Word Wise

Dan Santow's 4th Annual Proofreadapalooza!

2009-12-18T12:12:14-06:00

“The true proof-reader,” wrote John Wilson, head of The University Press in Cambridge, Mass., “… should be a lover of literature, familiar with the classics of all languages, with the results accomplished by science, and indeed with every subject that concerns his fellow-men…. [he should be] a man of much patience, well versed in the art of deciphering incorrigible manuscripts.” Okay, that was in 1901, so aside from the totally un-PC gender-specificism of his thought, he’s being a bit of a proofreading drama queen, as well. Still, proofreading is an important skill to develop, especially if you’re in a communications business.

Since there’s no one method of proofreading that works for everyone, pick and choose from the following tips and create your own method – and then follow it each time you proof a document.

Proof but don’t read: When you read, you subconsciously fix the mistakes. There’s a fine line between reading and proofing – stay on the right side of it.

Tidy up your desk – you’re your own worst interrupter when things catch your eye.

Content-ment: Check that contents page numbers and headings match with the actual copy in the document.

Abbreviate to alleviate: Check that abbreviations have been defined at first use.

Bullet proof: Look to see that all your bulleted or numbered lists are formatted similarly.

The dating scene: Ensure that dates and days of the week match – if copy says Tuesday, Nov 7, make sure Nov. 7 is a Tuesday.

Divide and conquer: Divide your task into several parts, completing one before starting the next.

Check for errors in the spelling of names and places.
Check the accuracy of phone numbers, dates, addresses, times, and amounts of money.
Check for errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization.
Check for transposed characters, omitted letters, and word division.

Forever format: To check formatting, scan the "edges" of the document and look for anything that doesn't look right. Then look at the overall page: Does it appear balanced? For example, is the text consistently justified or consistently left aligned? Make sure there's only one space after a period. Check page numbers and footnotes.

Hard knocks: Always proof from a hard copy. Don't try to proof a document from your computer screen; I promise that you'll miss errors this way.

A backwards glance: To proof for spelling, read the document backwards. When each individual word is looked at, outside the context of a sentence, you’re less likely to miss spelling errors. (However, reading backwards will not allow you to spot homophone errors – words that sound alike but are spelled differently: to/too/two, are/our, their/there/they're, and so on. You have to check these by skimming the paper forward.)

Once is never enough: After corrections have been made, proof the revised document. First check to see that all the corrections were made, then read over the document one more time to make sure you didn't miss something the first time around!

Know thyself... and thy own typical mistakes. Make a list of the errors you make repeatedly. Proofread for one type of error at a time. If commas are your most frequent problem, go through the paper checking just that one problem. Then proofread again for the next-most-frequent problem.

Time on your hands: Allow yourself some time between writing a document and proofreading so you can return to it with a fresh mind and eye.

Search parties: Use the search function to find mistakes you're likely to make. Search for "it," for instance, if you confuse "its" and "it's."

Circle back: Circle or highlight every punctuation mark. This forces you to look at each one.

Avoid interruptions: Move to a conference room and don’t take your BlackBerry. Forward your phone to voice mail. Turn off your iPod. Put down the Red Bull. Don't check blogs. Stop IMing your girlfriend. Stop texting your boyfriend. And please, no sexting while proofreading.

Color my world: Use a colored pen so your corrections stand out.

Cap and trade: SEPARATELY PROOF ANY TEXT THAT APPEARS IN ALL CAPS AND DO IT MORE PAINSTAKINGLY. TYPOS AND MISSPELLINGS ARE MORE DIFFICULT TO SEE IN ALL CAPS. I DON'T KNOW WHY, BUT IT'S TRUE.

Double, double, toil and trouble: Double check:

fonts that are unusual (italic, bold, or otherwise different)
proper names
little words: "or," "of," "it," and "is" are often interchanged
every number – dollar amounts, dates, page references, percentages, etc.

The humorist Dave Barry once wrote, “proofread carefully to see if you any words out." That said, there’s just nothing too funny about silly mistakes in an otherwise smart document. It undercuts you, your team, and your employer. Worse, it’s just plain embarrassing.

Finally, and I know this may be asking too much, but have fun, reward yourself and, if in the end a mistake creeps through, just learn from the experience and move on. Life’s short enough as it is.

