Monday, September 20, 2010

Goodbye, Cruel Words

An entertaining column from Sunday's Washington Post about poor editing in newspapers and on the news here.
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2 comments:

  1. HeatherSeptember 20, 2010 at 9:46 AM

    As someone with a copyediting background, I found this article to be very interesting. For one thing, it really demonstrates just how vital a role copyeditors play in the publishing world, usually while getting very little respect or recognition for what they do. Lynne Truss discusses many of these same issues in her hilarious book Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which I’m reading for the Book & Journal Publishing report. At the end of the day, I just don’t see how a newspaper or any publishing house can function without a strong team of copyeditors.

    On the other hand, I must admit that even I don’t honestly have a problem with the use of phrases such as “reach out to.” And of course, everyone makes an innocent mistake now and then. But for a phrase such as “the Obama’s” to appear in a first-class newspaper is definitely a shock to anyone who views clean copy as a benchmark of credibility.

    -- Heather Walrath

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  2. RumitSeptember 27, 2010 at 8:19 AM

    I agree. As a copyeditor myself, I often struggle with what to allow and what not to allow. In big companies like mine for which a lot of the copyediting is outsourced, it's impossible for production editors (like me) to review the copyediting over. There's a lot that I wish I could change, but I don't have the time to do so.

    At Heldref Publications where I was previously employed, we often had roundtable discussions on how picky we wanted to be, including using "on the one hand" as a complement to "on the other hand" (and other such "errors" that aren't really errors at all). We hardly ever came to a consensus, and sometimes just to achieve a sense of sanity, we yielded to what the majority felt was "right."

    "Obama's" is pretty jarring, and egregious errors like that should always be caught (as opposed to changing "since" to "because" or "while" to "although," and so forth, as we devout copyeditors love to do)!

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