Composing type the old way…

For a definition of composing type, see this page. And here are Gary Mawyer's reminiscences of the machines used by a company he worked for many years ago.

I certainly remember the linotype, and George [Beetham Jr.] is my witness. The old Michie Co. used linotypes for their city codes (state codes were still set by hand in wooden frames, and the type was rectified by a guy with a wooden mallet). As George will recall, the row of linotype machines was on the right-hand side at the top of the stairs when you came to work. Those things were shatteringly loud, and there were enough of them to vibrate the floor. The smell of hot lead fumes was no laughing matter, and we used to speculate what it would be like to pull an entire shift in a lead fog. There was some splatter associated with the type too.

We proofread city codes, and the difference in quality versus case type was stark, I would say. But for utilitarian printing, the machines were fine. I do not think these were late-generation linos. In fact they were probably quite early ones since the Michie Co went back to the 1870s. I would hazard a theory that the linotype was what made the incredible profusion of local newspapers that used to exist possible. For instance, as late as 1970 a place as small as Point Pleasant, WVA, still had 2 local newspapers.

The film by Douglas Wilson is right. As machines, they were incredible, and when the Michie Co dropped the not very lucrative city codes to concentrate more on new federal case reports, the old linos were broken up and sold for scrap. We saw them lying there, and we remarked on the way home from work one day that if we had as much as $10 between us and a basement to put it in, we could have picked up a perfectly good linotype. However, it might have been a challenge to keep it running.

Sentence 10 in quiz 4

For an explanation of why I'm inserting the hyphen in "login" in "login page," see this site on common errors in English.

Help desk

The youtube.com video I mentioned yesterday.

Don't even think about it…

Second Ka Leo letter

This is the one whose ending was changed from a rhetorical question to a statement.

First Ka Leo letter

My first letter on the subject. I've proposed to Ka Leo a follow-up piece, and the news editor is interested.

ESL editor wanted…

Backstage in a Bureaucracy

A News@UH item on the book I edited for UH Press.

Advanced vs. advance

On the back cover of the book I edited for UH Press is this blurb:

Backstage in a Bureaucracy is a compelling primer for anyone interested in politics and public service. Susan Chandler and Richard Pratt give us an advanced look into government in the twenty-first century. Must reading for aspiring leaders.

—David Heenan, Estate of James Campbell Trustee

Advanced ("far on or ahead in development or progress; new and not yet generally accepted") is what we call a past participle: the past-tense form of a verb employed as an adjective. Advanced is commonly seen in such phrases as advanced placement exam, advanced stage of negotiation, people of advanced years.

Unfortunately, the simple adjective advance ("done, sent, or supplied beforehand") is the correct word for Heenan's statement.

KOK Edit

An impressive list (in alpha order) of resources for copyeditors and those who employ copyeditors.

On the importance of looking things up…

The following is a post by Arnold Zwicky, whose piece on Eleanor Gould Packard I recently shared via our blog.

John McIntyre’s latest Baltimore Sun column, “Just look it up”, begins:

When an article assigned in my editing class contains an uncommon word, I ask my students what it means. The usual response is a row of blank stares. It appears that they just shrug when they encounter unfamiliar vocabulary. And then I explain to them that if you release an article that contains words you do not understand, you have not really edited it. But you will be held accountable for anything in it that is wrong.

An article on Newswise, “Study Shows Universities May be Failing to Sufficiently Teach Basic Research Skills,” suggests that many students don’t use the library and fail to take full advantage of electronic sources—in fact, don’t have a clear sense of how to begin research.

A salient paragraph: “To manage large amounts of information, the report says, ‘students in both large universities and small colleges use a risk-averse strategy based on efficiency and predictability.’ In other words, students avoid drowning by limiting the sources they turn to and the amount of information they take in.”

There is another side to this phenomenon, the willingness, displayed widely on the Internet, to make assertions or challenge other people’s work without troubling to check. What is a character flaw in civilians is a sin in copy editors, as Carol Fisher Saller explains today at The Subversive Copy Editor.

Oi. All the riches of the net and the web, and instead of taking advantage of them, some people are (apparently) overwhelmed by the material and contract their search strategies. Of course, university libraries are themselves vast and hard to navigate, but now people have the immensity of the net and the web at their fingertips, and tools for searching through them. Why don’t they use them?

Some time ago, I suggested (in deliberately hyperbolic language) on Language Log that “the InterWeb makes people lazy and stupid”, citing some instances of the effect, noting in particular that users of these resources have come to expect that everything of consequence will have clickable links, so that when no such link is provided the users treat the information in question as simply unavailable.

Wikipedia and some other sites provide clickable links, but in such profusion that most users just disregard them, though as I saw when I complained about “link fanaticism” on Language Log, many people enjoy the kind of random exploration all those links invite; you can find all sorts of neat stuff. But for people who are actually trying to find out about some specific topic, or who ought to be, the profusion of links undermines the utility of the resources; there are just too many.

Next, lots of people have come to view the net and the web as primarily social places, as locales for communicating opinions, personal news, reactions, anecdotes, reminiscences, gossip, and so on, in loosely connected, rapidly written exchanges — a view that threatens to overwhelm sites that were intended as locations for serious discussion on intellectual, technical, scientific, artistic, professional, and academic matters. I complained two years ago about Language Log comments, and how the blog’s stated policy was frequently and flagrantly violated. (The American Dialect Society mailing list suffers from similar problems.) As the readership of Language Log has expanded, significantly, these problems have gotten much worse. (I’ve said to the other bloggers that I think we’re experiencing a Success Disaster.)