Cigarette holder which wigs me/Over her shoulder, she digs me/Out cattin' that Latin doll

2009-12-11T11:26:06-06:00

Last week, after writing about et cetera, I received a flood of requests (okay, four) to address i.e. and e.g., two other common but frequently misused Latin abbreviations. Though from experience it seems to me that people often just choose one willy-nilly, it’s worth learning the difference since they are, in fact, different and we use them a lot.

Still, it can be hard to remember which is which. So I don’t mix them up, several years ago I taped the two with their meaning on my bulletin board at work. Take a look below and just ignore the fact that I also have photos of Mary Todd Lincoln and Evelyn Waugh on my bulletin board; it’s a long story.

i.e., the abbreviation of id est, means “that is,” or “in other words”
e.g., an abbreviation of exempli gratia, means “for example”

Here are a couple of mnemonic devices that may help you:

id est/in other words – both phrases start with an i
exempli gratia/for example – exempli and example both start with an e

Each of these abbreviations is followed by a comma: Septimus was interested in many things, e.g., English verse, French cuisine, and Italian paintings. You also need to precede these with either a comma, semicolon, or parenthesis. Note that since e.g. means “for example," which indicates an incomplete list, tacking on etc. would be redundant.

No one ever actually writes these terms in full. In fact, in the classic Dictionary of Modern English Usage, first published in 1926, of id est H.W. Fowler wrote that to do so “is now so unusual as to convict one of affectation.” Just imagine what you'd be convicted of today.

(If this post's headline confuses you, you must click here.)

It's a Puzzlement

2009-12-03T17:04:06-06:00

As movie musical lovers everywhere know, when the king in “The King & I” wants to show off his intelligence without having to actually go into any detail, he ends his boast by bellowing “et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” In the 1873 book upon which the movie is based, The English Governess at the Siamese Court, the author Anna Leonowens used the now passé spelling, &c., when she wrote that the king delighted in “music of every description, and in taming of dogs, monkeys, &c., &c….”

In the real world we use the abbreviation of et cetera to mean “and so forth” or “and others.” But let’s use it correctly, as it was meant to be used, etc.

It’s etc., not ect.
As it means “and other things,” etc., avoid writing “and etc.”
Since it’s an abbreviation, it requires a period. And when it appears in the middle of a sentence, it requires a period and a comma, like in the sentence above.
Despite being an abbreviation of a Latin word, it is not italicized.
“And other things,” “and the rest,” and “and so forth” are perfectly good ways to say et cetera without using etc.
Because it does mean “and other things,” using it at the end of a sentence or phase that begins with “For example” or “such as” is redundant since both phrases imply that there are “others.” For example, I ate an apple tarte tatin, a gooseberry pie, and a pound of butter cookies. The implication here is that I ate even more.
Don’t use etc. more than once in a row unless you’re the King of Siam or Yul Brynner.

Letter Perfect

2009-11-25T08:04:34-06:00

Spell check lets you add words to your custom spell-check dictionary that aren’t found in the standard dictionary. Once added, spell check skips over them, accepting their spelling as is. If you use unusual words a lot – those that may be common in your business or with a particular client – then this feature is especially useful.

But it’s also easy to inadvertently add words that are, in fact, spelled incorrectly. It may be that at the moment the spelling - however unusual - works for whatever it is you are doing, or that you’re working so fast that you accidentally click “add word” when going through the spell-check process. (This is easy to do when spell checking a long document.) Once added, however, these words may never be caught by the spell checker again. To avoid this problem you need to erase your custom dictionary every few months. This will allow the spell checker to catch those misspelled words in the future.

Here’s how to do it:

Go to “tools” and click “options”
Choose “spelling and grammar” and then “custom dictionaries”
Follow the prompts to complete the modification

Remember, spell checks do not distinguish between homonyms - words that sound the same but are spelled differently, like bare and bear, their and they’re, current and currant, and gorilla and guerrilla (that last mistake is more common than you’d think). And they aren't mind readers either. Spell checkers don't know you meant to type the word "same" when you typed "sane," which is a typo I just caught while writing this post.

Spell checkers are important tools, but they are not substitutes for good, old-fashioned proofreading.

