https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22copy%2Bedit%2Bthis%2...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/11/insider/copy-...
Some of them are dubious, though, IMO. For example:
> The total amount available to |disperse| will be $150 million annually.
I guess in a journalism context more people are talking about disbursing than dispersing, but how am I supposed to know that? For all I know this sentence comes from an article about wanting to "scatter" that money.
EDIT: another example from the second quiz:
> Republicans will not like many of these proposals, but they have been |fulsome| in their praise of Mr. Trump since his election. Speaker Paul D. Ryan, for instance, has repeatedly said that he expects Mr. Trump to work with Republicans on their agenda of rolling back the Affordable Care Act and making large-scale changes to the tax code and entitlements.
The explanation for why "fulsome" is wrong here was that "this word means not just “full” or “abundant” but “offensively excessive.”". How am I supposed to know "offensively excessive" wasn't the intended meaning here? I ended up picking it simply because it came across as a bit too pretentious, but not before I picked "instance" for the same reason ("for instance" instead of "for example" bugs me a bit).
Agree. I was tripped by that too. Here is an example from Merriam-Webster[1]:
"the passengers were fulsome in praise of the plane's crew"
The usage here seems to be in a similar context.
I'm guessing if it were the intended meaning, "but" would be incorrect in "Republicans will not like many of these proposals, but they have been fulsome in their praise of Mr. Trump since his election"
> 12. Led Zeppelin did not steal the opening riff of its rock anthem “Stairway to Heaven,” a federal jury ruled here, giving the band a victory in a copyright case in which millions of dollars were at stake.
> O.K., this may be a fine point. But since what was at stake was the total amount, rather than the individual dollars or even the individual millions, I would make it “was at stake.”
Millions were at stake. Dollars were at stake.
Just putting the two together doesn't magically make it singular. No one would ever say "millions of dollars was at stake."
Copyediting should reflect how people actually speak and write.
Why? Genuine question. Written language is always different than spoken language, and this is not unique to English. People make mistakes all the time when speaking, particularly native speakers. [0]
Upon initial reading, I would say one -could- say "was" or "were". But when I read it aloud, I found "was" was more natural.
In most situations this isn't that big of a deal, but we are talking about copy editors here...
> how people actually speak and write.
When I grew up religiously reading books, I wrote and spoke a lot more book-like than I do now. Which version of me is "how people actually speak and write"?
Is Standard American English "how people actually speak and write"? Or is it fine to use varieties of English like Appalachian English or African-American Vernacular English?
Who decides the above? English doesn't have a language council like Korean or French. There is no all-authoritative entity to ask.
[0]: /r/boneappletea is both humorous and infuriating for examples of this. https://www.reddit.com/r/BoneAppleTea/comments/doscha/starch...
Give it a specific sum: you wouldn’t say “two million dollars were at stake,” you would say “two million dollars was at stake”. I admit it’s pretty weird, but you also say “two million dollars is a lot of money,” not “two million dollars are a lot of money.”
This from the second quiz bothers me:
>>On the witness stand, the defendants said they had been duped by Mr. Wildstein, a self-confessed liar and political trickster, into believing that the closings were part of a legitimate traffic study.
"self-confessed liar" is a phrase present even in dictionaries - as example usage, no less. I have not seen many instances where it is substituted with "confessed liar".
Lots of reasons why, including, your inability to recognize problems you are unaware of; the inexorable fact of reading what you think you wrote, not what is on the page; inability to see logical problems, missing assumptions, etc. Ad infinitum.
There are line-level hacks which can help with some of this, e.g. reading backwards to find typographic and spelling error...
...but there is no general solution.
Suggested fix: find a professional peer and become their formal editing buddy. Define terms and scope, this is not peer review–it is simply copy editing.
Ha, nice, I will try this out.
> find a professional peer and become their formal editing buddy
Yeah, teams should have a review system for documentation, like they certainly have one for code review.
In practice, with many non-native English speakers in the team (100% in my case), this is something of an issue. But we do what we can :)
What tends to help me with long-standing documents in particular is to reread them after some time passes. A couple months down the line, I have lost much of the context, which makes it easier to spot problematic bits. I am also not invested in the text as much, which makes it easier to rip out the parts that have not aged well.
Especially in this increasingly remote-connected world, writing skills are key.
Especially coders. Writing clear programs is a lot like clear writing. A function is like a paragraph of a text. It should meaningfully abstract one concept of your higher level logic. It should be introduced by a clean input from the previous "paragraph", and produce an output that is the input for the next "paragraph".
If your higher level function becomes too large, you can create larger structures like sections in writing.
Having this ability to mercilessly copy edit, paring down your functions to their core concept and putting them into meaningful context is really useful if you want others to understand your code.
This book discusses the information architecture of clear and coherent phrases, sentences and paragraphs in the English language, and a few passes through its contents will leave you able to reason about the way you lay out ideas and information in your writing.
As I was typing in "Style: Towards Clarity and Grace" I was thinking Huh? Wouldn't "Toward" be much better?! And indeed that's what it is. Made me feel good about my copy-editing potential.
That said, I think that reading a book on copy edit just to be able to edit your own stuff is a little bit of overkill. You don't need a deep, sophisticated knowledge of grammar - something like Strunk and White's Elements of Style will cover the grammar stuff you need while also helping to offer a little bit better sense of bigger-picture writing style.
(For the record, she was familiar with neither.)
(And for those who don't know, Charlotte's Web was written by E. B. White who is the White of Strunk and White.)
Good code has both formal precision and conceptual clarity.
- It's much easier to track the provenance of complex decisions.
- Deciding in docs reduces meeting bloat.
- It's harder to get pissed at someone based upon a document.
- Anecdotally, points of view seem to be better thought-out.
This article made me think of how we should remember to try as hard as possible to adjust for variation in writing skill. I also wonder whether we're inherently biasing against people who are _slower_ writers.
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem...
