"Is Spelling Important?"

In light of our recent spelling test, which surprisingly stumped me repeatedly, I thought I'd post this piece. Oh yeah, and I'd get more A's in spelling if the only requirement was to put the letters provided in the correct order.

Here is an [unsigned] article which is making the e-mail circuit. It tries to prove that all of us read with a whole word approach.

"Can you raed tihs?

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid; aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.

The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

If you can raed tihs forwrad it."

Read more about this at http://www.learningbooks.net/wholeword.html

noun strings

I had a really hard time taking apart the noun strings. Does anyone have any hints or ideas on a better way to do them than the book explains?

style vs. clarity

I know that we will talk about the test in depth on Friday, but I wanted to know already if I shot myself in the foot with my version. I know that copyeditors aren't supposed to rewrite things, but I felt as if I did that. Quite a bit. At some points, it bordered substantially. However, it was for the sake of clarity and purpose! Which was I supposed to take into consideration more? The purpose of the email (to present a business front in order to recruit literary journals into projects) or the author's style ("not great")? Is it okay because it was a business-type letter since those should be more cookie cutter? I would never take liberties like that with a piece of fiction or poetry.

is the list format a style choice?

Last minute question: I was wondering about the list of the things Dzanc is planning on doing. Do we move it to align with the rest of the text (on the first page of the letter) and over to the left on the following page or is it okay to leave it indented? And, if we do need to move it, do we use the marks for align or for flush left? Does it even matter or is it the copyeditor's choice of style? Personally, I like to think that it looks okay as it is, but that's probably just me being lazy and not wanting to make a decision about how to put in the editing marks. I just don't know if it needs to be moved or not, since Pat moved it, but we've already discussed how we don't need to copy all of her editing marks.

em-dashes again

I had a problem with the em-dash on the first test and I still can't figure out how to make one on my computer. I have it correct once (but that might have been from the original text and had nothing to do with me), but the rest of mine didn't turn out. I Googled it and it says to use two hypens and that will make an em-dash, but mine won't change. Any suggestions?

Also, is that how I would use "Google" as a verb? :P

common usage

I was reading the "Opus" comic strip in this Sunday's paper and a character mentioned that "thaw" and "unthaw" mean the same thing. Are there a lot of words like this and if there is one that is more commonly used, but the author uses the other, do you bother to query about it (because th meaning is essentially right, regardless of what people can easily recognize) or is that just being too anal retentive, even for a copyeditor?

queries

In exercise 13, do the queries to the author not need to be circled because it's just an exercise? I know we talked about how everything should be circled so as not to confuse a typesetter. Or is it okay because it's obviously not meant to be changed in the type and stands as a query to the author?

reformating

I also had a question about format. The book says that copyeditors aren't responsible for rewriting or reformat issues. So if the piece needs extensive reformatting - maybe one big paragraph that would be served better in the form of a list or with bullets - would you just make a note and send it back to the writer to do? I just read through an article for a friend and planned to copyedit, but I ended up changing the format and it was so extensive that I don't know if I could have added all the marks needed in the space. Would you just squeeze them in however you could?

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?

The textbook definitions

I know that I should both understand and be able to explain how and why a sentence has correct or incorrect grammar. However, it's really always been a problem (as I think it has been for a number of people who have gone through the public school system - not to make excuses) for me to be able to label a "compound sentence" or any other grammatical sentence part for what it is and be able to explain the rights and wrongs. I've taken a Modern English Grammar and Technical Writing here at UHM and I still can't really pick out most of the technical things by name, but I've always been able to tell when something just sounds "off." I just wanted to ask how important it is for a copyeditor to be able to pick out things that aren't grammatical by name? I am planning on learning to be able to pick them out, but if it's a long process, will this hinder my progress if I can't tell an author exactly why I choose to change something grammatically?

Absolutes

I'm not sure how "good" of a question this is, but it was something that I keep thinking about from the exercises. Chapter 2 has the explanation about words like "unique" and "critical" being modified incorrectly. I was wondering if the explanation means that all verbs falling under the nature of being "something or not" (ie: it is unique or not/it is critical or not) can never be modified with words like most/more/extremely, like in the example? Or is it a case by case basis, depending on the word (so words like "unique" just can't be used with "most" or "more" but words like "critical" can)? Can't you say one person is more critical than another? Is there some kind of rule for this?