Phone Lex

2009-10-28T12:32:38-05:00

When it comes to telephones, a lot has changed since the days of “one-ringy-dingy, two-ringy-dingy." It used to be that we had a phone – okay, some of us had a princess phone – a phone number and that was that. Today? Well, you know. Not only are we talking on our phones constantly, we’re also talking about our phones, referencing phone numbers from New York to New Delhi, and encouraging people to call toll-free numbers, among many other phone-related things. As new technologies have been introduced, so, too, have the ways in which we refer to them in our writing.

Cell phone is two words. And cell has two Ls.
It would be fun if more than one BlackBerry could properly be BlackBerries, but it’s not. It’s BlackBerrys.
While it’s iPhone, it’s IPhone if it starts a sentence.
Hot line is two words, too.
Smartphone is one word and lowercase unless it starts a sentence as it does here.
The initialism for Voice over Internet Protocol is VoIP, styled just like that.
Bluetooth is a proper noun and always capitalized.
Toll free is two words, hyphenated when used as a modifier (a toll-free number, but you can dial toll free).
While we’re on the subject of toll-free numbers, you should not add a 1 before the number, as in 1-800-555-1212, since, as the Washington Post’s copy desk chief Bill Walsh wrote in his masterpiece, Lapsing Into a Comma, “there’s no need to … belabor the fact that everybody, and not just most people, has to add a 1 at the beginning.”
In the United States, we use hyphens in phone numbers – call me at 312-222-3333 – and not periods, no matter how soigné you think it may look.
SMS stands for short message service but no one knows that so it’s better to just write SMS or “text message.”
When referencing phone numbers for a global audience, from the United States include 011, which indicates a number outside North America; a country code; in some cases a regional, city or area code; and, finally, the local phone number itself. A list of country codes can be found here. But even better, at this site you choose the country from which the call is originating, the country it’s going to, and in return you get the exact numbers you need to use to precede the local number. For instance, if I want to call a colleague in my company’s office in Paris, France, I’d choose the U.S. and Paris, and it tells me I need to write 011 33 1 and then the local number. Voila!

Strategy Shmategy

2009-10-19T17:23:14-05:00

I don’t often strategically write a post about one word, but I’m thinking strategically today and, strategically speaking, the supposedly strategic use of the word "strategic" is not strategically helpful. The word means “relating to or concerned with a plan of action.” So to sound strategically intelligent, everyone in PR these days seems to think that strategically it’s a good strategy to call everything they do – every decision, every phone call, every everything – strategic, lest they be accused of acting willy-nilly. But like the tired-as-all-get-out “integrated” and “seamless,” the word “strategic” has lost its oomph. It no longer implies, strategically or otherwise, that whatever is being done is being done on purpose and with an objective in mind. It no longer has the force of its intended meaning. So inured are we to its presence that our eyes gloss over it without even taking it in. Instead, the word just sits there on a page forlornly, taking up space. Through nonstrategic overuse, misuse, and abuse, a perfectly good and powerful word is no longer powerful. We have forgotten to strategize.

Today's read & other stuff - The Hammer Comes to Glamour

2009-10-19T16:50:15-05:00

According to Gawker.com, life got a little less glamourous today as Conde Nast, fresh from shutting down Gourmet, gave the heave-ho to a half dozen folks at Glamour, all on its sales force. Still, that can't be a good omen for the glamourpusses on the editorial side. One of those let go today was a guy who was on "The Real World: New Orleans." Reality bites.

Probably not following Glamour's lead, The New York Times today announced it's going to cut 8 percent of its newsroom staff - 100 people - by the end of the year. According to the Times itself, the paper "will mail buyout packages to the entire newsroom staff on Thursday. The employees have 45 days to decide whether to apply for the buyout. Under the Newspaper Guild contract that covers most newsroom employees, buyouts generally offer three weeks’ salary for each year of service."

Finally, New York Magazine does a brilliant job of explaining how a news story changes and expands as it moves through people and institutions and other news sources by choosing a random date (Sept. 21) and showing how its top stories - including one about John Edwards' love child, General McChrystal's leaked report on Afghanistan, and the murder of a Yale student - got to actually be that day's top stories. Click here and here for PDFs of the really cool illustrations.

Today's read & other stuff - Shame, Shame, Shame

2009-10-16T12:36:43-05:00

It's a shame: Gawker has a sad little item about an event at which top chefs (not "Top Chefs") are to honor "the editors, writers and staff of the legendary culinary publication Gourmet magazine," except apparently it's hard to locate any of them. (Did anyone check the masthead?) Event planners even posted an ad on Craig's List.

