Mantra Therapy for Those Who Edit Their Text Messages

Who edits text messages? Who shrieks in horror when they realize they’ve just hit Send on a text with a misspelled word or—gasp!—without a comma before a conjunction joining the final element in a series of three or more items?

Silly questions.

I do, of course. And if you happen to be an editor or anyone else who is careful with words, I bet you do too.

The burden of pathological correctness

When words are your life, people expect you to be “on” all the time. They expect your words—spoken, written, e-mailed, texted—to be the right words, in perfect order, properly punctuated. It’s kind of like being a comic and having everyone expect you to be hilarious at all times. This is what I call the burden of pathological correctness. It’s hard to relax, let your hair down, spell stuff wrong, forget about punctuation. You always, always, always take the time to spell words out completely and insert apostrophes where appropriate. You don’t write Gr8! or dont tell mom. It’s always Great! and Don’t tell Mom.

As I said, it’s a burden.

It’s just a text. It’s just a text. It’s just a text.

One way to lighten the burden is to remember that a text message is an ephemeral wisp of a thing that barely even exists. It’s here and then gone, deleted, forgotten. No one will remember that you texted your significant other to “pickup milk, bred, & mangos.” But you’ll know. You’ll remember.  And so will the FBI if they have reason to hack your phone. “Aha! Two misspelled words, and you used a comma with an ampersand! You know what the penalty is for impersonating an editor? Huh, buddy?”

That imagined interview may be a bit dramatic, but that’s what it can feel like when you accidentally send a message that is somehow wrong. You want to pull it back and fix it all up before sending it out into the world again. You start making up excuses: “My thumb slipped.” “Who can see the letters on that little screen?” And everyone’s favorite, “Damn Autocorrect!”

But what you need is not a way to retract a misspelled message, nor is it another excuse. What you need is a mantra. Like this one:

It’s just a text. It’s just a text. It’s just a text.

Recite this to help yourself relax whenever you’re composing a text message (and by the way, if you “compose” your texts—like I do—boy, do you ever need this). Then just hit Send. The bad news is, you’ll send more texts with mistakes in them. The good news is, you won’t care. Much.

 

First, meditate on your mantra. Then hit Send.

A multipurpose mantra

People have told me that they proofread every text message they send to me because they worry that I’ll judge them if their texts contain errors. I feel two ways about this. First, there’s some sadness that friends and family feel they have to somehow guard their words around me. I’m really not a judgy sort of person…  Well, I’m not too judgy, not about little things like texts… Okay, I am judgy, even about texts, but I keep my judgments to myself (it’s not like I’m going to send back a corrected message; haven’t done that in months).

My second feeling about people editing texts is “Yay! Less dreck in my life!” I never say that out loud, though. What I say is, “Oh, you don’t have to do that. Who cares if there’s a little typo in a text?” Unfortunately, people think I’m honest, so some of them take me seriously when I say this. The result? More mistakes in my received messages.

Fortunately, the texting mantra works just as well when you’re on the receiving end of an error-filled text.

It’s just a text. It’s just a text. It’s just a text.

Don’t we all feel better already?

Photo credit: Stock images from GraphicStock.

In Memoir, Don't Ignore the Larger Context

Yes, this is interesting...

Quite a few years ago, a colleague of mine proofread a memoir whose author had been a young Jewish girl in Poland during the Second World War. Sounds compelling, right? Sadly, in this case the story was more frustrating than compelling, because the author made absolutely no mention of the war or its effects on her or her family. Instead, her story focused entirely on the young girl’s direct experiences, most notably (or at least most memorably for the proofreader) her being bitten on the leg by a goat.

Leaving too much out 

I don’t mean to suggest that this author’s life story was not worthy of being written down, and I’m sure her descendants will love that detail about the goat, but it felt like a big part of the story was being left out. Surely it would be frustrating or confusing for the reader to know that larger events—horrific events—were happening in that time and place but the author had decided not to include any word of them in her life story. And what about a future reader who might come to the story with no knowledge of that history?

...but don't forget to
mention this too.

Now, I suppose it’s possible that somehow this girl’s family shielded her from any knowledge of events surrounding them. Perhaps she was just too young to be aware of much beyond her leg and her goat. But surely the Holocaust and Second World War warranted a mention, even if it was only to say that as a young girl the author was blissfully unaware of these things.

Your story comes with a context

Your story is just that—your story—but it takes place in a larger context of place and time. That larger context matters to your readers, so give them at least a taste of it. You don’t need to provide an extensive background on world or national events; a few well-placed sentences can often do the trick, and the focus can be local if that is what is most relevant to your story.

Some of the older guys were getting drafted and going to Vietnam, and some of them didn’t come back. I wasn’t thinking much about that, though, not with the state baseball championship just a week away.

 That was the time of the Big Snow, January 1945. Almost four feet of snow on the ground, roads would get cleared only to drift over again, a neighbor across the way took sick and died because the doctor couldn’t get to him. And there sat I, stuck in our old farmhouse, about to burst with my first baby.

