C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 8

“Is thusly a real word?”“Webster’s says …”“Why doesn’t the dictionary

have the word I want?”“A dictionary shouldn’t have

bad words in it.”“The main meaning of a word is

the first one listed.”I’ve heard questions and statements such as these throughout

my career. They represent common misconceptions about dictionaries, reflecting assumptions often made by self-taught dictionary users.

Which most of us are.Copyeditors are surely among the most frequent users of

dictionaries, and are possibly the savviest as well. Yet even within our well-informed ranks, there are many who were never formally taught dictionary-use skills. Others had a smattering of lessons in language-arts classes, but nothing amounting to focused skill-building. The result can be that we expect too much of a dictionary and yet do not make the most of it as a tool.

I would like to fill in some of the blanks. I’ll start by examining some of our assumptions about dictionaries in this issue, which will provide the context for the discussion of the anatomy of a dictionary entry in the June–July issue.

What makes something “a word”Let’s begin, appropriately enough, with a definition. Here is how Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines word: “a unit of language, consisting of one or more spoken sounds or their written representation, that functions as a principal carrier of meaning.”

If I make a discrete sound and you understand that sound to mean a particular thing, communication has occurred. At the most elemental level, that sound is a word. Complex lexical and grammatical systems are far removed from grunting, and have added layers of rules about how we make and use words, but as long as understanding occurs, as long as meaning is carried by the sound, a word has been used.

Whether that word is approved of by a community of users is an entirely different question—and I’ve found that this is nearly always the real question that is being asked when someone wonders whether something “is a word.” We may not see the point of thusly when thus will do just fine, and irregardless may be flagged by our spell-checker programs, but both of the offending

Inside

2In the News3 Elements is golden3 Former copyeditor

saves papers3 Star Tribune

bankruptcy

CurrentsA dash of mystery

3Inside Joke

4Ask the Editor3 Parallelism problems3 Spelling ZIP code3 Metric conversions3 Segregatory

constructions3 On to or onto?3 Attain vs. obtain

6Technically SpeakingThe Word 2007 Quick Access Toolbar

11The Quiz Answer

12Dictionary Update3 nightlight3 ZIRP3 zombie bank

In StyleMr. President

THE QUIZ

How many mistakes does the following sentence contain?

Part tech firm, part creative think tank, [Name Withheld] is a online marketing firm dipped in tech know-how—one of the only that’s completely “wired” for the 21st century.

See page 11 for the answer.

April– May 2009WWW.COPYEDITING.COM

3 TK In the June–July 2009 issue:Dictionary entries, part 2

CopyeditingB E CAU S E L A N G UAG E M AT T E R S

3IN DEPTH

Which Webster’s?Wiki-Britannica?by Wendalyn Nichols

In one of the RSS feeds I monitor (so many now I

tend to lose track), I spotted a link to a January 22, 2009, story in the online version of the Telegraph, a major British daily newspaper, about plans to allow wiki-style contributions to the online Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The Telegraph story said that “academic writers and amateur enthusiasts will be able to submit articles, although they will be checked by the encyclopedia’s profes-sional staff” and “will only be available in a special section of the website.”

Wikipedia has taken off, as we all know (though I continue to caution people never to use it as a primary source of information).

C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 9

3RESOURCES

Demythologizing

the dictionary

by Wendalyn Nichols

2 Copyediting | April–May 2009 WWW.COPYEDITING.COM

A dash of mysteryby Linda Lowenthal

“What is the deal with en dashes?” someone asked me at a party once, immediately after I told him I was a copyeditor. At the time, I was annoyed that he thought policing arcane punctuation marks was all I did with my mind. But now I realize that he was probably just trying to impress me by reveal-ing that he even knew such things existed—and besides, he raised a good question.

It turns out that there’s little consensus on when and how to use en dashes, which are like hyphens but a little longer (spe-cifically, as long as a lowercase n is wide). Some publications, especially newspapers and others that follow Associated Press style, don’t use them at all. When they are used, it is for one of three basic pur-poses, each of which can be looked at in a couple of different ways.

The simplest way to use the en dash is in ranges: “May–September 2008,” for instance, or “pages 100–124.” Some sources, such as The Chicago Manual of Style, take the en dash to represent up to and including or through in such constructions; others, including Words into Type, say it stands in for to, which makes more sense when you think about the convention of using it in reporting sports scores or votes.

Another use is to convey a certain kind of relationship between two or more words. I’ve seen this relationship described in various terms: it “indicates movement or tension (rather than coop-eration or unity),” says Garner’s Modern American Usage; it means “the equivalent of and, to, or versus in two-word concepts where both words are of equal weight,” says The ACS Style Guide of the American Chemical Society; or it is used to “express the meaning of to or and between words of equal importance,” says The Oxford Guide to Style, which adds the tip that “in

these cases, the words can be reversed in order without altering the meaning.”

In dose–response curve or labor– management relationship or cost–benefit analysis, for example, neither of the modifiers is modifying the other to form a single concept, as in cost-cutting measures; instead, both are modifying the noun in the same way. A related use is to link the names of joint authors (the Smith–Jones proposal), distinguishing them from a single author with a hyphenated name. I’d probably been editing for ten years before I ever heard of these practices, since neither Chicago nor Words into Type mentions them (though the 15th edition of Chicago does note cryptically that “in certain scientific disciplines, the en dash may sometimes be used where one would normally expect a hyphen”).

The last, and probably most often argued about, use of the en dash is in forming compounds with terms that are com-pounds themselves. In these cases (Chicago’s examples include post–World War II,

I N T H E N E W S

c u r r e n t s

by Erin McKean or state aid, and that the purchase does not saddle the papers with significant debt. The sale includes the newspapers’ Web sites, but not the buildings, which Schroeder plans to lease from the JRC.

Schroeder, 50, left Newsday in 2005. He was the publisher of the free com-muter daily BostonNOW, which ceased publication in April 2008 when key investors pulled out.

As part of the publicity surrounding the purchase, Schroeder personally deliv-ered copies of the Bristol Press and the New Britain Herald to the reader of each paper who had subscribed for the longest time—a 60-year subscriber to the Press, and a 70-year subscriber to the Herald. The personal delivery also came with the promise of a year’s free subscription.

In a speech to about 40 employees of the Herald on January 26, Schroeder laid out plans for improving the papers’ Web sites, leasing new offices, and turn-ing down the heat in the existing offices, and he stated that no layoffs are planned.

completed his purchase of two daily papers, the New Britain Herald and the Bristol Press, and three weekly papers—the Wethersfield Post, the Newington Town Crier, and the Rocky Hill Post—from the Journal Register Company (JRC, based in Yardley, Pennsylvania), on January 23, 2009. The two daily papers have circula-tions of about 9,000 readers, with a circu-lation of about 19,000 for the combined Sunday edition.

The JRC had closed several of its Connecticut weeklies in December, including the Pictorial Gazette, the Branford Review, the Clinton Recorder, the Main Street News, and the East Haven Advertiser. It had announced in November that the two daily papers and thirteen weekly papers in Connecticut would have to be closed if no buyer was found by January 16. Schroeder signed a letter of intent on January 7.

The terms of the deal have not been made public, although Schroeder has said that he did not receive any tax breaks

Elements is golden The 50th anniversary of the publication of E. B. White’s revised version of William Strunk Jr.’s The Elements of Style will be celebrated at the Museum of the City of New York on Thursday, April 16, 2009, at 6:30 p.m. The museum will be hosting a panel of writers and critics, including Roy Blount, Jr., and Barbara Wallraff (editor emeritus of this newsletter), to discuss the longevity of the little book and the effect it has had on their writing.

The Museum of the City of New York is located at 1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street. Ticket prices and more informa-tion are available at the museum’s Web site, www.mcny.org.

