Never too Old to Learn

Commenting on a recent post, Celia Hayes spoke of an editing programme called Serenity. I’m over half way on my ten day free trial and it’s the main reason I’ve not blogged all week.

We all need editors. I’m currently reading and thoroughly enjoying Harmony by HRH The Prince of Wales. It is published by Blue Door, the prestigious new imprint from HarperCollins, about as mainstream as you can get. There are no typos that I can see, no gaps between words that shouldn’t be there, none of those things commonly called ‘errors’, so it has almost certainly been edited. However, the editor did not know that it is Bad Form to begin a sentence with a number in figures (should be spelt out ); nor did he/she gently rebuke His Royal Highness for capitalising words such as Winter and Spring. Or perhaps he/she did and was rebuffed for his/her temerity (as happened to me once on this very issue, resulting in a book looking like it had been written by a German capitalising Every Important Word).

There are different levels of editing, and this programme deals with six of them, each one done separately as a list, which shows how incredible the human brain is, because a human editor would read all six levels at once and produce just one edited copy.

1. FIX – finds many mechanical errors and lists words and phrases that are often incorrect in novice writers’ work.

2. SPELL1 – finds many spelling mistakes that other spelling checkers miss.

3. SPELL2 – finds many sound-alike words that poor spellers mix up.

4. TIGHTEN – looks for wordiness and for unnecessary repetitions.

5. POLISH – looks for cliches, vagueness and overused expressions.

6. CONSIDER – finds many words and phrases that, while not always wrong, often cause problems for novice writers.

And those six levels are only in the category called ‘copy editing’. The Serenity programme is good, if ill-named (it would have been better called Humility), but it shows the limits of machines and software programmes. It does not do, cannot do, what only a human editor can do and show you where your plot has a hole or the pace has slackened. It is, by its very nature, mechanical.

There is a joke about a novelist writing a story set in Florence and using all the facilities Word has to offer, including ‘Find and Replace’ when he decided to change his hero’s name. His editor says he enjoyed the book but he was a bit puzzled by references to ‘Michelangelo’s Kevin.’

Machines have their limits.

That said, Serenity’s Editor programme is pretty bloomin’ amazing. I shall almost definitely be buying a copy once my trial time is up. I must say it is one of the most difficult programmes I’ve encountered and I’m still not using it properly, I’m sure. It is designed to make things difficult so that we don’t just use it like an editing slave, clicking the mouse whenever we accept the suggested change. Until I did what I was told and printed out the draft copy (it numbers every sentence in your text) I found it maddening going from ‘draft’ to ‘usage’, as I was meant to. Do what you are told! For Editor is here to teach you, not to do the work.

And boy, I have a few things to learn. For those aficionados of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, this programme goes a long way to helping you eliminate all unnecessary words. It’s already shown me that when it comes to the difference between that and which, I consistently opt for the wrong one (and no, I’m not going to tell you which is which).

I quickly learnt to work with Editor rather than be cowed by it, and by no means do I accept all suggestions. My sentence may be ‘wordy’ but I have cadence to consider as well as economy. Nevertheless, I feel chastened to learn how often I use ‘empty intensifiers’ such as ‘very’ and ‘great’ and how much more effective a sentence is without such words.

For example, consider the difference between these two:

‘Alberti would say you are very ignorant.’

‘Alberti would say you are ignorant.’

The first is what I would say in the circumstances, but the second carries more force; in fact, the absence of  ‘very’ does the intensification that the word, overused, no longer does.

You get six lists from Editor, which means you have to comb through your draft text six times. This is intense and you cannot do this work without both the text and its author changing. What I have learned is how often I use ‘vague terms’ such as ‘somewhat’, ‘rather’ and ‘quite’. I know why I use them: these are middle class understatements often used to humorous effect, but it suddenly occurred to me that I may just have picked up this trick from Wind in the Willows when I was a child. I haven’t checked, but I’m wondering if I don’t seem somewhat Mole-ish at times, or, as Editor would have me say it, deleting ‘seem’ and ‘somewhat’: ‘I am Mole-ish’. For what the programme is pointing out to me is the English habit of avoiding saying exactly what I mean. I sit in my burrow, make tea and try not to offend anybody. As a result, my text is woolly and verbose with empty intensifiers and dead metaphors.

But I have also learned my strengths and it is only lists 4 and 5 which are throwing up changes and improvements, the rest I could ignore, but I read them all through just in case, because Linda Humility is my new name.

As I said, it’s a programme designed to teach as well as advise. You have to sit and think of an alternative to your ‘cliche or dead metaphor’. I find this very useful – oops! I find this useful and hope it rubs off. But is ‘origin’ really a pretentious way of saying ‘beginning’? Should ‘not possible’ always become ‘impossible’? No! You must keep your wits and overrule where necessary. Starting sentences with ‘there was’ may be sloppy but it is sometimes unavoidable and rhythm must always be considered. Nevertheless I appreciate the work which changed ‘ill-gotten gains’ to ‘profits from usury’, and learning what the difference is between ‘ship’ and ‘boat’, ‘gaol’ and ‘prison’.

