage over time. The OED is available in many formats, all of which are expensive: book form (the 20-volume full set, a two-volume abridged set), CD-ROM, and web subscription (monthly or annually) at www.oed.com. The great news is that many public libraries subscribe to it, so if you have a library card, you may be able to access it for free from your home computer through your library’s website. (For example, on the Seattle Public Library website, the OED is in their list of databases and websites, so if you enter your library card number and PIN, you’ll have full access from home.)

 There are many free dictionaries on the web, but I’ll only list a few here:

• Merriam-Webster offers free web access to an online dictionary and thesaurus at www.m-w.com, though access to their premium works (the Collegiate and Unabridged dictionaries) is by paid subscription only.
• OneLook Dictionary Search (www.onelook.com) is a special search engine which has indexed over 1000 online dictionaries. By entering a word or phrase into one search box, you can view results from many different online dictionaries.
• A free online dictionary and thesaurus can be found at www.yourdictionary.com.

Choose the dictionary that best suits your needs. For the casual user, a simple print or online dictionary may suffice. If you write or edit, you should use something more substantial and authoritative. If you are a professional writer or editor, check with your publisher or employer, as they may specify one as part of their house style.