Former copyeditor rescues five Connecticut newspapers Michael E. Schroeder, a former copyeditor who worked at Newsday for 15 years,

WWW.COPYEDITING.COM Copyediting | April–May 2009 3

hospital–nursing home connection, and quasi-public–quasi-judicial body), a hyphen might seem to connect the wrong pair of words: post-World, hos-pital-nursing, and so on. In the case of a multiply hyphenated expression like quasi-public–quasi-judicial, an en dash breaks it into its proper conceptual units. And when you need to attach a prefix, a suffix, or another word to an open compound, the dash conveys a little more connecting power than a mere hyphen: it has the oomph to bridge mul-tiple words. All this can make a sentence more readable even for people who don’t consciously know what an en dash is.

The question is whether all open and hyphenated compounds should get this treatment and, if not, which shouldn’t. Some sources are pretty en-happy: the American Medical Association Manual of Style, for one, recommends constructions like multiple sclerosis–like symptoms, non–small cell carcinoma, and Winston-Salem–oriented group; and Amy Einsohn’s

The Copyeditor’s Handbook includes the example lead soldier–size bronze sculp-tures. But Einsohn recommends multiple hyphens in “compound adjectives formed by attaching a prefix to a hyphenated ele-ment,” such as semi-labor-intensive, and Chicago specifies hyphens in non-English-speaking and wheelchair-user-designed on the grounds that they’re unambiguous and an en dash would create “an awk-ward asymmetry.”

So, is Chicago telling us to use en dash-es in all but the least ambiguous cases, or to reserve them for the most ambiguous ones? Should we use them with all com-pounds permanent enough to appear in dictionaries, like nursing home, or only with compounds that truly resist inter-nal hyphenation because they’re foreign terms or proper names, like World War II? Personally, I’ve always thought the latter was the best practice. Since the en dash is at best a subliminal visual cue to many people, it seems to work best in conjunc-tion with other visual cues, like capital

letters or italics; in the absence of these cues, multiple hyphens usually make the compound easier to process. (The 14th edition of Chicago, in fact, includ-ed the example pre-latency-period, although latency period is a permanent compound that many editors would leave open and precede with an en dash.) If multiple hyphens would cause confusion, an en dash can make things clearer, but it’s a last resort.

A spokesperson for Chicago con-firmed this view. You can use an en dash to join a modifier to an open compound whether it’s fixed or temporary, she said by e-mail, “but be aware that readers may not see such a thing. Be prepared, in other words, to use two hyphens (as a temporary fix) or reword, whichever is least awkward. En dashes are best reserved for use with proper [that is, capitalized] open compounds.”

If you’re following Chicago style or setting your own, it’s something to keep in mind.

(The Herald and the other daily paper, the Bristol Press, employ over more than people, including 30 on the editorial side.)

Star Tribune latest newspa-per to file for bankruptcyThe Minneapolis Star Tribune filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on January 15, 2009, a week after talks ended between the paper and its union, the Newspaper Guild, with no agreement on the $20 million in union wage concessions sought by management.

According to the newspaper’s own announcement on January 16, the Star Tribune ranks as the 15th-largest daily newspaper in the U.S. and the 10th-largest Sunday paper, with a Sunday cir-culation of more than 500,000; its Web site is “among the top ten newspaper websites in the nation.”

The paper, which still has nearly 1,400 employees, had announced buyouts in December, which affected longtime sports copyeditor Bud Armstrong and copyedi-tors Jay Ewoldt, Mike Bonafield, Barbara Haugen, and Sharon Nyberg. The buyouts at the Star Tribune were part of $50 million in cuts made at the paper since

2007. The newspaper, will continue to publish during bankruptcy.

The Star Tribune bankruptcy is just one example of the continuing cutbacks and closures within the newspaper industry. In the weeks surrounding the paper’s announcement, other actions included the December 8, 2008, bankruptcy filing by the Chicago Tribune; the January 9, 2009,

announcement that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is up for sale; the January 14, 2009, announcement of one-week unpaid furloughs by Gannett, publisher of USA Today; and a candlelight vigil held January 29, 2009, by employees of the Rocky Mountain News to draw attention to that newspaper’s proposed closure unless a buyer can be found. n

inside joke by Sage Stossel

4 Copyediting | April–May 2009 WWW.COPYEDITING.COM

I see constructions like the following quite often: “At Princeton, he played football, basketball and ran track.” Shouldn’t that sentence say, “At Princeton, he played football and basketball and ran track”? If so, what is that type of error called?

Pamela CurtisSenior Writer/EditorSoftware Engineering InstituteCarnegie Mellon University

That is an error of parallelism, one that H. W. Fowler calls a “bastard series.” Each part of a compound predicate must complete the sentence in the same way as all the other parts. Your correction is absolutely right. Let’s break it down:

He played football.He played basketball.He ran track.

The only thing each of the verb phrases share is their dependence on the same subject, He.

The first two also share the same verb, so you can put those together:

He played football and basketball.

To add “ran track,” you must sepa-rate this verb phrase from the others so that it depends only on the one thing they all share, the subject:

He played football and basketball and ran track.

Although we normally would not put a comma before that final and, because what follows it is not an independent clause, it would be helpful to put one in there to show that the final verb phrase should not be read as a third element in the earlier compound. Or you could switch the order of the elements, which would provide enough clarity, I think:

He ran track and played football and basketball.

A S K T H E E D I TO RI know there are other variants on the capitalization of this term, but years ago we standardized [our treatment as] ZIP code here. Now a senior manager who works with geomapping software insists that the “industry standard” and USPS standard is ZIP Code, and wants us to change our decision.

I see inconsistency in the “indus-try,” and besides, [capitalizing] terms to make them seem important or to “stand out” is a common tendency. I think it looks especially wrong to pluralize Codes, as in “We offer delivery in six different ZIP Codes.”

What say you?

Sue KocherCorporate TerminologistSAS Institute

The problem with capitalizing code is that it is generic, so it shouldn’t really be treated as a trademark. And nobody seems to be consistent. The American Heritage Dictionary has Zip Code; The Chicago Manual of Style uses zip code; and The Associated Press Stylebook cat-egorically states, “Use all-caps ZIP for ‘Zoning Improvement Plan,’ but always lowercase the word ‘code.’” And the U.S. Government Printing Office Style Manual says it’s ZIP Code, but says that stands for “Zone Improvement Plan Code.”

What seems clear to me is that ZIP is an acronym, so I think sticking with the all-caps treatment is best, with lowercase code (because it’s generic). So for once I’m going with the AP here, which also happens to be what you’re already doing.

I’ve been copyediting an article about research into new energy sources, and the article contains references to the metric system. It contains sentences like these, which are scattered in the article:

At temperatures of under five degrees Celsius (41 Fahrenheit) the summer-blooming algae go into hibernation.

Next year, a collector area of one hectare will produce around 150 metric tons (approximately 330,000

by Wendalyn Nichols

pounds) of biomass annually, thereby absorbing 450 metric tons (990,000 pounds) of carbon dioxide.

Reflecting the Andalusian sky, a sea of mirrors will produce 180 gigawatt-hours (gross) of electricity through means of a collector surface totaling more than 510,000 square meters, or the equivalent of 70 soccer fields.

This article is going to appear in a customer magazine which will be distributed globally, including to people in the U.S.

The readers are IT experts. I originally advised converting any quantities from the metric system to something U.S. readers will understand by putting them in parentheses. The client has done that (thus the conversions above), but now it all comes across as being over the top to me. Would you convert everything, or does it also seem too much to you? Or would you just convert a few of them at the beginning of the article? As a copyeditor, my starting point is to create clarity for the reader, but I wonder if I’m going overboard here. Or should we not convert anything and assume IT experts will be able to understand from the context?

Diane BaumannDiane Baumann Corporate CommunicationsLudwigsburg, Germany

I think the conversions are really dis-tracting. There are many metric-to-U.S. converters on the Web, Google itself being one of them, so IT people should have no trouble converting things if they want to. And note that it is very hard to catch every mention of a measurement: in the second example, you still have “one hectare” that has not been converted to acres.

If most of your readers do not live in the U.S., go with metric. The minority can look things up. If most of the readers are American, you can go with U.S. standard measurements, although if the article is technical in nature, following ISO standards is best (refer to Scientific Style and Format: The CSE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers).

