Seriously now…

I didn't realize that the blog's sidebar had a link to this February 2005 encomium by Arnold Zwicky. Worth reading now—near the end of the semester—because it presents editing from the author's point of view. I've mentioned the importance of understanding our craft from this perspective, but Zwicky's voice will give my words new meaning.

MISS GOULD PASSES

In response to an affectionate appreciation ("The Point of Miss Gould's Pencil", by Verlyn Klinkenborg, NYT 2/16/05, p. A26) of the work of Eleanor Gould Packard at The New Yorker, where she served for 54 years, Michael R. Burr (letter to NYT, 2/21/05, p. A20) elevates the magazine's "venerable arbiter of style" (Klinkenborg) to a kind of sword-wielding sainthood:

No mere proofreader or pedant, Eleanor Gould Packard was a guardian of civilization in a thankless struggle to avoid its disintegration. She upheld standards and imposed discipline, which in turn taught discipline in one's thought, and ultimately in one's actions as well.

For those of us who care about such things, Miss Gould's magnificent efforts are greatly appreciated, and she will be sorely missed.

Burr totally misses the point of Klinkenborg's appreciation (now echoed in a longer memorial by David Remnick in the 2/28/05 New Yorker, pp. 34f.)—that what Gould was trying to do was help writers say what they were aiming for in a language with "a kind of Euclidean clarity—transparent, precise, muscular" (Remnick)—and instead celebrates her career with ravings about the disintegration of civilization. We aim for grace and style, but somehow we get barbarians at the gates. Undisciplined barbarians, at that. Some people seem unable to think about matters of syntax, usage, logic, rhetoric, and diction except through the distorting glass of the image of the Great Decline.

Not, however, Klinkenborg and Remnick, who experienced Gould's editing first-hand.

As Klinkenborg puts it:

I learned from her neatly inscribed comments that even though I was writing correctly—no syntactical flat tires, no grammatical fender-benders—I was often not really listening to what I was saying. That may seem impossible to a reader who isn't a writer. But Miss Gould's great gift wasn't taking writers seriously. It was taking their words seriously.

She received the title Grammarian (a title that was retired with her), not because she was primarily concerned with grammaticality, but (presumably) because people who aren't actually grammarians use the label grammar for everything in language that is subject to regulation or judgment. She had four pet peeves, Remnick reports, two of which (failure to observe the distinction between restrictive and non-restrictive modifiers, incorrect subject-verb agreement) are matters of grammar in the narrow sense, two of which (indirection, careless repetition) are not. But it's clear from what Klinkenborg and Remnick say that her attention was almost entirely devoted to other things; after all, grammar in the narrow sense was very unlikely to be an issue in manuscripts submitted by Janet Flanner, J. D. Salinger, Pauline Kael, or Lawrence Weschler. Writers and editors valued her advice (even when they bridled at it) not because she saved them from error but because she was trying to help them realize their intentions.

I've had many experiences with editors. Some I remember with distaste even after many years; few things are quite as alarming and frustrating as an editor who comes at your manuscript like a grammar-checking program, with nothing more than a long list of Don'ts and fixes for them. But other encounters were rewarding, with editors who aimed for clarity, an effective voice, and an appreciation of the audience, and who negotiated choices and changes with me. (Most recently, Bruce Shenitz at Out magazine.) Somehow, the putative disintegration of civilization never entered into these exchanges.

Things to add to Frank Stewart's list of style elements

As you recall, Frank pointed out that the following elements characterize an author's style:

1. Level of diction (big words, Latinate words, slang words, foreign words)

2. Sentence structure (long sentences, short sentences, complex, simple, fragments, parallel and formal)

3. Punctuation (dashes instead of semicolons, full stops rather than commas or semicolons, exclamations)

4. Paragraphing (short or long, for emphasis or whole thoughts)

5. Tone (serious, silly, sarcastic, witty, lofty)

6. Person (first, second, third; one rather than you or we)

I added one element soon after I posted his list: references and allusions. Today I thought of another: metaphors and similes. I'll bring to class an example of the latter.

