From Bad to Worse

Huh?

Frield Noddles

A friend of mine found this sign at a restaurant and I thought I'd share.

Is it just me or are you less likely to buy food from a place with a sign like this?

Grammar Cops

I was looking around online for grammar resources and stumbled on the Grammar Police site. I sort of got stuck there looking at past posts, but just wanted to share one particular snippet that I found enlightening.

Apparently, TBS has a new slogan, "more movies... less commercials," and the folks over at the Grammar Police aren't happy about it:

OK, everybody repeat after us …

I will use “less” for amounts that cannot be counted as discrete items, such as, water, sunshine, and money.

I will use “fewer” for numbers of items that can be counted as discrete items, such as, drops of water, rays of sunshine, dollar bills, and … of course, commercials!

I had never really considered this before, but it makes so much sense!

Unique Baby Names??

I can't even begin to explain how I ended up on this web page, but I found a site that suggested ways to come up with unique names for your newborn (or to be born) children.

Unique punctuation - Create a totally unique name by making unusual use of punction such as the placing of an apostrophe, a hyphen or a middle Capital Letter.

Alternative Spellings - An easy way to create unique baby names. A good example is Ryann or Delyia.

First of all, does that really say 'punction'?

And second, there should be editing rules against this sort of baby naming.

Classifieds Need Editing, Too

This ad was seen in the current issue of Ka Leo:

Work Wanted

Looking for a part time offer where you can earn

extra income at your own flexible schedule plus

benefits that takes only little of your time.

Requirements -

* Should be a computer Literate.

* 1-2 hours access to the internet weekly.

* Must be Efficient and Dedicated

contact us with your resume for more details and

job information at

eheatherallbeautycosinc@gmx.com

Hurry.don't wait! This great opportunity is limited

so contact All Beauty Cosmetics Inc. today!

So, I think it's fair to say that the classifieds don't get edited! Let's see what we can do with this...

Help Wanted

Looking for a part-time job with benefits where you can earn

extra income on a flexible schedule that only takes a little

of your time?

Requirements -

* Should be computer literate.

* Access Internet 1-2 hours weekly.

* Must be efficient and dedicated.

Email your resume to Heather at eheatherallbeautycosinc@gmx.com
for more information and details.

Hurry, don't wait! This great opportunity is limited.

Contact All Beauty Cosmetics, Inc. today!

I'm assuming that the email address is correct, but it might be a good idea to verify it with the submitter, too. As a suggestion to the submitter, I think it might be a good idea to make the email address something a little less confusing. I think she's going for e-heather-all-beauty-cos-inc, but it's easy to see how readers might see the word "ethereal" or "e-health" that might cause the email address to be misentered.

Otherwise, most of the corrections were related to word ordering and inconsistencies in punctuation and capitalization.

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.

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?

19th Century British writing

I'm doing some reading for another class from Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (first published in 1851) and I came across the following passage that just made my wannabe-editor head spin.

He brings the greengrocery, the fruit, the fish, the water-cresses, the shrimps, the pies and puddings, the sweetmeats, the pine-apples, the stationery, the linendrapery, and the jewellery, such as it is, to the very door of the working classes; indeed, the poor man's food and clothing are mainly supplied to him in this manner.

The use of so much alternate spelling and hyphenations was a little overwhelming, and I honestly don't think 'linendrapery' is a word. It wasn't in any dictionary that I could find.

So, if we are ever called to edit an historical text that includes words that don't exist any longer (or that the author possibly made up?), do you let it stand?

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.