New Gig, Old Books

So what's a fellow to do on Day One of his work in the Gig Economy? Unpack reference books from the old gig.
That work, which I did first thing yesterday morning, may be akin to a soldier checking, oiling and testing his weapon. I felt a granite sureness in pulling out Webster's Unabridged, The Chicago Manual of Style, Follett, Fowler, Strunk and White and the AP Stylebook. Weapons and ammo. Check. Ready to go to battle.
I mentioned this in a Tweet and got an interesting response from an old colleague, an award-winning wordsmith in his publishing days.

Strunk and White? Are you kidding? The days of having 30 minute arguments of serial commas and whether one means anticipation or simple expectation are days of yore, old friend.

I understand where he's coming from, in an era of 140-word Tweets and IM slang that's, OMG, 2die4.But sunshine peeks through the clouds. His response coincided with a request from a colleague at Blanc & Otus. A client wanted to resolve an internal discussion about how to handle compound modifiers. He was wondering whether their copy was too hyphen-happy.
There, in the pages of those great language books, was the guidance we so often have trouble finding these days: Use the hyphen to avoid confusion. "Small-business owners" means something different than "small business owners."
So people still care. Are these people graying around the temples, raised at a time when we read books not screens, tapped typewriters not keyboards? Perhaps. But at the agency I got urgent questions from twenty-somethings (note the hyphen) about serial commas, about punctuation, about style. It matters.
People, like nature, abhor a vacuum.While the language evolves as it should, business communications, done well, will always adhere to rules.

In writing, measure twice, cut once

PR industry consultant Sam Whitmore has been tracking editorial accuracy (as if he doesn't have enough to do!). It falls loosely under the umbrella that smaller editorial staffs are doing more work and stress cracks are emerging. He used as an example an error in a Wall Street Journal story about an SAP product. His email blast today contained the following:

It turns out that the WSJ no longer has a copy desk per se. Senior editors still read and edit stories, but recent layoffs have decimated the layer of fit-and-finish wordsmiths -- copy editors and slot readers -- that reinforced the WSJ's hard-earned reputation for excellence. Also, WSJ production systems don't make it easy for reporters see a headline before it runs. This creates risk when stories are technical, like the SAP piece.

This anecdote illuminates a ignored problem within digital publishing: When a piece of content is published, regardless of when it's corrected, the original incorrect version not only can get into millions of hands quickly but can also exist in certain forms even after the correction.
The moral to the story? Similar to a carpenter (who should measure twice, cut once): edit many, publish once.

The Apostrophe Catastrophe Continues

Earlier this month I blogged about about the lingua lunacy that's infiltrated elected officials in Birmingham, England. In short, they're ignoring them on public signs.
An updated dispatch from the Daily Telegraph indicates the good guys are still losing the good fight.

Wakefield Council in West Yorkshire said that it did not include the punctuation mark on road signs "to avoid confusion", even where the name was intended to take the possessive.

One of the good guys turns out to be the uncle of an EE Times colleague of mine, David Blaza.

Allan Blaza of the Pontefract Civic Society accused the council of ducking its responsibility to maintain standards.

He said: "I think it's a cop out. I'm sufficiently rigorous when it comes to the English language, which is a magnificent language, to feel sure that all the grammatical necessities – not niceties – should be observed."

Here, here, Mr. Blaza. Now that said, check out the photos here. The upper photo is from the earlier coverage and shows no apostrophe. The lower photo is from the more recent story. It has an apostrophe but appears to be a different sign placed in a slightly different position near the church.
So there's hope.

The Art of Editing

Our son, a high school sophomore, demonstrated over breakfast today why that adage about jazz is just as true about writing: Often it's what you leave out that resonates more than what you put in.

He was reading a story in the San Francisco Chronicle about a trial of a man accused of shooting the bullet that paralyzed a young boy while he was playing piano.

Here's the lede:

(02-02) 17:58 PST OAKLAND -- The 11-year-old boy paralyzed by a gas station robber's bullet while taking a piano lesson in Oakland still plays music and basketball - but now, he does both from a wheelchair.

My son's suggestion: Replace "paralyzed" with "hit" or "struck" or "shot," and you have a better lede. The changed construction adds an element of suspense to the sentence because it leaves out the outcome of the shooting until the end of the sentence. The emotion-coaster that creates in a single sentence is breathtaking: He was shot! Oh, he survived! He can play basketball and piano! Oh! He's paralyzed and in a wheelchair!

Writing is just as much about engaging with readers as it is about the raw conveyance of ideas and information, even in the digital age. Whether it's in print or online or in an email newsletter, good writing engages the mind.
You do that, and the rest will follow.

Catastrophe for Apostrophes

The people who invented the English language seemed determined to destroy it.
Birmingham, England, officials have decided it's okay not to have apostrophes.

Councilor Martin Mullaney, who heads the city's transport scrutiny committee, said he decided to act after yet another interminable debate into whether "Kings Heath," a Birmingham suburb, should be rewritten with an apostrophe.

"I had to make a final decision on this," he said Friday. "We keep debating apostrophes in meetings and we have other things to do."

Martin, why on Earth are you debating apostrophes? There's nothing to debate. They're a crucial part of understanding a written piece of communication.

Perhaps you should pass a law allowing people to spell Birmingham any which way they choose. Or renaming it. I'd vote for Mullaney's Folly.

Quote of the day

From Dr. Seuss:
"So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads."

Tip of the cap to Mighty Meredith for the Twitter Tip.

How Obama's Words Look to Us

A great way to revise and refine your copy is to run it through visualization tools (more on this in another post). Then there are times when you just want to admire how those words look. Here's what one visualization of Barack Obama's inauguration speech looks like, courtesy of the IBM-backed tool Many Eyes. Click on the image for a better view.