Editor is not infallible. It’s American for a start, and has to be forgiven for its inappropriate spelling suggestions. ‘Spelt’ it tells me, is the name of a fish and I should use ‘spelled’ – well, not in the UK, as it happens, but I appreciate having to go to the dictionary to find this out – indeed I’ve never gone to the dictionary so often as I have done these past few days. (There is a way to switch to British English but I haven’t found it yet.) Editor’s list of ‘homonyms’ designed to spot possible errors failed to see that I had written ‘sites’ for ‘sights’ – but I would never have spotted this myself if I had not been in the process of the intense work which Editor encourages.

Yes, a human editor is best, but one always needs at least three – one to spot holes and inconsistencies in the story; one to edit copy as Editor does; one to proof read at the end – and to have all three is expensive whoever is paying for it. Serenity’s Editor is a good alternative to the copy editor. My husband does the first job; Godstow employs someone to do the proof reading. I’ve always done the second kind but now, I realise, not perfectly. Hence the lesson in Humility.

But there is a law which states that some mistakes are only visible once a book is bound, and no amount of editors will help bypass that. One always has to steel one’s self against the helpful correctors, those readers who write to you so much more quickly than those who want to praise your work. Forget the humiliation, be grateful and designate an ‘Author’s copy’ of your book to keep a record of all changes for the next edition.

In The Rebirth of Venus I poked a little fun at all this. My hero is working in one of the earliest Italian printing houses and meets the Printer’s Devil, the sprite responsible for all the mistakes. And then I deliberately misspelt a word to demonstrate how hard it is to spot such things. My proof reader and typesetter did spot it, so I had to keep correcting their corrections to keep the mistake intact.

I’d heard from nobody about it until this week when I received an email from Argentina:

In case you are collecting lists of errors for future editions, we had a good chuckle today because on page 265 of the third book of your trilogy, when Tommaso is complaining that it’s somehow and inexplicably impossible for the human brain to spot all the mistakes in the proofreading of printed texts, the end of that paragraph (the last word in the chapter – “understanding”) is misspelt!!

Tee hee!

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The Book that Ate America’s Brain

After Margaret Donsbach’s comment the other day, about choosing active over passive verbs, I reached out for a book which wasn’t there. I often lend writing manuals to students. Too often the book is returned the following week with the student saying, ‘Thank you so much, I really enjoyed that.’ What I would like them to say is, ‘It was so rich I couldn’t get past page 5 and still digest everything. I have to keep referring to it. Can I borrow it another week?’ But obviously one student did find that, and that’s where my Strunk and White is.

‘Strunk and White’ is the US bible of good writing practice.

From Wikipedia: ‘Cornell University English professor William Strunk, Jr., wrote The Elements of Style in 1918, privately published it in 1919, and first revised it in 1935 with editor Edward A. Tenney. In 1957 at The New Yorker magazine, the style guide reached the attention of writer E. B. White, who had studied writing under Strunk in 1919, but had since forgotten the “little book” that he described as a “forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English.^“

Weeks later, he wrote a feature story lauding the professor’s devotion to lucid written English prose. Meantime, Macmillan and Company publishers had commissioned White to revise The Elements of Style, then 41 years old, for a 1959 edition, because Strunk had died 13 years earlier, in 1946. His expansion and modernization of the 1935 revised edition yielded the new writing style manual, since known as Strunk & White, whose first revised edition sold some two million copies. Since 1959 the total sales of three editions of the book, in four decades, exceeded ten million copies.’

E.B. White was the author of Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little and a collection of fabulous essays which should be at everyone’s elbow as a source of inspiration.

I have always tried to practise this active over passive principle. In short, instead of writing, ‘I was pounced on by the cat,’ you would say, ‘the cat pounced on me.’ The active version is more immediate and invites imaginative participation by the reader. So, as a quick way the liven up the writing, adopt the principle.

Reading on about Strunk and White in Wiki, I discovered that this principle appeared in the third edition, which White enlarged. The entry goes on:

‘E.B. White advises writers to have the proper mind-set, that they write to please themselves, and to aim for, in the phrase of Robert Louis Stevenson, “one moment of felicity.”

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. The Elements of Style.’

Who could argue with that? It’s a perfect principle beautifully stated. But of course, there are English lit professors who know much better than me:

In criticizing The Elements of Style, Geoffrey Pullum, professor of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, said:

‘The book’s toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules . . . It’s sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write however or than me or was or which, but can’t tell you why.’

Specifically, Prof. Pullum said that Strunk and White misunderstood what constitutes the passive voice, and criticized their proscribing established usages such as the split infinitive and the use of which in a restrictive relative clause. He also criticizes The Elements of Style in Language Log, a linguists’ blog about language in popular media, for promoting linguistic prescriptivism and hypercorrection among Anglophones, referring to it as “the book that ate America’s brain.”

In the Boston Globe newspaper’s review of The Elements of Style Illustrated (2005) edition describes the writing manual as an “aging zombie of a book . . . a hodgepodge, its now-antiquated pet peeves jostling for space with 1970s taboos and 1990s computer advice.”

Pardon me?

If you’re not familiar with Wikipedia, anyone can create or edit an entry. On the whole I find Wiki very reliable, but you need to develop a sixth sense about exactly who’s been adding stuff in.

Strunk and White has helped if not created a couple of generations of fine writers. I unreservedly recommend it as a style guide. But if you think it’s going to eat your brain, then by all means, find another, but don’t leave style as something that comes naturally. It doesn’t.

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