I find the real-world reference to “the equivalent of 70 soccer fields” to be the most helpful kind of analogy, one that helps me grasp the concept of how much

WWW.COPYEDITING.COM Copyediting | April–May 2009 5

of a given thing is being talked about. You might also consider offering a quick-conversion sidebar with a few benchmark amounts (a metric ton, a square meter, some temperatures) that would help the American reader visualize the amounts. (In my opinion, though, that would be babying the U.S. readers, who should just be prepared to do the math when reading an article that is meant for a global audience.)

When a doctor dictates “right and left kidney” or “right and left lung,” should “kidney” or “lung” be plural? Or do “right and left kidney/lung” serve as a pair and not need the s? I looked online and Googled it as well, and it seemed that plural was the popular choice.

Margie StantonMedical/Radiology Transcriptionist

Your question is essentially about coor-dination. You have a pair of adjectives coordinated with and, but with segrega-tory meaning, which is probably what is making you wonder whether the singular might be right in this case. (“Segregatory” means that the phrase is elliptical for “the right lung and the left lung”; it should not be read as saying that you have one lung that is both right and left.) But these con-structions still take a plural noun. If you don’t use the plural, you are not allowing the segregatory meaning; that is, you are talking about one lung that is somehow both right and left.

Grammars mention the ambiguity of some of these constructions. When the two referents are mutually exclusive, it is easy to understand what is meant:

the right and left ventricles male and female patients oral and written histories

But sometimes the segregatory meaning is not at all clear, or even intended. If you say you are looking for “cost-effective and minimally disrup-tive alternatives,” most people would think you meant alternatives that were both cost-effective and minimally dis-ruptive, not alternatives that were one or the other. We usually use or as a coordinator when we mean one or the other, and we rely on context to tell us whether the meaning is segregatory or not when we use and as a coordinator

(which is necessary when the meaning is “both,” not “either”).

My boss is insisting that I make onto two words in the following sentence: “And then he knew he was onto something.”

My gut also always wants to make it two words, but I keep it one to follow the only mention I can find in my reference books, which is in Amy Einsohn’s book [The Copyeditor’s Handbook]. She states that the correct phrase is “onto something,” meaning to be aware of something, but with no explanation or history.

Can you confirm that it should be one word and provide some reasoning or history that I can not only show to my boss but also keep for my own future reference?

Lorraine Burton Production Editor Reader’s Digest Select Editions

Dictionaries list both the open and closed spellings. That specific use of onto has its own definition in every dictionary I checked, but it also appears at entries for on. The American Heritage Dictionary, Webster’s New World Dictionary, and Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary list “be on to” as an idiom with its own definition at their respective entries for on; The New Oxford American Dictionary does too, but spells it as onto.

Only Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary lists this as a separate meaning at the adjective entry for on, noting that it is usually used with to. As a lexicographer, I think this is an error. It suggests that on can carry the meaning ‘having knowledge about’ by itself, independently of its occurrence with to. But the use of on in this meaning always requires a statement of who or what it is that you know about. You can’t say “I’m on,” and then reliably expect someone to know to ask, “To whom? To what?” The other dictionaries have it right: be on to someone/something is an idiomatic lexical unit that must be defined as such. That is probably why the spelling onto is also used—and accounted for in all the dictionaries.

None of them will tell us which spelling is more common, though.

My company has been developing its own style guide, and as a part of it we have included common terms that are

consistently misused. One such example is attain versus obtain, especially in re-gard to academic degrees.

Would you be able to shed some light on the appropriate term to be used when receiving a bachelor’s degree? Would you attain the degree, or obtain the degree?

Nicole KujawskiCoordinator, Campus SupportStudentVoice

The answer depends on the context. Normally we talk about students earning a degree, not obtaining one; obtain is just a formal way to say get. If you are writing a prospectus, say, describing degrees that students can earn, I’d rather see earn most of the time, although obtain is also correct. It just smacks a bit of having completed a transaction, rather than of fulfilling all the difficult requirements for earning a degree.

Attain is going to be the wrong choice unless you’re speaking in the context of achievement; normally a granting institution is not going to talk about students attaining degrees, but the students’ proud families might: “Before your grandmother, the highest level of education anybody in this family attained was eighth grade. Grandma got her high school diploma, I got my nursing creden-tial, and now look at you: you earned a master’s degree.” You could just as easily swap in achieved for attained there.

We generally use attain for things that don’t have a fixed set of require-ments attached to them, such as a cer-tain level of status. (“It had taken many years of careful career choices for him to attain the rank of vice president.”) You can use attain when you are talk-ing about a level you have risen to that is not associated with something you get (such as a degree) that proves your achievement. For instance, you will see a form asking you to give the “highest level of education attained” because that’s less specific than “highest degree obtained,” allowing you to answer, say, that you did two years of grad school but didn’t get a doctorate.

Bottom line: you obtain something by buying it, being given it, or fulfilling clear requirements for it. Obtain is akin to get. Attain is akin to achieve; the focus is not on the degree, rank, or level itself so much as on the status of that level and what it took to get there. n

6 Copyediting | April–May 2009 WWW.COPYEDITING.COM

TECHNICALLY SPEAKING

A Word 2007 lifesaver—the customizable Quick Access Toolbarby Charles M. Levine

In the previous column (“Taking the first steps with Word 2007 for the PC” in the February–March 2009 issue), I cov-ered the basic transformation involved in switching from an earlier version of Word to the latest upgrade, Word 2007 for the PC. (I will review Word 2008, the latest version for the Mac, in a future column.) I would like to round out this introduction to Word 2007 with a few additional tips that will make the transition go much more smoothly.

As I noted in the previous column, two fundamental and striking design changes have been made to the Word 2007 interface. First, the File menu has been replaced by the Microsoft Office Button, located in the upper left-hand corner of the workspace, which is used for such basic tasks as open-ing, saving, printing, and e-mailing documents, and for setting program-wide preferences called Word Options. Second, all the Word menus found in the previous version of the program have been reorganized and regrouped in browser-like tabs located in an area at the top of the workspace called the Ribbon.

While it takes some time to feel comfortable using this new GUI (graphical user interface), the good news is that Word 2007 works much more efficiently than earlier ver-sions do—and, very important, seems much less prone to crashes when the user is working with large documents or over a long period. (Microsoft does respond to user feedback, albeit at what seems to be a non-digital pace!) The general consensus in the blogosphere supports the assessment that the programs in Office 2007 represent a major improvement over previous versions, and that it is worthwhile tackling the learning curve that accompanies switching to this major new software upgrade.

There also is a third new feature that can make the transition to using Word 2007 much less daunting: the highly versatile Quick Access Toolbar (dubbed QAT for short, spelled with-out periods but pronounced as an initialism), located at the top left-hand corner of the workspace, just to the right of the Microsoft Office Button (see the illustration at top right). As I tested Word 2007 over several months, I found the QAT to be a lifesaver, because you can customize the toolbar by adding any menu command found in Word 2007. This means that, during a relatively short trial-and-error period, you can create a personal menu of Word commands that you use most often—no matter where the corresponding icon may have been relocated to or hidden in the new design.

The Quick Access Toolbar in its default setting at the top left-hand corner of the workspace, to the upper right of the Microsoft Office Button, showing the Quick Save, Undo, and Redo command icons. Clicking on the down/open arrow highlighted to its right activates the menu Customize Quick Access Toolbar, which is illustrated in detail in the first column of page 7.

Customizing the QATThere are three basic ways to customize the Quick Access Toolbar:

3 1. Add a command directly from the Ribbon. Highlight and right-click on any Word command found on the Ribbon, which activates the drop-down menu illustrated below. Select Add to Quick Access Toolbar to add the highlighted command but-ton to the QAT. It is that fast and easy. You can also add an entire menu group found in the tabs, such as Clipboard, Font, Paragraph, Styles, and Editing (on the Home tab). You also can choose to activate the related menu for customizing the QAT (more on this below), or to reposition the toolbar below the Ribbon, or to collapse and minimize the Ribbon.

