Commas; or, I can’t believe you put a comma there

The comma is the cause of so much confusion—odd, because it’s supposed to clarify writing. One of the main points of confusion, at least with my editing clients, is the series or serial comma, the pesky critter that goes (or doesn’t go) before the final “and” in a series of items.

The Chicago Manual of Style generally endorses series commas, and you’ll find that many books are edited with that style in mind (as is this blog). I have a profound comfort level with the series comma because that’s what I was taught. Magazines and especially newspapers, however, often follow the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook, which eschews the series comma in favor of saving space. In a publication that accepts advertising, the more text that can be fit in a smaller amount of nonpaid editorial space, the better.

I think many readers are being subconsciously taught AP style because so many people read magazines, newspapers, and their online equivalents in greater number and frequency than books. I also wonder if the public schools are no longer teaching the series comma in English classes, as I remember so clearly from my younger days. Certainly, many of my clients are mildly shocked or uneasy with the series comma. “Are you sure that goes there?” is a common question. Yes, I say, and then I explain why.

Of course, even AP style requires that a series comma be used when there is potential misunderstanding without it. Writers and editors who use AP style and who don’t fully understand the rules surrounding the series comma often err in these situations. If you use AP, it’s worth refreshing yourself on the stylebook’s comma rules.

In my wanderings around the Web, I’ve found an excellent resource for AP editing questions at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of South Carolina. This article by Doug Fisher, from their August 2005 newsletter, is a wonderful reintroduction to the comma and its pitfalls: http://www.jour.sc.edu/news/csj/CSJAug05.html.

I especially like that Fisher references and endorses Bryan Garner’s exception to the comma after the year in an exact date. To explain, using Fisher’s example, a comma should be after the year (and the state) in this sentence: “Construction of the plant in Lima, Ohio, began on Aug. 16, 1984, and took six years.” The exception to the comma after the year is when the date or place is used as an adjective, e.g. (Garner’s example) “The court reconsidered its July 12, 1994 privilege order.”

No editor or writer should be without a good usage guide, and I am partial to Garner’s Modern American Usage, which you can find at the usual booksellers online and off. Garner has such a commonsense and thoughtful approach to English that I find myself reading beyond my original question, just enjoying the writing and the information. (I also used to read dictionaries as a child, so perhaps I’m just weird.)

(The title of this post is a play off the lengthy book titles from yesteryear and allowed me to introduce the comma in what is now considered an old-fashioned construction. See Chicago 7.132: “Old-fashioned titles connected by or are usually treated as follows: England’s Monitor; or, The History of the Separation or England’s Monitor, or The History of the Separation…”)

Editing matters

One of the golf industry’s premier publications is the award-winning Golfdom, a magazine targeted to an audience of golf course superintendents, owners, and managers. I enjoy reading it, not because I’m a golf enthusiast or because my job entails any of the difficulties that a golf course superintendent has, but because of the quality of the writing, the magazine design, and the editing. I began reading it because a client is in the industry, and I have become quite attached to the magazine over time. There are few if any casual proofreading errors, such as typos or misplaced punctuation, in Golfdom. And I know how difficult maintaining that kind of editorial quality can be in a monthly publication.

In the January 2010 issue of Golfdom, however, it looks like spell check ran wild without the proper amount of intelligent human supervision.

On page 4, this sentence managed to escape the proofreading process: “These people had one thing in common—they were shells hocked by the onslaught of a dreadful economy.” On page 16, we are told “Sewage plants typically discharge warm water that, during colder months—flu-season months—is particularly attractive to water foul and birds.” Given that waterfowl are birds and neither is particularly foul as a matter of course, this is truly a magnificent error.

But I’m not picking on Golfdom alone.

I am a fan of the writer Roger Zelazny, a giant in the New Wave movement in science fiction and fantasy that began in the mid-1960s. His Amber series, the first five books of which were published by Doubleday, are rife with typos and typesetting errors. (I don’t have the books in front of me or I would enumerate the errors as I did with Golfdom, just to make things fair.) I once thought that the errors may have been confined to the Science Fiction Book Club editions that I was initially introduced to, but I recently reread the series in its new reprinting, The Great Book of Amber published by Eos, and found a few of my old mistaken friends in its pages. Are they Zelazny’s fault in the writing of the books? I tend to think not, if only because many of the errors are obvious typesetting errors and typos; I must place the blame on the editor, the typesetter, and the proofreader (and whatever multiples of those positions there may have been in the process)—and the rush to get the books out and onto bookstore shelves.

What I would like to convey through the use of these examples, widely separated by time and type, is that we, as writers and editors, need to be more careful. We need to care, period.

The evolution of how information is distributed is truly making us a world of readers. We read e-mail, we read blog posts, we read tweets, we read e-newsletters, we read Web sites, we read text messages, we read e-books—and we read everything in the printed, three-dimensional world that we used to read, such as magazines and books (and print-on-demand books) and newspapers—though admittedly in declining numbers. Someone has to write what we read, and that writer needs to carefully craft his or her words so the message is understood. And after that, someone needs to carefully edit and proofread those carefully crafted words. (In the digital world, often that second someone is the same person—oh, the humanity!—and therein lies a problem we just don’t have time to get into today. If you see an error in this blog post, let’s just call it a case in point.)

That we so often don’t care, or perhaps don’t care enough, likely will be made evident in the next e-mail or text message you receive.

Why should we care? You know why. Because that momentary slip in grammar, that fumbled sentence, that typo left untouched affects how readers perceive the message and its author. It becomes somewhat of a bugbear—the eye is drawn to it, the mind puzzles over it, and the reader’s flow of thought is interrupted.

It is the final editor’s job to at least mitigate if not eliminate those interruptions. And that’s not because of the editor’s need to protect his or her reputation—few readers know who edits their favorite books or magazine articles—it’s because of the editor’s job description, which is to make the author look good.

I am, of course, well versed in human error, particularly my own, and understand that the world of writing and editing is anything but perfect, especially when you’re on deadline. But in both the instances above, all that would have been necessary is for someone (again, that someone) to, one last time, go over the proof, check the pages, scroll through the document. To be careful, and by that I mean to apply serious attention to doing something correctly.

Now, let’s hope I don’t have to eat these words on my next editing job.

How to write badly well

I was clued into this blog by my partner at Infusionmedia: http://writebadlywell.blogspot.com/. In addition to the blogger, Joel Stickley, writing badly well, other writers write badly well in their comments. It’s a badly well-written free-for-all. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Beginnings

It occurs to me that I no longer write—I mean writing as a means of personal expression. Occasionally that leads to fluff or nonsense or, well, bad writing, but like all writers, I think I have something meaningful to communicate and I hope that is actually the case.

I write for other reasons and for other things: business proposals, news releases, marketing plans, the occasional editor’s note or short rewrite of another’s words for the paper I work for—but that lacks soul or heart or whatever you wish to call it. The satisfaction is momentary, about as long as it takes to do the writing or less than that. So, I no longer write, and I would like to change that. Hence, this blog.

My primary interest is the publishing industry, subsidy publishing (or self-publishing) in particular, and that will be the focus of my posts. I fully intend to go off topic, however, and I hope any readers will be indulgent of my tangents.