Orhan Pamuk

Dear Classmates,

Please feel free to edit me. I am in the class to learn what I don't know, and to establish the mistakes that I've been making all along.

I want to elaborate on the controversies that surround Orhan Pamuk, as I understand them. I would also like to provide support for the comments that I made in class about the tone of the ancillary document discussed.

Prior to his acceptance of the Nobel Prize (2006), Pamuk’s contemporaries accused him of plagiarism (2002). According to reports, certain story lines, specific paragraphs, and particular ideas found in Pamuk’s My Name is Red and The White Castle are the original works of other authors. Pamuk rebuffed the allegations, but received an eternal black eye as a result of the claims against him. Apparently, he is both loved by some and hated by many in his native country.

Orhan Pamuk was the first writer from a predominately Muslim country to win the Nobel Prize for fiction since 1988, when Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt took home the honor. After receiving this prestigious award, Pamuk was interviewed by a Swiss Newspaper. It was during this interview that litigious issues emerged. Despite Turkey’s censorship around national crimes against humanity, Pamuk made comments during his discussion with the reporter about how Turkey was responsible for the deaths of over 1 million Armenians. -The Armenian Massacre, was the premeditated and methodical destruction of the Armenian population, by the Ottoman Empire, during and immediately after World War I. (The word genocide was conceived as a result of the Armenian carnage.) The Turks ruthlessly killed over 1 million Armenians, according to historians. - Pamuk said that his country was in denial about their role in the slaughter. His efforts to air the country’s dirty laundry instigated criminal charges against the Nobel Prize winner - for "insulting" the parliament, the military, and the nationals. However, about a year later, and after much legal wrangling, the charges were dropped.

When I was reading the transcripts from the public lecture given by Pamuk, I couldn't shake the feeling that he was addressing his contemporaries in a passive-aggressive way. He spends a lot of time explaining his own process as a writer as if he is trying to defend himself against the allegations of plagiarism, for example. In the first paragraph when talking about the writer he says, “it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.” By portraying this image of being shut away from society, Pamuk suggests that he could not be influenced by outside sources because he spends his time in self-imposed confinement. The transcript, in my opinion, is littered with this circuitous oration. Pamuk uses this platform to address the well-publicized contentious issues also.

In the last paragraph he begins his ending thoughts with “A writer talks of things that everyone knows but does not know they know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing…” Because of the suppression in Turkey about the Armenian incident, the nationals were prohibited from even considering the concept of the crimes committed on the Turkish soil during World War I. As I said earlier, it was this horrific event that prompted the international community to name the crime, “Genocide” also known as “Crimes Against Humanity.” The International Criminal Court was not in existence until after the World War II and Nuremberg, the birthplace of the Nazi party, and consequent post-war tribunals set up to address War Crimes and other crimes against humanity. So, Turkey was never held accountable for their atrocities. In his interview with the newspaper, Pamuk merely pointed out the pink elephant in Turkey’s living room. In his public lecture in 2006, as the newly crowned Nobel Prize recipient, he did it again.


On a separate note, one of my all-time favorite books is Snow by Orhan Pamuk. He is a phenomenal writer.

Punctuation matters too!

Lisa L. posted about when to capitalize a word; and how the meaning of a word can change depending on whether or not a capital letter is used. The same can be said about punctuation. The meaning of a sentence can be drastically altered by the arrangement of the punctuation.


Written by Richard Lederer and John Shore, "Comma Sense - A FUNdamental Guide to Punctuation," relies on humor to teach the principles of punctuation.


“‘Writing well is important for business, but it also can be crucial in love,’ the writers warn. “Do you want to say, ‘I would like to tell you that I love you. I can’t stop thinking that you are one of the prettiest women on Earth,’ or ‘I would like to tell you that I love you. I can’t. Stop thinking that you are one of the prettiest women on Earth.’? As Lederer and Shore say, ‘Punctuation can mean the difference between a second date and a restraining order.”"

More about Eleanor Gould Packard...