Note: According to Word Help, “the contents of most lists, such as indent and spacing values and individual styles, which also appear on the Ribbon, cannot be added to the Quick Access Toolbar.”

The drop-down menu that is activated when you highlight and right-click on any command or menu group found on the Ribbon. Selecting Add to Quick Access Toolbar will pin the command or menu group to the toolbar.

Quick Access Toolbar

Customize Quick Access Toolbar button

WWW.COPYEDITING.COM Copyediting | April–May 2009 7

3 3. Add a command using the full-blown customization dialog box in the Word Options menu. This dialog box also can be reached two ways: by either (a) selecting More Commands … from the Customize Quick Access Toolbar menu; or (b) clicking Microsoft Office Button R Word Options R Customize. Microsoft deserves a medal for including this functionality in Word 2007, as it allows you to add to the Quick Access Toolbar any of Word’s numerous commands and menu groups. You now can customize and tame Word 2007 in ways not possible in earlier versions of the program.

Shown above: the full-blown customization dialog box in the Word Options menu. From here, you can add to the Quick Access Toolbar any command in Word as well as useful menu groups such as Font and Paragraph.

A glimpse of Word 2007 customized and tamed. The Ribbon has been minimized, and the Quick Access Toolbar has been moved below the Ribbon and expanded to include the most versatile commands I often use, including Insert Field, which adds the document’s file name to the header or footer.

3 2. Add a command using the Customize Quick Access Toolbar menu. This menu can be reached by either (a) right-clicking on any command (or area) in the Ribbon and then selecting that same-named option; or (b) clicking the down arrow to the right of the Quick Access Toolbar. This menu lists ten of the most common commands in Word, any of which you can select to add to the QAT—or deselect to remove from the toolbar: New, Open, Save, E-mail, Quick Print, Print Preview, Spelling & Grammar, Undo, Redo, and Draw Table.

The Customize Quick Access Toolbar menu. From here, the menu pictured above you can add ten common commands to the QAT, or select More Commands … to move on to the full-blown customization dialog box in the Word Options menu (shown upper right).

Customize Quick Access Toolbar button

8 Copyediting | April–May 2009 WWW.COPYEDITING.COM

Then there is the new-words frenzy. Until the advent of online dictionaries, publishers were constrained by the eco-nomics of printing books: for instance, the public was resistant to paying more than a relatively low amount (in 2001, it was $25) for a 1,600-page hardcover college dictionary with thumb tabs. If the editors wanted to add new words with-out incurring the expense of adding sig-natures, something else had to come out to make room for them—an entry for a relatively obscure word, a piece of art—or existing definitions had to be short-ened. (The battle to be able to claim the largest number of entries puts pressure on lexicographers to streamline entries rather than cut them, something we will discuss further in the June–July issue.)

Competition among dictionary publishers in the 1990s led to yearly revisions of the competing houses’ college-size dictionaries, with rivals touting their lists of “new” words. But just as there is no ur-dictionary, there is no ur-entry list. Each publisher has its own inclusion policies. At Random House, because we had a flexible elec-tronic database and in-house composi-tion capability, we’d evaluate our crop of new words every year. We tended to include some of dubious staying power, figuring we could always remove them the next year. Merriam-Webster still takes a more conservative approach, tracking words longer before they earn their place. And learners’ dictionaries base their entry lists on frequency sta-tistics. Thus a new word might already be in one dictionary and not yet in another; and similarly, the lexicogra-phers at different publishing houses will have made different choices about which obscure words to remove and which entries to pare down.

Online dictionaries don’t face the same space pressures; the considerations that now limit inclusion policies are more purely lexicographic ones, as long as the product is not destined for print as well. The main problem area with online data sets lies in the quality of the entries; unless an online dictionary is a version of a highly respected print work, the scholarship can be patchy.

So whether or not the word or meaning you are looking up is in the dictionary you’re using depends on a

forms are words. (The definition of irregardless in the Oxford English Dictionary is “in non-standard or humorous use: regardless”; thusly is simply cross-referred to thus. Both words are supported with citational evidence.)

The concept of “the” dictionaryTo understand why the presence or absence of a word in a dictionary says nothing about whether it is in fact a word, we need first to understand a basic truth: ever since the first lists of “hard” words were printed in the 16th century (long before Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster published their famous dictionaries), there has never been one ur-dictionary, one capital-D Dictionary presenting an ideal and finite set of entries, a singular vision of how words with multiple meanings should be divided and defined, and absolute rulings on proper spelling and usage. Not even the OED, as its current editors will be the first to tell you.

English is messy. English is creative. English never stops changing. We can carve it up and serve it in myriad ways, which is why we should not ever be talking about The Dictionary. We must always instead refer to a given, particu-lar dictionary, and assess each on its own merits.

This is not an intuitive approach for most dictionary users, particularly in the United States, where saying “Webster’s” is equivalent to saying “The Dictionary.” But in fact there is no single Webster’s dictionary. The G. & C. Merriam Company bought the rights to the 1841 edition of Noah Webster’s dictionary in the year that Webster died (1843). It also secured rights to produce updated editions of the work. In the ensuing years, as the name Webster became synonymous with American dictionaries, many publishers used the name, which entered the public domain in 1949.

This means that the correct response to an assertion that “Webster’s says …” should be “Which Webster’s?” Webster’s New World College Dictionary is the official dictionary of the Associated Press. Merriam-Webster’s dictionaries,

particularly the Collegiate, dominate the American market. In 1990, Random House also began publishing its dic-tionaries under the brand Random House Webster’s. And if you go to the back-to-school aisle of any big-box retailer in August, you’ll find cheap, mass-produced dictionaries calling themselves “Webster’s” that are little more than glossaries. I could write my own dictionary and call it the Wendalyn Webster’s Dictionary, and the name would be perfectly legal—and be no guarantee of the quality of the work.

For an excellent account of all the byways of dictionary development, I highly recommend Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography, 2nd edition, by Sidney I. Landau. I quote here one of my favorite passages (pp. 46–47): “The history of lexicography … [is] a succes-sion of slow and uneven advances in vocabulary and methodology, tempered always in its early stages by outrageous promotional blather consisting in equal parts of self-deification and attacks on the very predecessors whose works one has systematically rifled and without which one’s own dictionary would have been impossible.”

A dictionary’s inclusion policyA major way in which dictionaries differ is the number of entries they con-tain. “Concise” or “desk” dictionaries typically have 50,000 to 60,000 entries, whereas a “college” dictionary will have 150,000 to 170,000. “Unabridged” dictionaries can be single-volume (like Webster’s Third International Dictionary) or comprise multiple volumes (as do the Oxford English Dictionary and the American Century Dictionary).

The smaller the dictionary, the better the lexicographer has to be at gauging which words are most likely to be use-ful to the target buyer. So the entry list for a mass-market paperback diction-ary probably won’t include as many obscure words as a large hardcover will, but a specialized medical diction-ary will contain far more medical terms than a general dictionary will, even if the medical dictionary is considerably smaller. Definitions tend to be shorter in the smaller dictionaries, fewer obscure senses are included, and less usage infor-mation is given.

Which Webster’s?C O N T I N U E D F R O M PA G E 1

WWW.COPYEDITING.COM Copyediting | April–May 2009 9

number of factors: how many entries the dictionary contains, whether it is a general or special-subject dictionary, and how old it is. (Someone actually wrote me a letter demanding we replace her 1980s-vintage college dictionary because it did not have all the new words in it that our promotional materials listed as being in the 2000 edition.)

The rise of descriptivismThe dictionaries of Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster read oddly to our ears. They are full of editorializing and, particularly in the case of Webster, wild speculation about word origins. The modern dictionary, in contrast, benefits from generations of scholar-ship and is expected to be rigorous and dispassionate. We have the chief editor of the original Oxford English Dictionary, James A. H. Murray, and the standards of scholarship he set, to thank for the change.