A perennial problem on both LLog and ADS-L is that so many commenters/posters don’t use standard reference works (despite their being recommended again and again; I’ve gotten very testy about it) or check the archives to see if the topic has been discussed before — yes, I know, this can be difficult to impossible to do in some cases — so discussion proceeds from the ground up, chaotically, time after time.

If you’re someone trying to find information, or someone who should be, then you’re looking at a roiling sea of material, without a rudder or compass. So maybe it makes sense for students to pull back and rely on just a few sources. Or, worse, just ask their friends.

It gets worse. The wonderful resources available to students — to all of us — are shot through with looniness, falsehoods (honestly believed or maliciously spread), parodies, confused thinking, and other pitfalls. In a discussion a while back on ADS-L it became clear that a great many students had no way to think critically about what they read and so gullibly accepted all sorts of things.

It’s no good just mocking the students who get caught up in these many traps. They need help, of several kinds: training in critical thinking, information about good reference sources (John McIntyre went on to list a few for copy editors), advice about how to thread their way through all that material, good examples of how more experienced writers and thinkers work their way through it.

And someone needs to keep saying: You Could Look It Up! Even if you’re not a copy editor (or fact-checker), not looking it up is still, as Carol Fisher Saller put it, a character flaw.

Editing the president

The president of our esteemed institution just sent out a Thanksgiving message. I thought this paragraph needed special attention from an editor:

Every one of the top elected officials in our state have had their own lives profoundly impacted by the University of Hawai'i. They are our graduates, and in one case the son of a longtime faculty member. We are proud that our university continues to produce leaders for Hawai'i's future -- in politics and government, business, law, the sciences, medicine and health, engineering, education, skilled trades, and the list goes on and on.

Not as good as Samantha's

I fear my post isn't as good as Samantha's, which quoted a passage in which Thanksgiving, eating, flying, and misbehavior are connected.

Joel Bradshaw, the head of the journals department at UH Press, wrote a conference paper some years ago, and I recently asked him for a copy of it. He said he'd posted it at UHP's blog. Here is part of it:

Cultural Evolutions

In many ways, the digital era has been very, very good for academic journals. Their authors have acquired many more readers, all across campuses and all around the globe. Their publishers have implemented more efficient means of production and dissemination, and often found very significant new streams of revenue. But there have been some difficult cultural adjustments.

Subscriber counts are becoming less important as a metric for assessing readership than actual counts of article views online. And those online readers are much less likely to be subscribers, much less likely to be able to evaluate the reputation of the journal, and much less interested in anything but the disembodied article they found via an all-purpose search engine. This has led to an identity crisis for many journals. Are they a place for scholarly dialogue, or just a warehouse of articles awaiting consumers who may or may not care about which brand they buy?

Journal articles become harder to distinguish from chapters in multiauthor books, and senior scholars in the humanities tend to contribute less and less to journals because they tend to be overcommitted to editors who have solicited their contributions to more highly valued books. As journals become more and more specialized, those with broader—and often more prestigious—coverage, tend to attract less of the cutting-edge research that makes people feel the need to subscribe as individuals.

Finally, in an era of fast food, online communities, and instant feedback, ambitious scholars have less patience with the languid cycles of journal review and publication.

That dwindling patience no doubt extends to careful editing as well.

The tilde

The tilde is a common diacritical mark. I wrote to Luis Verano, of the University of Oregon, about it recently, and here is what he said.

One of the diacritical marks in Spanish is the tilde. When placed over the letter n (ene), the tilde creates a new letter—the ñ (eñe)—which produces the palatal nasal sound ny, as in the word señora or señor. Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888–1963), a writer from Spain, referred to the ñ jokingly as “una n con bigote” (an n with a mustache). The ñ is an entirely different letter, however, and words that begin with ñ appear in a separate section in dictionaries.

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.

Jargon

An artifact from one of my 2006 classes.

Editor wanted

Just read a message from the membership director of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses that had the following passage:

This is a survey created by a graduate student conducting a study about print and/or online presses about how literary work is promoted. The collected information will be available to all our members— we think it will be a great way for CLMP members to see a break down of what your colleagues are doing to promote their projects, especially with social media.

Another (flat) biographical note

You might want to print this out and try editing it:

Oakley Hall, author of eleven novels, two of which were made into movies, five mysteries, six librettos, and a textbook, is teaching classes for the creative writing program in the UHM English Department spring semester. Hall, who attended the University of Hawaii in 1938, is a professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, where he directs a graduate program in creative writing. The movies, "Warlock" and Downhill Racers," were based on his novels.

I'm glad I didn't write that (which)

Written by Michiko Kakutani for the New York Times:

Nowhere is this PC mood more striking than in the increasingly noisy debate over language—that has moved from university campuses to the country at large—a development that which both underscores Americans' puritannical zeal for reform and their unwavering faith in the talismanic power of words.

Community Party

Cindy wrote me a long response about my Scott Nearing post, pointing out that the Community Party was a distinct entity similar in its mission and principles to the Communist Party. As far as I can tell, though, it was the latter Nearing was ejected from for holding irreconcilable views.

Cindy, many thanks for your great research; we all benefit from it.