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Pam Nelson: The Grammar Guide

 

Archive for February 2012

Number of comments in parentheses

26: Editing in practice: Jim Fingal, fact-checking hero (2)

A book review from the New York Times gives me a new role model. The book is “The Lifespan of a Fact” by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal. It’s about the struggle to get an essay by D’Agata ready for publication in The Believer. Fingal was an intern fact-checker assigned to the essay. D’Agata believed that he was writing Truth and Art and shouldn’t be too bound by Facts. Fingal pushed back with questions and endured verbal abuse from D’Agata as he did his job, as reviewer Jennifer B. McDonald describes it. “The book presents, line by line, D’Agata’s[.....]

24: Grammar Guide word choice quiz – No. 63

I have a new 10-sentence multiple-choice quiz for you to try. I was reminded by something I read recently that these quizzes are actually about usage rather than grammar. In fact, most ordinary English speakers and writers need no guidance on grammar. It’s usage that we stumble on. Of course, English is what we make it, and what is common and preferred usage in one era is outdated in another. Copy editors follow current and common usage principles. With that disclaimer, here is the quiz. I hope it proves fun and useful.

15: “Lowly” copy editor? Surely you jest (2)

A post by Yoni Goldstein at the National Post of Canada asserts, I hope with irony, that the copy editor in modern newsrooms is “basically, a human spellchecker and guardian of the newspaper’s arcane style guide, a set of rules (like whether to spell the word “aging” or “ageing”) most editors and reporters either ignore or forget.” This has caused a stir among our kind. I first saw the link on a Facebook post by Testy Copy Editor and later read a spirited and pointed response from John McIntyre, who has said what needs to be said about this.[.....]

10: We beg you to stop “begging the question”

I read this sentence in a story recently: The churches say they have no money for upkeep, and the world-renowned hospital says it has no need for churches. Which begs the question: what happens to architectural gems that no one can afford to maintain? I don’t even understand why writers started using “begs the question” at all.  It doesn’t even make sense in the way they want us to read it. But even if we could discern that they mean “raises the question” or “prompts the question” or even “dodges the question,” the phrase “begs the question” has a[.....]

4: Word choice: Predominate and predominant

These two sentences stopped me recently — one from a Twitter feed, the other from a piece I was copy-editing. ACLU warns General Assembly to stop using predominately Christian prayers to start sessions. Inspired by her travels to Mound Bayou, Miss., the nation’s largest predominately black town, Marshall-Linnemeier’s exhibit spins off images of experimental plantations set up during the Civil War by the Union government at Davis Bend and Port Royal. The word in common is predominately. I changed it to predominantly in the story I edited. Here is why.