Dictionaries are now known as descriptive, rather than prescriptive, resources. A dictionary will give you a picture of current usage, and might tell you the history of past usage. It might, in usage notes, caution the reader about certain uses that are disputed. It will definitely label a meaning as nonstan-dard or disparaging or offensive, so that you understand what you’re doing if you choose to go ahead and use the word anyway. But if you want to be told explicitly what to do or not do, seek out one of the many style and usage manu-als that will oblige; don’t expect that from a dictionary.

Even though modern lexicographers would not describe their job as telling people what good or bad language is, modern dictionaries differ somewhat in how they deal with language that is considered nonstandard or that is offensive. Regarding “correct” English (and comparing college-size dictionar-ies in each case): the American Heritage is known for its usage notes that report the opinions of a usage panel and then let the user draw his or her own conclu-sions; Merriam-Webster’s usage informa-tion is the least prescriptivist; Webster’s New World offers relatively few usage notes; and the Random House usage notes lean toward the prescriptive. (To test a dictionary’s slant, look up a word

such as comprise—if you can find a bookstore that still carries a range of dictionaries—and compare the way “is comprised of” is treated in each.) As for offensive terms: we will look in detail at these when we consider dictionary labels in the continuation of this article in the June–July issue.

A healthy dose of skepticismThose of us who have had the hum-bling experience of writing and editing dictionaries know that these works are fallible things. Yes, the best of them rep-resent careful scholarship—sometimes a lifetime’s devotion—and meticulous attention to detail. But some are very shoddy efforts indeed. And none, good and bad alike, should ever be considered above scrutiny. A little healthy readiness to question their authority is the mark of a truly skillful user. n

Britannica seems to be joining the wiki trend because it can’t beat it. But I see a catch-22. The main selling point Britannica has is that its content is writ-ten by experts. That is one reason, I’m sure, the entries submitted by willing amateurs won’t be housed with the “main” entries they relate to—that, and the not insignificant fact that Britannica can’t charge a subscription fee for access to content submitted by wiki.

Yet keeping the data sets separate means less functionality for the user. Having to click through to two sepa-rate entries to read information about one topic isn’t something Web users have much patience with, especially if one of the entries is behind a subscriber firewall.

Perhaps Britannica wants to create a rival to Wikipedia that is more authori-tative, yet is distinct from its published encyclopedia (presumably so that subscriptions to the main work can still be charged for). If so, it seems to me that the relevance of the published work will be further diminished. If Britannica’s experts vet the wiki entries, there is less reason to pay to read the ones in the main work. I very much

doubt that linking from the free entries to the paid ones will increase the num-ber of subscriptions, if that is the goal.

It seems rather that if wiki applications are the future, then free, advertising-sponsored content: should be, too far better to incorporate wiki functionality into the main work, make it free, and then let consumers determine which offers the more reliable infor-mation, Britannica or Wikipedia. The Britannica site already accepts advertis-ing, so making people pay a subscription to read “premium” topics while its own wiki is free makes little sense to me. Taking on Wikipedia head-on, though, with better content, just might work.

Also worth watching: Google’s launch of Knol, its own version of a wiki encyclopedia. It differs from Wikipedia in that its entries will be signed by authors; rival entries could be written about the same topic, and users will not be able to change an author’s entry without the author’s permission. Users will also be able to give feedback on the entries, and Google’s underlying technology will keep up with page views and rankings, in something resembling an ongoing competition in which the fittest infor-mation survives. You can see the beta version at http://knol.google.com/k.

3RESOURCESC O N T I N U E D F R O M PA G E 1

3ERRATA

We regret the following errors in the February–March 2009 issue:

The Quiz and the Quiz Answer both contained the phrase “one of out of,” which should have read “one out of.”

In the second paragraph of In Style, SMS is referred to as an acro-nym; it is, of course, an initialism.

In the September–October, 2008, issue, we reported on the “corrections” made to a Grand Canyon lookout sign by a pair of self-appointed “typo vigilantes.” A photo of their handiwork is included in court papers available at http://blogs.usatoday.com/ ondeadline/files/deck.pdf.

10 Copyediting | April–May 2009 WWW.COPYEDITING.COM

I look forward to every issue of Copyediting and particularly your column. As a language teacher for fifty-one years, I appreciate the ques-tions and the seriousness with which you take the written word. Sometimes I think our tribe is dying out!

I would like to refer to your column in your February–March [2008] issue. It dealt with a question that was submitted to you concerning a plural or singular. The text in question was:

What taxes do the iron mining industry pay?

Your answer was correct, that a simple diagram of the sentence would indicate that taxes is the object and the iron mining industry is the subject. What I did find controversial in your reply is the use of the word indicative. I believe that what you meant here is the declarative form, not the indicative form. Both What taxes does the iron mining industry pay? and The iron mining industry pays taxes are indicative. However, one is interrogative (the first) and the other is declarative. This is the difference between the mood of the sentence and the form of the sentence.

Further, I am not too sure that I would agree with Noam Chomsky about the role of the verb do. I do not believe it is there all the time, just as I do not believe the verb to be is there all the time—I love you, I do love you, I am loving you. One is the simple form, the other is the emphatic form, and the third is the progressive form. When questioned about whether a student was doing his homework, he answered: I do do it.

It is interesting to note that the emphatic has been with us for a long time, even when it was not commonly used for questions. Today the emphatic and the progressive are used for questions almost exclusively. The archaic forms would just use the inverted order of the simple phrase: Lovest thou me? I remember many years ago my Irish grandfather saying to me upon returning from visiting

my grandmother in the hospital, “What news bring ye?” His questions did not make use of the emphatic or of the progressive forms as auxiliary verbs. You will see many questions of this type in the King James version of the Bible.

There is a similar phenomenon in the imperative mood where we would say: Bring that here. But if we were to make it negative, but still an imperative, we would say: Do not bring that here. When teaching language, the use of the emphatic and the progressive as the only acceptable forms of questions in English presents a great challenge to foreign students. The use of the phrase: You didn’t do that, did you? or, You did do that, didn’t you? is a complex use of main verbs and auxiliary verbs in an interrogative form.

My best wishes for your continued work to keep our English vibrant and clear.

Sincerely yours,

Father Philip K. Eichner, S.M.PresidentKellenberg Memorial High SchoolUniondale, N.Y.

There was much to respond to in this letter, so much that it’s taken a year to find the space in these pages to do so.

Let’s begin by refreshing our memories. Fr. Eichner is referring to the answer I gave to a subscriber who asked a question about agreement. The problematic sentence was in the interrogative (it was a question); I suggested changing it back to the indicative to spot what needed to agree with what. I then discussed the role of the helping verb do and how it is dropped in the indicative (The mining industry pays taxes) and reappears when we’re being emphatic (The mining industry does pay taxes).

I’ll begin with the concept of the indicative versus the declarative. Some grammars use indicative to refer to sentences that can take the form of a statement (a declarative) or of a question (an interrogative). This isn’t the only way to analyze sentence

structure, however. The method I learned in grad school (and in ESL and lexicographic training) considers the interrogative to be a separate mood. In essence, this analysis recognizes three main moods: indicative (AKA declarative), interrogative, and imperative. The two minor moods are the subjunctive and the exclamatory. The reason for this analysis is that “mood conveys the speaker’s attitude toward the factual content of the sentence.”1 The mood is clearly different between a question and a statement, and therefore the types of sentences are not the same.

I think, as an aside, it’s important to be careful in the use of the term form. Form means the way a particular tense, aspect, or mood is shown: the past is a tense, and has a particular form (e.g., the -ed form or an irregular form, as in jumped or swam); the progressive is an aspect, and has a particular form (e.g., the present progressive is formed with the present tense of be and the -ing participle); and the subjunctive is a mood, and has a particular form (e.g., the use of were).

Now, the do-drop rule that generative grammar identifies is a big topic, and it would take too much space to go into the complexities of it. It’s shorthand for the idea that a helping verb—do or be—is always present in the underlying grammar of a sentence, whether it is explicit or not. Chomsky is associated with this because of his seminal work in the area, but linguists have refined and in some cases rejected some of his theories. In any case, people have argued about this analysis for decades now, and there’s plenty of literature on the subject. The concept is of most help to people working on natural language processing and other applications of linguistic analysis to computer functions.