After reading "Grammarian, Copy Editor, Magazine Legend" by Janny Scott, I thought I would do more research on Eleanor Gould Packard.

Wow, what an amazingly gifted, focused, and dedicated, woman.

E.B White gives Eleanor credit for her for her contributions to the second edition of "The Elements of Style." (The first edition was written by William Strunk Jr.) In her obituary, which she contributed to before her death, her boss called her "indispensable."

"“My list of pet language peeves,” she once told The Key Reporter, the Phi Beta Kappa newsletter, “would certainly include writers’ use of indirection (i.e., slipping new information into a narrative as if the reader already knew it); confusion between restrictive and non-restrictive phrases and clauses (‘that’ goes with restrictive clauses, and, ordinarily, ‘which’ with nonrestrictive); careless repetition; and singular subjects with plural verbs and vice versa.” She was a fiend for problems of sequence and logic. In her presence, modifiers dared not dangle. She could find a solecism in a Stop sign.""

I stand in awe of such talent.

When do I...

The text we read was interesting in that it made me come to better understand when to edit the text. During the first week of classes, I was honestly tempted to change the author's text. As the article stated, however, there are a large amount of questions that include how to continue the author's style. It brought me to thinking about the legality of editing it after we discussed the publishing process in class yesterday. How does the author get input in what changes are included when the publication goes to print after they receive the galleys?

Imagining the Other

The following piece was sent to me by Steve Heller; I hope everyone in the class will read it.

The weekend of April 20–22 marked the second annual Weekend Residency for graduates of Antioch University L.A.'s MFA in Creative Writing Program, which I chair. After acknowledging this event was both a reunion and a celebration, I asked everyone in attendance to take note of the main reason why we had gathered. What happened in the writing workshops and seminars that weekend mattered, I claimed. What happened after the residency was over and we each returned to our homes and put pen to paper or tapped a keyboard in front of a shimmering computer screen also mattered. Then I took a few minutes to illustrate why.

The day after the Virginia Tech tragedy, I received an email from a senior reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education who said he was working on a story about the shootings. He informed me that a one-act play written by the shooter, Seung Cho (identified elsewhere as Seung-Hui Cho or Cho Seung-Hui), had become public. He provided a link to the play, and invited me to read it and respond to a series of questions, including these:

Is the writing particularly disturbing?
Or is it the sort of thing you've read before from undergraduates?
What would you do if a student handed in a piece of work like this?

I followed the link and read a short play by Seung Cho called Richard McBeef. The play is about a breakfast-time confrontation between a 13-year-old boy and his stepfather, whom the boy accuses of murdering his biological father in order to have his way with the boy's mother. The mother is also present for part of the action. The play includes a great deal of yelling, cursing, wild accusations, unlikely behavior (including some off-stage sex and a brief incident with a chainsaw), plus a considerable amount of violence—including, if I read the ending correctly, the death of the boy. All in just over seven pages.

I did not read a word of the play to our MFA alumni, but I did share my response to the questions listed above.

Is the writing particularly disturbing?

For me, yes, but only in the way that boredom is particularly disturbing, the way writing that demands rather than deserves our attention is disturbing.

Have I received this sort of work before?

At the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch L.A., never, thank god. The fact that we are an internationally competitive program with a rigorous application review process has probably prevented this, at least so far. However, for 22 years I taught undergraduates at a large university in the Great Plains, which, for many of those years was pretty much open to all graduates of any high school in the same state. On rare occasions I did in fact receive writing as violent and as badly written as this. And, truth be told, I received clumsy, violent writing from female as well as male students, though not as often.

What would I do if a student handed in a piece of work like this?

I doubt I could do anything that would prevent a deeply disturbed person from performing some horrific act, though of course if I feared this would happen I would try. But in my role as a teacher, the first thing I would do would be to talk with this person about the concept of aesthetic distance, specifically what literary critic Wayne Booth calls emotional distance—in particular the emotional distances between the author and the characters, the author and the action. What makes Richard McBeef disturbing is the same factor that makes it badly written: a complete lack of distance between the implied author (the person we assume the author is) and the emotions, particularly rage, felt by the characters. The script lacks the aesthetic distance that results from contemplation, from separating oneself and one's experience from the experience rendered on the page, from separating self from other, from imagining the other, from imagining how events appear to another person and are experienced by that same person—the aesthetic distance through which a writer perceives and thereby values the experience of others.