They should be ashamed: French Vogue this month features a model in blackface. "The exoticism of the model is supposed to be the story but it ends up being nothing,” New Yorker magazine writer Hilton Als told the Daily Beast, which reported on this. “It’s not offensive, it’s just the scraping of the bottom of the fashion world barrel to come up with something."

Time Sensitive

2009-10-12T16:29:03-05:00

All sorts of documents we write include the time – when an event starts or stops or a new service begins or a person lands at the airport or arrives at the office or an embargo ends or a march steps off or when that much-anticipated giant inflatable singing flea will be in town. So getting the time right is important. But time and again our timing is off because we’re not describing time accurately.

Often, in the United States, this happens between the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November, when in most of the country it’s Daylight Saving Time (note, “saving” isn’t plural). During this period it’s not, say, 2 p.m. CST but 2 p.m. CDT; that is, Central Daylight Time. Each U.S. time zone name changes to reflect circumstances. EST (Eastern Standard Time) becomes EDT (Eastern Daylight Time), etc. It’s a small but important distinction and not one limited to the United States.

Since 1996 Europe (except Iceland), where Winston Churchill once said that the idea of changing clocks provides “the opportunities for the pursuit of health and happiness among the millions of people," has also had a form of this called European Summer Time, which runs from the last Sunday in March through the last Sunday in October. In the Southern hemisphere – where summer starts in December – Daylight Saving Time more or less occurs from late October through late March.

Springing ahead or falling back, however, is not without controversy. The great Canadian writer Robertson Davies said that time change suggested “the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves." (Yes, you read that right, he was complaining about governments encouraging their people to become “healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Now that's a curmudgeon!)Despite Davies, around 70 countries worldwide adhere to “Daylight” or “Summer” time to do just that.

So while it’s true that in casual correspondence CST is okay when you actually mean CDT, and it’s sort of a moot point when scheduling meetings online since most (probably all) systems correct for time changes in meeting requests, given the opportunity it’s always best to err on the side of accuracy and use the correct acronym. After all, time waits for no man (or, for that matter, woman).

Today's read & other stuff - Gourmet Goes; Saveur Grows

2009-10-08T09:02:19-05:00

Today's read & other stuff - Please, Sir, I Want Some More

2009-10-06T06:56:07-05:00

Gourmet: R.I.P.

From Ruth Reichl's Twitter account: "Thank you all SO much for this outpouring of support. It means a lot. ... We're all stunned and sad..... Dishes done. All gone. Great gathering at the house tonight. I so love the people I've worked with at Gourmet. Hard to believe it's over."

Slate's take: How Conde Nast Is Like General Motors - The Magazine Empire as Car Wreck

New York Magazine asked a bunch of famousy chefs what they thought about Gourmet's demise. "Gourmet was not the Bible but people read it," noted one of the chefs. "But the world changes. It's big and sad news."

From Time Out New York, a cris de coeur about "where we go from here."

A great slide show about Gourmet at the Daily Beast. I especially like this cover:

Color Coded

2009-10-05T16:17:35-05:00

We know that, say, Maya Angelou is African American, but is she Black or black?

I’ve come across several documents lately, written by colleagues and others, who’ve referred to African Americans (as well as people of African heritage living in other countries outside Africa) as Black. Ditto, I’ve seen people like me – a member of the Caucasoid race – referred to as White or white.

I get the caution – one person told me she thought lowercasing a color when referring to race may connote disrespect – though I'll admit I also roll my eyes at it. Seriously, people, we’re talking about uppercasing and lowercasing letters. Let’s all stay calm.

With all due respect to people everywhere, the answer is that both black and white, when referring to people’s race, are lowercase. This is AP style as well as that of most mainstream media outlets. “Lowercase black and all racial designations derived from skin color (white, brown, yellow, red),” notes The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage.

While we’re on the subject, I’ve also come across several instances of writers referring to black people en masse as African Americans. Go USA and all that. But keep in mind that people of African ancestry live around the world and that not all black people are African American.