For most of us, the idea of do-periphrasis, which is just another way of saying “do as an auxiliary verb,” is more useful. But I did find that helping students to understand that sometimes do is used and sometimes it isn’t, and then learning to identify when it is, helped clarify its use for learners.

Letters

1Marianne Celce-Murcia and Diane Larsen-Freeman. The Grammar Book: An ESL/EFL Teacher’s Course. 2nd ed. Heinle & Heinle, 1999, 21.

WWW.COPYEDITING.COM Copyediting | April–May 2009 11

When budgets are tight, our audio conferences and webinars provide real value because the fees are per-site rather than per-person. This means that organizations can gather team mem-bers in a conference room and train them all for one price. And freelancers can pool together, too, signing up for access from one site and gathering there to attend. (If you are a member of a freelancers’ group such as the Editorial Freelancers Association, you can reach out through its discussion list to find other interested freelancers.)

For more detailed descriptions of each seminar, visit Copyediting.com.

Streamline Your Editing with Word MacrosWebinarThursday, April 16, 2009Speaker: Hilary Powers , author of Making Word Work for You: An Editor’s Intro to the Tool of the Trade

When You’re On Deadline: Editorial TriageAudio ConferenceTuesday, May 19, 2009Speaker: Wendalyn Nichols

The Savvy Editorial Resource User Webinar Thursday, June 18, 2009Speaker: Wendalyn Nichols

How to Edit Scholarly PublicationsAudio ConferenceThursday, July 23, 2009Speaker: Amy Einsohn, author of The Copyeditor’s Handbook

Update Your Editorial StyleAudio ConferenceTuesday, August 25, 2009Speaker: Wendalyn Nichols

Copyediting for the Web: Challenges and Tactics WebinarThursday, September 17, 2009Speaker: Tony Long, copy chief, Wired News

One Article, Four Ways Audio ConferenceThursday, October 15, 2009Speaker: Ruth E. Thaler-Carter

The Juggling Act: How to Manage the Editorial WorkflowAudio ConferenceThursday, November 12, 2009Speaker: Wendalyn Nichols

The Subversive Copy Editor Takes Your QuestionsAudio ConferenceThursday, December 10, 2009Speaker: Carol Fisher Saller, author of The Subversive Copyeditor

CoPYEDITINg TRAINING OPPORTUNITIES

The 2009 Copyediting audio conferences and webinars

THE QUIZ ANSWERThe Quiz is on page 1.

This sentence, from an unsolic-ited, e-mailed press release, has five mistakes.

(1) The indefinite article an, not a, should precede online. (2) Dipped is an unfortunately comi-cal malapropism; perhaps the writer meant steeped. (3) The company can be “the only one” or “one of the few,” but not “one of the only.” (4) If “one of the few” is meant (as we presume is the case), then that’s should be that are. (5) There is no need to surround wired with quotation marks at this point, because it is a common term—though its association with older technology, in this era of wireless devices, undermines the idea that the company is on the cutting edge.

3 CONTACT US

Copyediting welcomes your questions and comments. For Ask the Editor, write to wendalyn.nichols@copyediting.com. For Technically Speaking, write to technicallyspeaking@copyediting.com. Mail letters to the editorial office (see “How to reach Copyediting” in the masthead, on page 12). Please be sure to let us know whether we may publish your name and company or whether you’d prefer to ask anonymously. Questions may be edited and become the property of Copyediting.

THE COPYEDITING JOB BOARD

If you haven’t checked out our job board in a while, do have a look. Job seekers can view job announcements, post anonymous résumés, and create personalized job alerts. Employers can target their searches for editorial staff by posting announcements or by viewing résumés free of charge, paying only for those that are of interest. Go to www.copyediting.com and click on the Job Board link.

The Copyediting Tip of the Week

Join the hundreds of Copyediting subscribers who receive the e-mailed Tip of the Week from editor Wendalyn Nichols. Just send a message to subs@copyediting.com with the subject line subscribe to ce tip. In the body of the message, give your name, subscriber number, and e-mail address.

12 Copyediting | April–May 2009 WWW.COPYEDITING.COM

by Grant Barrett

nightlight, noun. An analog tele-vision signal that broadcasts a looping message after a station moves to a new digital signal on a different frequency. The message reminds viewers of the move.

The FCC also said that it had identified stations in only 136 out of the 210 markets where a nightlight service would not interfere with dig-ital signals or otherwise not be able to provide a signal.—Broadcasting & Cable, December 26, 2008

One compromise idea is to have a so-called “night light” period where analog might continue maybe for 30 days

D I C T I O N A R Y U P D AT E Copyediting:

Because Language Matters

Vol. 21, No. 2

April 2009–May 2009

Editor Wendalyn Nichols

Contributing Editors Grant Barrett

Charles M. Levine Linda Lowenthal

Erin McKean

Cartoonist Sage Stossel

Copyeditors Patricia M. Godfrey

Andrew Johnson Jarelle S. Stein

Editorial Advisory Board Susan L. Blair, Time (retired)

Bryan A. Garner, LawProse, Inc.

Cheryl Iverson, JAMA/Archives

Paul R. Martin, The Wall Street Journal

Anne McCoy, Columbia University Press

Marilyn Schwartz, University of California Press

Martha Spaulding, Harvard Business Review

Carl Sessions Stepp, American Journalism Review,

University of Maryland at College Park

Barbara Wallraff, Copy Editor editor emeritus

Bill Walsh, The Washington Post

Vice President Center for Professional Excellence

Scott Accatino

Marketing Director Jennifer Zuverink

Creative Director Amy Wimmer

Product Manager Jenny Babich

Production Specialist Dean Shirley

Product Specialist Tara Wise

How to reach Copyediting EDITORIAL OFFICE

1010 E. Missouri Ave. Phoenix, AZ 85014

wendalyn.nichols@copyediting.com

SUBSCRIPTIONS 1010 E. Missouri Ave.

Phoenix, AZ 85014 subs@copyediting.com

WORLD WIDE WEB www.copyediting.com

www.mcmurry.com

PHONE (TOLL-FREE) 888-303-2373

FAx: 602-427-0374

Search for or post a job opening Simply click on the Job Board

link on our Web site.

Our privacy policy Copyediting occasionally exchanges its

subscriber list with organizations whose products or services are

likely to interest its readers. If you want your name to be excluded

from such exchanges, please write or e-mail us at the Subscriptions

address above.

Copyediting is published bimonthly by McMurry.

All rights reserved. Reproduction without prior

permission prohibited.

ISSN 1049-3190

Copyright © 2009 by McMurry.

or so.— The Tennessean, January 18, 2009

ZIRP, noun. Zero interest rate policy, in which banks charge interest of zero to one percent for lending their reserves to each other.

When the zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) was first introduced in February 1999, it was intended to continue until “deflationary concern is dispelled.”—Monetary Policy with Very Low Inflation in the Pacific Rim, 2006, University of Chicago Press

Since the Fed’s adoption of near zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) in December in an attempt to revive economic

growth, short-term U.S. rates including those on Treasury bills have plummeted.—Reuters, January 26, 2009

zombie bank, noun. A bank that is continually near failure, especially one propped up by government assistance.

Zombie banks are being kept alive by Fed advances.—American Banker, May 13, 1991

Zombie banks struggling with billions of bad assets could continue to exist, but do very little business for a long time.—The Boston Globe, January 30, 2009

These entries are derived from the records of the Double-Tongued Dictionary, http://doubletongued.org/.

Mr. Presidentby Paul R. Martin

“Your article refers to President Obama as Mr. Obama,” an e-mail message to The Wall Street Journal complained. “This man holds the highest title in the land and should not be referred to as Mr.”

The reply: “The Journal has used Mr. as a second-reference alternative to President before the surname for many decades, through many presidencies. No disrespect is implied. We might point out that most publications use no honorific, calling him Obama after the first reference. So bug off!”