At Antioch there is no preferred way to write or think. And the writers who teach here have different views on the nature and definition of creative writing. But for me, creative writing is the opposite of self-expression. Creative writing is the expression of otherness, the relationship between self and other, the writer and the world, the writer and experience, the writer's view of things outside—and in interaction with—the self. Without imagining the other, the writer's craft and vision cannot grow.

What Seung Cho wrote was self-expression. What he did on that awful day at Virginia Tech, all of it, was self-expression, a failure of the imagination.

In the end, the writer's rage left the page and became a national tragedy. The events in Blacksburg have left almost everyone feeling vulnerable and helpless, as if nothing we say or do about the issue really matters. But this is not true. What happens in the classroom, in the home, and on the street does matter. What people say and what they write matters. Interaction with others—face-to-face and on the page—matters. The act of imagining others, and thereby understanding them better, doesn't merely express and engage—it staves off madness. It can save lives.

Editing Procedures

The University of Washington Press has guidelines for authors on manuscript submission. Please take a look at the section on editing (to go to it, click on the title of this post).

More idiotic…

Gary Mawyer sent me the link for this article by Geoffrey Wheatcroft: More idiotic than erotic. It's a wonderful piece—followed, I might add, by some provocative comments. One of these reads as follows:

What is remarkable here is the evident failure of Geoffrey Wheatcroft's publisher, Politico's Publishing, to employ a copy editor capable of picking up obvious errors. Traditionally, all mainstream publishers submit manuscripts to a copy-editorial process before the proofreading stage is reached, the copy editor usually being someone with knowledge of the subject area. It's true that small publishers, which Politico's presumably is, are often challenged in this area, but then Politico's is an imprint of Methuen, which obviously has the resources to employ competent editors. So what is to blame for this surprising, and extremely depressing, blunder? Cost cutting? I think we should be told ...

Tragic grammar

Sometimes, I think, copyediting something could take away the beauty that is found in flaws. Here, an example, is Virginia Woolf's suicide letter. Imagine if someone had copyedit it! Now, that would be tragic.

"I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer."

Sentence Length

Someone has suggested to me that I should vary my sentence length in my writing, so that I don’t sound monotonous. Is sentence length something over which a copyeditor has control? Does a copyeditor ever tell an author to avoid monotonous writing by varying sentence length?

A Million Little Lies

I recently saw a documentary on James Frey and his controversial book A Million Little Pieces. I decided to do some research, and I found this review on A Million Little Pieces on amazon.com. It got me thinking, "Should editors be more careful (I guess you could say) about what they choose to publish?"

Amazon.com
News from Doubleday & Anchor Books

The controversy over James Frey's A Million Little Pieces has caused serious concern at Doubleday and Anchor Books. Recent interpretations of our previous statement notwithstanding, it is not the policy or stance of this company that it doesn’t matter whether a book sold as nonfiction is true. A nonfiction book should adhere to the facts as the author knows them.

It is, however, Doubleday and Anchor's policy to stand with our authors when accusations are initially leveled against their work, and we continue to believe this is right and proper. A publisher's relationship with an author is based to an extent on trust. Mr. Frey's repeated representations of the book's accuracy, throughout publication and promotion, assured us that everything in it was true to his recollections. When the Smoking Gun report appeared, our first response, given that we were still learning the facts of the matter, was to support our author. Since then, we have questioned him about the allegations and have sadly come to the realization that a number of facts have been altered and incidents embellished.

We bear a responsibility for what we publish, and apologize to the reading public for any unintentional confusion surrounding the publication of A Million Little Pieces. We are immediately taking the following actions:

We are issuing a publisher's note to be included in all future printings of the book.*

James Frey has written an author's note that will appear in all future printings of the book.* Read the author's note.

