knuckleheaded, hotheaded, ham-handed

I was interested in the occurrence of these words in the Asterisky Business article, specifically in their hyphenation.

The words appear in the following sentences:

In the fifth paragraph-
"...and then several more times in a ham-handed effort to get a roomful of sports reporters to retract or ignore his original use of the word."

And then in the second to last paragraph-
"I don't want Mr. McMackin punished for society's larger troubles any more than I want Prof. Henry Louis Gates or Sgt. James Crowley to bear sole racial responsibility for every inflexible cop or every hotheaded homeowner with an ego."

"And whether you believe it's the intolerance Crowley showed gates, or the intolerance Gates showed Crowley -- or the knuckleheaded intolerance Coach McMackin showed about lives different than his own -- it all gets you to the same place."

In each instance the word serves as an adjective, so why the difference in hyphenation? This is a good example of the evolution of words and how they change from two separate words, to hyphenated words, to a closed form. In the Merriam-Webster dictionary "ham-handed" and its derivatives are always hyphenated. "Knuckleheaded" is a closed compound.

Merriam-Webster lists "hotheaded" as a closed adjective but demonstrates its hyphenated use in the example: "He wrote a hot-headed letter." Dictionary.com lists both versions, "hotheaded" and "hot-headed." This leads me to believe that there is not yet a consensus on the form of this word, and it is an example of the in-between on an evolutionary scale. Because it appears in the same paragraph as "knuckleheaded" the un-hyphenated form is appealing.


I'm still developing my understanding of compound adjectives and when they should be hyphenated, so please comment or correct me!

Numbers are confusing....

I just did a Google search to find some of the rules for writing numbers and numerals and I was confused. Below are two links to a the ones that I felt most closely matched one another. I didn't know that so much thought could be put into spelling or not spelling numbers. Whoa!

After reading these articles, I still don't think that I know when to spell numbers out for people. Just reading the post by Richie Mae really got me thinking. There are some clear rules there, but there are more rules in the articles I read.

Also, thinking back on this same post, I went and looked at a math book that I still had and couldn't believe that the what Richie said was totally true. Math books are inconsistent in naming their naming of numbers.

Writing Numbers

10 Rules for Writing Numbers and Numerals

Style and "Truth" in Autobiography

I was reading today from Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives and came across two things that were relevant to topics we have covered in class.

The first is an excerpt from Gertrude Stein's Everybody's Autobiography that has a vastly different style from anything we have seen in class and would certainly be fun to edit (if it needed it).

It is funny this knowing being a genius, everything is funny. And

identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself

to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course

you do not believe yourself. That is really the trouble with an

autobiography you do not of course you do not really believe

yourself why should you, you know so well so very well that it is not

yourself, it could not be yourself because you cannot remember

right and if you do remember right it does not sound right and of

course it does not sound right because it is not right. You are of

course never yourself.

This passage, besides being hilarious, really made me think how challenging it would be to analyze and maintain the style while editing.

The second thing that I came across was the idea of Autobiographical Truth, which relates back to our discussion that we had on James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. This isn't really related to editing at all, but I found it enlightening and wanted to share. Smith and Watson refer to autobiography as "an intersubjective truth" that requires the reader to bend their version of truth while reading. Although I don't think they would necessarily agree that purposely altering truth for the purpose of selling more novels is an ethical decision, they do state that, "any utterance in an autobiographical text, even if inaccurate or distorted, characterizes its writer." Food for thought.

The Letter...

I am mortified that any company would send something like this out to its customers or the general public!!! I agree with Samantha in that I am having extreme difficulty simply copyediting, rather than tearing this piece apart and rewriting (something I had alluded to earlier when it came to editing papers). I'm truly frustrated because there are so many basic grammatical mistakes that it seems almost impossible to even distinguish a starting point!

Moving Large Sections of Text

I am looking at the business letter we were assigned to edit and having a difficult time drawing the line between editing and rewriting. I have been trying to make changes by moving and combining sentences and now I am wondering what is the cleanest way to indicate those changes. We have already seen a few examples of how to move phrases, etc. but how, for example, would I best indicate the following change:

Original-
Aloha! We just wanted to follow up with you on how are you and if everything is coming along satisfactory with your tub installation job, which we did for you on January 22 of this year.