Well, not that last part. The commander-in-chief is Mr. President, after all, and papers like the Journal use either President Obama or Mr. Obama after the first mention of his full name.

The Journal and The New York Times are among the few antediluvians still using courtesy titles, AKA honorifics, such as Mr., Ms., and those fading relics, Miss and Mrs., in news arti-cles—although many papers (and the Associated Press) still use them in obituaries. Only historical household names like Washington and Lincoln are

used without the Mr. or other honorific in the news pages. Of course, Dr. is used instead of Mr. in second references to physicians and oth-ers who are so called in their professions; priests are called Father, for instance, and military people are called by their rank, but everyone is honored with an honorific.

Like the president, officeholders are typically called Mr. or Ms. as an alternative to Gov. or Sen. or the like. In the recent presidential cam-paign, in which several prominent senators were candidates, readers objected to stories that they saw as glorifying one candidate by using Sen. more often while diminishing the other with Mr. more often. Such was the readers’ sensitivity to this that the Journal took to consistently calling them Sen. in all references. But with the election out of the way, Sen. McCain and the former Sen. Obama can sometimes be just plain Mr. once again.

Why continue courtesy titles at all? Uncommon courtesy.

Paul R. Martin is the editor of The Wall Street Journal Guide to Business Style and Usage and a member of Copyediting’s editorial advisory board.

i n s t Y L e

Streamline Your Editing with Word Macros Thursday, April 16, 2009Once you’ve learned to make MS Word do about what you used to do on paper, it’s tempting to just get to work. But if you stop there, you’re missing a lot.

Macros—instructions Word carries out at your command—let you work with your computer, rather than just on it. Whenever you catch yourself doing something over and over, you can build a macro to do it for you—anything from putting a serial comma after the next “and” that needs one to typemarking a series of paragraphs to populating your style sheet. And that just scratches the surface: macros can do routine file cleanup for you; they can set up your author queries to your client’s specifications; they can convert embedded notes to plain text and put them back again, and much more.

And they’re easy to use. After a quick orientation, you can get right into the world of macros and start handing off the tedious side of editing to your computer, freeing your mind for the parts of the job that require human thought. This session will get you started with macros in any version of Word from 95 through 2007, for the PC or the Mac. (But not Word 2008; Microsoft dropped the macro language from that one.)

When You’re On Deadline: Editorial Triage Tuesday, May 19, 2009

In an ideal world, you’d look at every piece of copy three times: once to clean up the easy stuff, once to give it a thorough edit, and once to double-check everything. But who lives in that world these days? You need to know how to make the best difference to a document in the time you have, and how to negotiate with assigning editors about how much to expect in how much time.

Join Wendalyn Nichols, the editor of Copyediting, for this practical session that will teach you strategies for catching the most important errors, how to prioritize other corrections, and how to communicate your priorities so that you aren’t left red-faced when someone booms, “How did this mistake get through?”

NEW! 60-Minute Webinar

ENCORE PRESENTATION 90-Minute Audio Conference

copyediting seminars

n Why it saves time to spend some time adding tools to Word

n What macros are and why you should care about them

n How to record a macro to automate repetitive steps

n How to make use of a macro someone else wrote or recorded

n How to edit a macro to change what it does

n Where to find free macros

n What kinds of macro-based tools you can buy, and some of what they can do for you

“WORK FASTER,” THEY TELL YOU. HERE’S HOW.

DATES: MACROS, April 16, 2009;TRIAGE, May 19, 2009

TIMES: 11:30 A.M. Eastern, 10:30 A.M. Central, 9:30 A.M. Mountain, 8:30 A.M. Pacific

*COST pEr DIAl-In SITE: $199 ( Copyediting subscribers) $229 (non-subscribers)

* (unlimited attendance, one phone line)

OpTIOnS FOr rEGISTrATIOn:

n Go to www.copyediting.com and follow the Audio Conferences/Webinars link

n Call us at 1-888-303-2373n Fax the registration form to

1-602-427-0374n Mail the registration form to

McMurry, Attn: Center for Professional Excellence, 1010 E. Missouri Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85014

SEMINAR QUICK LOOK

n How triage saves time and stops the blame game

n How to create a triage checklist

n How to get buy-in to your triage plan

n Red-flag errors to fix before any others

n How to spot errors when you’re the only one proofing a document

P R E S E N T E D BY

B E CAU S E L A N G UAG E M AT T E R S

1

2

HERE’S WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

This audio conference sold out in November 2008. Book now to reserve your spot!

copyediting seminars

AbOUT OUR AUdIO CONfERENCES ANd WEbINARSA phone- or Web-based seminar is an easy, interactive, inexpensive way to keep your skills up to date. Each seminar will include a presentation by Hilary or Wendalyn, plus am-ple time to discuss questions posed by you and the other seminar participants. Asking a question or making a comment is simple, and the moderator for each seminar will be there to tell you how.

HOW dO THEY WORK?An audio conference is much like a large conference call or a call-in radio program. Simply dial the 800 number from your handheld, your speakerphone, or your con-ference pad, enter the PIN you’ll receive—and you’re connected. For a webinar, you’ll also connect to an interactive Web site. In either case, you can gather a group around the phone (or phone and computer) so ev-eryone can benefit from the presentations and the live Q&A session.

WHY AN AUdIO CONfERENCE OR WEbINAR?n It’s easy. The toll-free phone number, the

PIN, and any Web site links are sent directly to you by e-mail.

n It’s convenient. You can call and take part from anywhere you have a phone (and Web connection for webinars).

n It’s interactive. The seminar includes plenty of Q&A time.

n It’s a bargain. You needn’t spend extra money or time on travel. And it doesn’t matter how many staff members are in your conference room or how many free-lancers are in your group: You can train your whole group for the one low per-site price of $229.

SEMINAR REGISTRATIONYES! PLEASE REGISTER ME OR MY GROUP To pArTicipATe in The seMinAr(s).

CHOOSE YOUR SEMINAR(S):

MACROS April 16, 2009

TRIAGE May 19, 2009

SUbSCRIbERS: seminar: $199 cD: $199 seminar + cD: $259

subscriber number __________________________________________________________

NON-SUbSCRIbERS: seminar: $229 cD: $229 seminar + cD: $289 contact name _____________________________________________________________

Title ___________________________________________________________________

company ________________________________________________________________

Address _________________________________________________________________

city _____________________________________ state _________ Zip _____________

phone __________________________________________________________________

e-mail __________________________________________________________________

Fax ___________________________________________________________________

For faster service, register online at www.copyediting.com

YOUR PRESENTERSHilary Powers, author of Making Word Work for You: An Editor’s Intro to the Tool of the Trade, has been freelancing since 1994. Almost all her 475-odd projects have been on screen, and she’s used each of them to research ways to make her computer do more of the routine work. She’s led many programs and classes on using MS Word in editing—in New York and Washington State, as well as in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Wendalyn Nichols, the editor of Copyediting newsletter, was a teacher of remedial English, ESL, and composition for twelve years before entering publishing. She began as a freelance researcher, writer, and editor, then became a lexicographer and editorial manager with the Longman Group in England. For four years she was the editorial director of Random House Reference and Information Publishing. Wendalyn has been interviewed about language on The Today Show, CNN, The Joy of Lex (The Discovery Channel), and dozens of radio programs, including Public Radio International’s

The Next Big Thing and NPR’s Talk of the Nation. She was a regular contributor to The Mavens’ Word of the Day Web site, answering questions about word origins and usage.

PAYMENT INfORMATION

My check is enclosed. (Make payable to copyediting. )

please charge my credit card:

Visa Mastercard American express

Card number _______________________

Expiration date ______________________

Signature _________________________

All registrations must be prepaid in U.s. dollars. Tax iD# 86-0540887. Mail form to McMurry, Attn: center for professional excellence, 1010 e. Missouri Ave., phoenix, AZ 85014.

MATERIALSDial-in instructions for the program and the UrL for accessing your conference materials will be e-mailed to you. (You will need Adobe reader, available free at www.adobe.com.)

please check here (or tell us when you call) if you are unable to receive materials via the Web. We will fax a hard copy to you.

