Okina & the Islands

I was just wondering which of the islands (besides O‘ahu) take an okina. I've flipped through some of the locally produced magazines here and I can pretty much guarantee that I'm not the only one with this question. I saw the okina popping up in what seemed to be really awkward places (Mau‘i). But I can't deny that finding an answer is hard - I've tried looking up the correct spelling on the state's website, wikipedia, random google searches, etc., but so far the results have been so inconsistent! This leads me to a secondary question as well: what kind of resources would you consult in order to check the on the definitive spelling of Hawaiian words?

A sample of web pages on copyediting marks

University of Colorado at Boulder
San Diego State University

Restaurant Inspired Meals and Flash-Dry Technology

Here are some interesting (or maybe mundane) examples of proper and improper hyphen usage. There is a missing hyphen in "restaurant-inspired", as it is a compound adjective. Saying "restaurant, inspired meals" would not make any sense. Bad, bad Healthy Choice.




Here is a proper use of hyphens, as "leak-proof", "flash-dry", "quick-dry", and "drip-proof" are all compound adjectives. Good job, Hartz Training Academy.

Before I took this class, I never noticed these things. Thank you, Eng 408 for giving me “grammar vision”. :P

Exercise F

Some of the answers in the answer key to exercise F seem vague to me.

For example, (lines 13, 14, and 15)

"A company that produces fewer than eight or ten titles a year is most likely a two- or-three-person operation,..."

The answer key for 14-15 indicates that a

" A Suspended compound: " two- or three-person operation." Make sure the hyphens and word spaces are indicated correctly."

Other examples included are:

The fourteen- and fifteen-year-old students attended.
Steel-plated or -cased vaults were used.

I feel like the correct answer should be a two-or-three person operation. The explanation doesn't clarify the answer to me. When I look up hyphenated compounds the only explanation that I can find says, "if it is not listed in the dictionary then there is no hyphen." There has to be a better explanation. I find this confusing.

Also, I feel unclear about lines 27- 28,

"books, computer books, gardening books, cook- books, and every stripe of how-to-books."

The answer key for line 28 states that

"Dictionaries show a hyphen in the adjective how-to, but there's no hyphen between the adjective how-to and the noun book.

and then changes "how-to-books" to "how-to book".

I am confused about the placement of the hyphens, and why the the plural form of book becomes singular in the answer key.

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?

semicolons to commas

I remember going over changing punctuation by just making the correction (ie: turning a period into a colon by adding the other dot and perhaps circling it for clarity). However, in Exercise 6, paragraph 4, where they are changing the semicolons to commas, they just include the caret over the semicolon. Is that supposed to mean just cover the dot with your mark, therefore making it a comma with a caret over it? The second one still has the dot visible - is that the standard that the typesetter would just know to change to a comma because of the marking?

Straight or Curled?

What is the difference between a looped cancel mark (as the answer key shows in Ch. 4) and a strike-through line (as we were told to use in class)? Is there a major difference between the two or is a regular line just easier to make than a looped line?

Close-up hooks

In Exercise 6 (p 43-44), "a simple deleted symbol suffices at the beginning of a word" when the copyeditor deleted the "s" at the beginning of "as." To clarify, is it unnecessary to use close-up hooks at the beginning of words and sentences, and at the end of words and sentences?

Also, in Exercise 6 (p 49), after consistent style, the copyeditor used two close-up hooks (one above, and one below), would it have been more appropriate to use just one close-up hook on top to "decrease space"?