 The above sentences provide some context without going into unnecessary detail. They’re just enough to let the reader know a little more about how your story fits into the bigger picture. Whether you’re writing primarily for your own family or for a wider audience, your readers will appreciate that information—along with the more personal details of how you were bitten by a goat or stuck in the snow or threw a baseball through the living room window.

Picture credit: Goat photo and German soldier stock images from GraphicStock.

I Stop Editing When I Start Seeing Giggles

Editing is intensive work. It takes a level of concentration that a normal human being can sustain only for a limited time. An editor can go a little beyond that time, but still, we all come to a point where we just can’t think anymore.

In my case, though, my eyes often give out before my brain does. Sometimes, with my tired, scratchy eyes, I see things that aren’t there. For example, not too many weeks ago, I copyedited a book by someone who was once in a rock band. I was editing along late one afternoon when I came across a sentence very similar to this:

We giggled for the rest of the year.

Giggled?

“Gee,” thought I, “that’s a long time to giggle. There might have been marijuana, but still….” Then I blinked my eyes hard, zoomed in from 180 to 200 percent, and… Oh, gigged. They gigged for the rest of the year. Well, that made sense, for a rock band.

Gigged.

It was time to step away from the manuscript. I’d edited for a good five hours, and that’s my limit. If I do more, I start seeing giggles everywhere.

Don’t Trust Your Editor … Too Much

An editor works to make a manuscript perfect. Should
an author blindly trust that he'll succeed? No!
Stock image from GraphicStock.

The author-editor relationship is built on trust: The author trusts the editor to correct errors in a manuscript without screwing anything up, and the editor trusts the author to pay the bill on time. Usually, this system works out just fine. Most editors I’ve known will make every effort to edit as flawlessly as possible, and most authors pay promptly. Sometimes an author will skip out on a payment, but that is a subject for a different post. Today I’m thinking about authors who trust too much.

Most of my editing projects go like this: I read through the work, marking up changes and inserting questions and suggestions as I go, and then I return the marked-up work to the author. Sometimes (though not as often as I’d like), our agreement is that I will do another editing pass after receiving the author’s comments/answers/changes. Ideally, the author will read through the entire work before sending it back to me. Even more ideally, the author will read through the entire work one more time after my final edit.

But as we all know, things are often not ideal.

In the real world

If I have just returned an edited 350-page book with instructions for the author to read through it carefully before sending me an updated manuscript, and the updated manuscript hits my in-box a mere eight hours later, I can be pretty darn sure the author did not read the whole thing; said author most likely responded to my questions/suggestions and maybe—maybe, mind you—looked at some of the tracked changes before approving all of them. If I have just returned a 350-page manuscript and the author e-mails me two days later to say that the self-published book is now available on Amazon, I can be pretty darn sure the author did not read through the whole book one last time before hitting Publish.

This is a problem, for me and the author.

We try to be perfect, but…

Remember back in the first paragraph when I wrote that editors “will make every effort to edit as flawlessly as possible”? I chose that wording for a reason: Editors are human. Even the best, most experienced editors make mistakes sometimes. Yes, a skilled editor can miss a simple typo even when they’ve read through a manuscript two or three times.

We are not purposely imperfect. I am honest and conscientious about my work. I would never deliberately leave a mistake in a manuscript or knowingly introduce a mistake by subtly changing the author’s meaning when I reword a sentence to improve its clarity. But suppose I were less honest and more sloppy. Suppose I were vindictive or evil. How, without reading through the entire edited manuscript, would the author know that I hadn’t changed a character’s eye color or twisted some wording to reflect my own style, opinion, or political persuasion?

I’ll say again I would never ever ever do any of those things, and the vast majority of editors follow the same code. But I am not perfect, and I get the creepy-crawlies when authors assume that because I have done a careful edit, the final product will be flawless.

Yes, I try to be perfect, but…

Authors, own your work

Now, I’m not suggesting that authors should do all the hard work of writing and the heavy lifting of line editing or copyediting. I’m not suggesting that authors should treat editors with suspicion. I am suggesting that authors should treat their relationship with an editor as an interactive partnership. Don’t hand your manuscript over to someone and say, “Here, fix this,” blindly trusting that the editor is going to do everything just right.

Authors, trust your editors, but own your work. Take the time to look at the edits in your manuscript. Ask questions if you don’t understand something or if you disagree with something the editor has done. Read through the whole manuscript. Yes, I know it’s a hassle and you have a kid and a full-time job and you’ve already worked on this book for six years and it’s about to drive you batty and you just paid an editor a wad of dough to fix everything for you.

But remember this: When that book is published, it’ll be your name, not the editor’s, on the cover.

On Grizzly Scenes and Gristled Old Men

A grizzly (not gristly) bear 

in Anchorage, Alaska.

Photo by Shellie from Florida 

[CC-BY-2.0] via Wikimedia Commons. 

All editors have pet peeves, little errors that are so crazy-making we just can’t let them go. And by let them go I do not mean “choose not to fix them”; I mean something more like “unburn them from our retinas so we can go on to lead relatively normal lives.”