The jacket for all future editions will carry the line "With new notes from the publisher and from the author."

Computer editing

(from Moon-Yun)

My friend plans to write a book about his crazy life. I am thinking about offering my editing services since taking this class. I'm afraid that if I do the proofreading markings, he's going to freak out. To be diplomatic, I was thinking of making the edits on the computer instead of marking it on the paper. What do you think?

three hours on six pages

I am ashamed to admit, but I must have spent about three hours copyediting test #2. What frustrated me was it seemed that the author took no more than an hour to write the piece. In an actual work environment, wouldn't it be more economical to ask the author to take another hour to rewrite instead of having a copyeditor spend hours trying to fix the work?

Lazy writing

How much do you think the copy editors task is keeping the author honest?

When I reread my writing, I often find most of my time is spent revitalizing passages I slacked my way through on the first go. Lazy writing seems like a fairly subjective phenomenon. For example, John Gardener (author of Grendel and a number of books about writing) somewhere states that writing too many sentences starting with -ing verbs is lazy writing. He claims that overuse of -ing comes from a desire to vary sentence structure, but without effort. e.g. Walking down the street, Dave heard the jingle of a Mister Softee ice cream truck.

Some people may have no problem with an abundance of sentences that start with -ing verbs, but I agree that -ing verbs are a little lazy. Do you think the copy editor is, or should, be the person who makes the writer do the extra work that makes their writing good, even if its outside the scope of the copy editors task to correct the lazy writing? How do you break it to a writer that they are being lazy (I think one can tell if an author is being lazy)? What are some other examples of lazy writing? There are likely a few in this passage.

Freedom of speech or just bad writing?

I was thinking about a few of the in-class exercises we have done where we were given songs and poems to copyedit. Yes, the poem we were given was hard to understand and had excessive errors. And I agree, "Lay lady lay" should be "Lie with me across my big brass bed." In fact, I've caught myself wanting to correct a Wings song ("But in this ever changing world in which we live in" -- redundant and ends in a preposition). But who am I to tell Bob Dylan or Paul McCartney his hit song is grammatically incorrect? In these instances, should the copyeditor correct the mistakes or leave the errors due to artistic freedom? Is there such a thing as too much freedom (where the work makes absolutely no sense but the artist pulls the freedom of expression card)?

Style

When I was copyediting the letter and poem that we were given in class today, I found it difficult to "respect the author's style." I just wanted to cross everything out, and to re-write it. This has been addressed here and there in previous entries of the blog, but I wanted to know what it meant to respect a author's style. Does that mean we should copyedit a sentence to sound like the rest of the sentences? If so, then how would we have copyedited the letter and poem to "sound" as if the author had written it?

Communication Style

In class Prof. Matsueda advised that we think of the copy editor as participating in a dialogue with the author. I'm interested in the details of that relationship.

For example, do you change the tone of your queries based on your personal experience with the author? Do you ever try to guess or research the author's disposition so that you can communicate with her more effectively? How often does the dialogue between writer and copy editor end on the page, and how often do copy editors and authors meet, either in person or via email/teleconference? I imagine the effort of relationship management varies between publications, as well as between freelancers and non-freelancers. If you freelance there aren't other people in the organization to aid in managing the author-copy editor relationship. Ideally though, would your final copy edit be identical for the same piece of writing, even if it were written by two different people?

The Author's Voice

Here's my question. I suppose it's not too technical, but I have been wondering exactly how bendable some of these rules of grammar are. I know that recently (as in the few decades) grammatical aspects such as the comma have had more open "rules" about placement, but I am more curious about dangling modifiers and the like; the words. Where do you draw the line between style or voice and what is just clearly wrong? How much can one argue that, even though a phrase is incorrect technically, it should be allowed into a publication because it's part of the author's voice. I would think it all depends strictly on the context, but is that always true? (or true at all?) Would it be okay to leave an unclear phrase in a piece if the mistake has so ingrained itself into the common language that it would make more sense to the reader left as it is?

(from Claire)