Edited-
Aloha! We wanted to follow up on the tub installation job we did for you on January 22 of this year to ensure that everything is coming along satisfactorily.

Aside from some of the more minor edits, what is the cleanest way to move a large chunk of text without rewriting it?

Editing Within Different Mediums?

Reading the bit about “One Paragraph, Three Ways” was very interesting, as I had never thought about the importance of preserving the author’s style when editing. However I was wondering if copyediting in different mediums call specifically for different degrees of editing "heaviness". For example, it would probably be safe to assume that maintaining authorial style would be very important in a novel, and so a light copyedit would be used to revise the piece. But what about magazines, newspapers, or web pages? Are there any standards that are restrictive of the medium that the editor must work in?

"Nit-picker's Bible"

So, Google News has informed me that the 16th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style has just been released and is generating a lot of buzz. Well, buzz for a bunch of grammar nerds anyway. So, here are some of the facts I found interesting while reading this 3 PAGE homage:

• The Chicago Manual of Style has 11,000+ fans on FB.
  
• The preferred spelling of the term "U.S." has been updated to: "US."
  
• The proper citation for Wikipedia is now included.
  
• The rule for sequential punctuation marks has been rethought - "Chicago says it is now OK in certain situations to use a comma directly after a question mark or exclamation point."
• People seem to do more than just respect this book - they love it. They adore it. They want to make little half-text, half-human babies with it.
  

Overall, it was kind of interesting to read some of the ways that copyeditors think about this book. It's clear that it's one of their most vital tools. During editing tests they're often given this book and nothing else to reference. I've had to use it, but it certainly hasn't taken on the significance for me that it has for others. Not yet, anyway :D

Editing Student Essays

I wish I had read "One Paragraph, Three Ways" many years ago when I began tutoring students for SAT and SSAT. I felt that most of the time I was completely rewriting and reworking their essays to fit my style. After reading this section I realized that what I should have been focusing on was their style, maintaining internal consistency within their essays. The author notes that by resisting the urge to rewrite someone's writing, the copyeditor will be able to "devote more of [their] attention to [their] primary responsibilities." Rather than change the writing around to fit the editor's voice, a copyeditor should devote time and energy into finding mechanical errors, internal inconsistencies, and grammatical mistakes.

Editing English as a Second Language

The article "One Paragraph, Three Ways" brings up the important point of maintaining authorial style, but I'm curious how one goes about doing this when English is the writer's second language. How do you balance the need to maintain the author's style when there are severe errors in the author's writing that require sentence structure to be altered or even re-written?

A few comments and questions...

"One Paragraph, Three Ways" touched on a big issue I have while informally editing friend's papers: maintaining the author's style. When I come across sentences that are poorly written or that I feel need to be rewritten altogether, it is extremely hard for me not to impose my own style. This becomes especially difficult if I run into many sentences that fit this description.

Obviously this applies more in a teaching scenario, as opposed to a professional copyediting setting. However, I am curious as to how to best edit a paper in this situation.

10 Words You Need to Stop Misspelling

There are some words that are commonly misspelled that can feel like nails on a chalkboard to an editor. Now, when you see your friends use them, you can just point them to this cartoon image.


My favorite part has to be the explanation for the proper spelling of 'a lot'.

You don't write alittle, abunch, acanteloupe, aporkchop.

So, don't write alot.

Articles

My dad, who studied English as a second language, often torments me with questions about the English grammar. One issue that comes up again and again is the use of articles. Now, my dad’s English is pretty good, and he has studied grammar in school and on his own. So he knows that an indefinite article ‘a/an’ is used when the noun in question is “not specific” and a definite article ‘the’ is used when the noun is “specific.” But such a generalization proves almost useless for a second language learner when actually composing a sentence.

Is there a practical, workable way to know exactly when to use ‘a/an,’ ‘the’ or no article? Or should I just tell my dad to flip a coin?

Takashi