11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Eastern

10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Central

9:30 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. Mountain

8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. Pacific

APRIL 16, 2009MACROS

11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Eastern

10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Central

9:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. Mountain

8:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Pacific

MAY 19, 2009TRIAGE

WISH YOU COULD

AFFORD TRAINING

IN 2009? YOU CAN.

In this practical Web-based seminar led by Copyediting

editor Wendalyn Nichols, you’ll learn to shape a

writer’s copy to remove biased or loaded language,

clichés, jargon, and bureaucratese without taking the

life out of it or making people sound as if they aren’t

knowledgeable members of their own profession.

The webinar comprises four consecutive 45-minute

sessions with 15-minute breaks between them,

for a total of four hours. Each session will involve

approximately 30 minutes of presentation and

15 minutes of discussion.

In the first three sessions of the webinar, you will learn

principles to follow from plenty of before-and-after

examples. The final session will address the question

of how to edit tactfully, and will offer strategies for

coaching writers and establishing protocols where

you work so that the copy you edit will (one hopes!)

need less work in these areas.

Introducing the newest training opportunity from Copyediting: a half-day webinar that’s just one price per log-in site, no matter how many people attend.

All you need is an Internet connection and a speakerphone. Gather your entire editorial staff or a group of your fellow freelancers to take full advantage of expert Copyediting training that’s a true bargain.

HOW EDITOR S C AN COACH CL ARIT YMark My Words:

presented by

NEW Half-Day Copyediting Webinar!

HOW EDITOR S C AN COACH CL ARIT YMark My Words:

2009WEBINAR SCHEDULE

See page 2 for more information about your webinar leader.

���March 4 and 18: n 8:30 A.M. – 12:30 P.M. Pacificn 9:30 A.M. – 1:30 P.M. Mountainn 10:30 A.M. – 2:30 P.M. Central

n 11:30 A.M. – 3:30 P.M. Eastern

MARCH 11 AND 25: n 10:00 A.M. – 2:00 P.M. Pacificn 11:00 A.M. – 3:00 P.M. Mountainn 12:00 P.M. – 4:00 P.M. Centraln 1:00 P.M. – 5:00 P.M. Eastern

TRAIN 10, 20, 30 pEopLE—ALL foR oNE gREAT pRICE!

Wendalyn Nichols, the editor of Copyediting newsletter, was a teacher of remedial English, ESL, and composition for twelve years before entering publishing. She began as a freelance researcher, writer, and editor, then became a lexicographer and editorial manager with the Longman Group in England. For four years she

was the editorial director of Random House Reference and Information Publishing.

Wendalyn has been interviewed about language on The Today Show, CNN, The Joy of Lex (The Discovery Channel), and dozens of radio programs, including Public Radio International’s The Next Big Thing and NPR’s Talk of the Nation. She was a regular contributor to The Mavens’ Word of the Day

Web site, answering questions about word origins and usage.

Meet Your Workshop Leader

WEBINAR REGISTRATION YES! PlEaSE rEgiStEr ME or MY grouP For tHE WEBiNar

Mark My Words

Choose your date: March 4, 2009 (Start time: 8:30 a.m. PST, 9:30 a.m. MST, 10:30 a.m. CST, 11:30 a.m. EST)

March 11, 2009 (Start time: 10:00 a.m. PST, 11:00 a.m. MST, 12:00 p.m. CST, 1:00 p.m. EST)

March 18, 2009 (Start time: 8:30 a.m. PST, 9:30 a.m. MST, 10:30 a.m. CST, 11:30 a.m. EST)

March 25, 2009 (Start time: 10:00 a.m. PST, 11:00 a.m. MST, 12:00 p.m. CST, 1:00 p.m. EST)

Pricing: SuBScriBErS: Copyediting subscribers save $80.

You pay just $289! Subscriber number__________________

NoN-SuBScriBErS: Standard fee: $369 per dial-in site.

Contact name _________________________________________________

Title _______________________________________________________

Company ____________________________________________________

Address ____________________________________________________

City ______________________________ State _________ Zip __________

Phone _____________________________________________________

E-mail ______________________________________________________

Fax _______________________________________________________

Payment information: My check is enclosed. (Make payable to Copyediting. )

Please charge my credit card:

Visa MasterCard American Express

Card number __________________________________________________________

Expiration date ________________________________________________________ Signature ____________________________________________________________

Materials:Dial-in and login instructions for the webinar will be e-mailed to you. The URL for accessing a PDF of the slides from the presentation will be sent following the session you attend.

Please check here (or tell us when you call) if you are unable to receive materials via the Web. We will fax a hard copy to you.

Mail form to McMurry, Attn: Copyediting Workshop, 1010 E. Missouri Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85014.

WEBINAR AGENDABefore the webinar, you will be sent a document containing example sentences and passages that we’ll refer to during our half-day together. The examples will be presented as editing exercises you can do ahead of time, to get the most from the seminar. But don’t worry—if you don’t have time to go through them, we’ll be looking in detail at how to edit them during the seminar.

Hour 1: Tightening copy without strangling itDo you need to delete every use of the word that? Change every “in order to” to just to? Break every long sentence into shorter ones? Many of us, especially if we were trained by journalism teachers, have been taught that tight writing equals mini-malism. In this first session, we’ll reconsider that principle, and look at how we can wield a scalpel rather than a hacksaw.

Hour 2: Removing hidden biasIt may seem that these days, no matter what you write, someone is going to be offended. We don’t have the option of throwing up our hands, however. Editors can help writers avoid blunders—if we are adept at providing alternative language that isn’t so painfully PC that it draws attention to itself. We’ll discuss how to deal with terminology, work around the he/they problem, and neutralize unintentionally loaded language.

Hour 3: Jargon, clichés, and bureaucrateseSimplicity of expression should be the goal of all writers, no matter how technical their subject matter. Yet a certain amount of business jargon is expected in business writing, and scientific and other technical subjects require that certain conventions be followed. We’ll discuss how we, as editors, can help a writer know the differ-ence between necessary jargon or a helpful analogy and bureaucratese or clichés that get in the way of understanding—or even undermine the message.

Hour 4: Coaching writersEditing a writer is one thing; doing it in a way that doesn’t put the writer’s back up and actually helps the writer improve is quite another. In our final hour we will discuss techniques for editing tactfully—and we’ll also take a look at what we can do in our workplaces to help improve the quality of writing before it hits our desks.

All registrations must be prepaid in U.S. dollars. Tax ID# 86-0540887.

foR fASTER SERvICE, REgISTER oNLINE AT WWW.CopyEDITINg.CoM/WoRkSHopS.

Magnum Opus Awards 2009Don’t let this be the year you fail to get your best work recognized

The good news about the global economic downturn is that it will separate the wheat from the chaff in every profession, and custom media will be no exception. The bad news—especially if you haven’t done enough to show you’re the cream of the crop—is that you’ve got to show you deserve to rise to the top.

Make your first and best move today: Round up the best work you’ve done in 2008 and enter it into the ContentWise Magnum Opus Awards, which is now accepting entries in more than 200 categories.

Now expanded to include social media vehicles like blogs, podcasts, and online videos, the Magnum Opus Awards recognize excellence across the content delivery spectrum.

So whether your best work sample is an entire issue of a magazine or a single headline, a podcast series or a photo caption, Magnum Opus has a category that you can enter and win. (For a complete list of categories and their descriptions, visit www.magnumopusawards.com/categories.)

Enter right now, at www.magnumopusawards.com.

The deadline for entries is March 20, 2009. This year, of all years—don’t miss it!

Magnum Opus Awards vitals:

3 Entry deadline: March 20, 2009

3 Late entry deadline: March 27, 2009

3 Winners announced: Week of June 22, 2009

Call for Entries

ContentWisePresented by:

’09Magnum

Opus AwardsDeadline: March 20, 2009

Questions? Call us at

888-303-2323 or e-mail

Jenny Babich at jennyb@

magnumopusawards.com