My pet peeves include the misuse and abuse of the words grizzly, gristly, and grizzled. I have lost track of the number of “grizzly” or “gristly” murder scenes, accident scenes, or battlefield scenes I’ve encountered. And somehow grizzled often becomes gristled, so we end up with “gristled” old men, old veterans, or what have you. Just yesterday in my online travels, I came across a video game site that promised “gristly” scenes in one of its products.

In case you’re wondering (and I hope to all that is holy that you are not), grizzly and gristly in the above examples should be grisly, and gristled should be grizzled. In general, a murder scene is not “somewhat gray” (dictionary definition of grizzly), “crowded with big bears” (my definition of grizzly), or “consisting of gristle” (dictionary definition of gristly). It is instead “grim and ghastly” (dictionary definition of grisly). Also in general, old men and old veterans, or at least their hair and beards, can be “sprinkled, streaked, or mixed with gray” (dictionary definition of grizzled), but they are less likely to be “covered in extraneous bits of cartilage” (my definition of gristled).

I don’t know why these particular problems make me bang my head on my desk in despair, but they do. I know I should learn to let go.

I had very nearly convinced myself to refuse to be bothered by these words any longer, but then while researching this post, I was reminded that Merriam-Webster Unbridged allows grizzly as a variant spelling of grisly. This peeves me in ways I prefer not to admit to, much less describe. Thanks a lot, dictionary.[1]

---

[1] This in no way diminishes my love of dictionaries. I am still one of those weirdos who can spend a whole afternoon browsing words in a dictionary.

Where Have All the Hyphens Gone?

Certain things in life just bug me. For example, compounds that are missing their hyphens bug me—a lot. The hyphens are missing from work I’m editing (this does not bother me so much, because I’m the editor and fixing that sort of thing is my job), ads and other promotional materials, instruction manuals (yes, I do sometimes resort to reading those things), and published (and presumably edited) books and articles. It seems that everywhere I look, I see these little gaps where a hyphen should go.

I’ve read about “sixteen year-old girls” going on dates (call me old-fashioned, but that is just too young), “gray bearded men” (a little vitamin C and some sunlight would probably bring their color back), and “low flying planes” (sad “flying planes”?). Of course I change these to “sixteen-year-old girls,” “gray-bearded men,” and “low-flying planes.” And every once in a while an author will ask me to please remove the hyphens.

What is this language coming to?

It seems that the hyphen, like the comma, is misunderstood. This is not surprising, since hyphen usage (like comma usage) is to some extent a matter of personal taste. Personally, I like a good hyphen. If you happen to be an editor, you probably noticed the hyphen in “old-fashioned” above. I go for early-morning walks that are often necessary after my late-night snacks. I have lower-class taste than some people. I do, however, avoid overhyphenation. I don’t pick-up my mail or put-away my groceries. I see many high school students walking to school in the mornings (but some would argue that I actually see high-school students, unless the students I see are, in fact, high).

What can we do about our missing or misused hyphens? Call me crazy, but I have an idea. Picture a gang of hyphen vigilantes:  unemployed English majors roaming the country and righting hyphen wrongs everywhere they go.

This could work.

Goldilocks and the Three Comma Users

In editing, some things are easy. I could correct the improper use of lie versus lay in my sleep, for example. Easy. Other things are less easy, less clear, sometimes downright puzzling. Some things can leave me feeling like I don’t know this English business so good as I thunk I do.

Consider the comma. In form it’s a period with a cute little tail. In function, a comma can be the difference between a sentence making sense and well not (and, well, not). Just how important are these cute little comma critters? The 16^th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style devotes one page to the period, two pages to the colon, and over thirteen pages to the comma. Thirteen pages to explain comma usage, and some of us still have questions!

Chicago advises, “Effective use of the comma involves good judgment, with ease of reading the end in view” (6.16). Sounds easy enough, and often it is easy. Some sentences like this one cry out for commas (Some sentences, like this one, cry out…). But “ease of reading” implies you already know what the sentence is supposed to say; alas, for editors, this is often not the case.

Classification of comma users

Comma users (yes, I know "comma user" is not a "thing") can be sorted into three broad categories: those who love commas and use too many of them; those who have some sort of aversion to commas and use too few of them; and those who use commas just right. Consider these passages that might fit into a little tale titled “Goldilocks and the Three Comma Users”:

Too many:

As she slept, in the comfy bed, three, big, brown bears came in, and the biggest one, the old, and grumpy, father, said…

Too few:

As she slept in the comfy bed three big brown bears came in and the biggest one the old and grumpy father said…

Just right:

As she slept in the comfy bed, three big brown bears came in, and the biggest one, the old and grumpy father, said…

The editor's task

It’s my job to make things just right. And trust me, it’s not always this easy. But I won’t bore you anymore with my personal comma issues. After all how many examples of bad, comma placement can I expect you to read, in one day? I’ll keep playing Goldilocks, using my best judgment trying to get those commas just right.