When Every Word Counts

2009-09-25T09:28:37-05:00

It took me a little over four uninterrupted hours yesterday to write six sentences – all together 95 words (I was so intent on finishing that I lost track of time and almost missed “Project Runway,” though, really, how boring is this season?). A lot of people, especially those who don’t write often or who self-identify as “bad writers,” think a writing assignment that calls for only a few words is easier than one calling for many, that writing 95 words will take a tenth as long as writing 950 words. Au contraire, mes amis. My journey yesterday reminded me how hard it is to pack in a ton of information using as few words as possible and the need to edit, edit, edit.

No one process exists on how to do this, but here’s how I do it.

First, I more or less write as much as I want, ignoring word count. I just shove in all the information available. This way, when I start to edit, I can judge pieces of information – facts, data, references, opinions, etc. – side by side. I can use my judgment and weigh what’s important as I begin the arduous process of slashing content, rearranging words, and rewriting sentences.

Then I begin the arduous process of slashing content, rearranging words, and rewriting sentences.

If you haven’t been given a lot of direction then it can be hard to know what information is absolutely necessary to retain and what, given the space limitation, you can lose. This is where your smarts and savvy come into play. Oh, and your confidence, since you need to be confident in your decisions. They need to make sense and you need to be able to defend them intelligently when your client asks you where the information about the blah-bi-di-blah-blah-blah is.

I also mow through my copy and delete every adjective and adverb. They’re perfectly (adverb) nice (adjective) parts of speech but when every word counts, most modifiers do not.

In my mind, when I’m writing a short piece that’s intended to pack a wallop, I imagine myself putting words and sentences through a sieve and seeing what shakes out.

Interestingly (to me, at least) is that since I’ve been twittering (at SantowDan), forcing myself to say something compelling in 140 or fewer characters, I’ve also noticed that I’ve gotten more efficient at telegraphing a lot of information using as few words as possible. See, yet another reason to twitter.

Next time I have only 95 or so words to write, I’m hoping I can whittle down the time it takes. After all, “Project Runway” waits for no one. Good-bye, Mood!

Today's read & other stuff - For Immediate Release

2009-08-24T08:07:44-05:00

You may never feel good about writing another press release again after reading this in the Aug. 31 edition of The New Yorker.

Homonym Grits

2009-08-20T15:06:14-05:00

Even though you know the difference in meaning between, say, it’s and its, its not uncommon to type the wrong one (okay, I did that on purpose). Then again, even good writers (and good typists) mix up words that are spelled differently and have different meanings but sound the same – that is, homonyms. I suspect that’s because they’re not really, really, really sure which one is right. Everyone has their particular bugaboo – mine is effect/affect; I am constitutionally incapable of using either without confirming I’m using the right word – and it’s worth noting yours and taking extra care when necessary.

I see these pretty regularly:

ad / add

An ad is short for advertisement (one d in each), while add is related to addition (a double d in each). The ad for chartreuse Christian Louboutin peep-toe pumps made her want to add them to her collection.

aid / aide

Aid is a verb and means to help or assist, while an aide is a helper or assistant. My aide aided in my indictment.

assent / ascent

To assent is to say yes; while to ascent refers to the act of climbing something. Anik assented to the ascent up Sacré Cœur.

born / borne

To be born is to be brought into existence, while borne is the past tense of bear, or to bring about. Right after Blanche was born, she contracted a water-borne illness.

cash / cache

Cash is what I never have enough of, while a cache is a secret store of something. Barney found a cache of $1,000 cash.

cite / sight / site

To cite is to refer to, while a sight is something you see and a site is somewhere you visit. The online site cited the sights of Venice.

counsel / council

To give counsel is to provide advice, while a council is a group of folks in charge. The council of elders counseled me to stop all my damn bellyaching.

discreet / discrete

Something discreet is confidential, while something discrete is distinct from other things. Penelope's discrete office affairs were mercifully discreet.

lesson / lessen

A lesson is something you learn or the time you take learning, while to lessen is to remove or reduce. Cristobel lessened his boorishness with a lesson in manners.

peak / peek / pique

A mountaintop is a peak, a quick look is a peek, and a hurt ego is a pique. Martha had a pique when she took a quick peek at Mt. McKinley’s peak and realized Stewart had beaten her there.

shear / sheer

A shear is a large tool for cutting, while sheer is either very thin and light transmitting or in a complete manner. Mr. Kenneth’s talent with a pair of shears was a sheer delight to see.