It's not just me...

You might say this is a lazy post, and I might agree with you, but David Mitchell says it so well. Although technically he's not just talking about standards of spelling.

Getting possessive about proofreading

So I was at a party last weekend - and please don't get distracted by your amazement at such an unusual way for me to spend my leisure time - where I knew nobody except the hosts. A woman was telling her friends about how, when shopping, her daughter had picked out a slab of chocolate with the iced message "Worlds best brother" on it. Naturally, the woman asked the shop assistant to add the missing apostrophe but this being Thorntons, which, like Barclays, has decided that ugly possessive punctuation clutters the brand, her request was met with incomprehension. The woman sensibly left without the chocolate. So far so unsurprising. But then... "Of course it needs an apostrophe," her friend responded, "Otherwise it's as if he's the whole world's brother." The first woman (who turned out to be a copywriter) paused and blinked. "It's a possessive apostrophe," she said. "Oh yes," agreed woman three, "It's the same as putting an apostrophe in "its". That really winds me up. The rule is simple. You should never do it." The first woman paused and blinked again, and I considered wading in to back her up but, being British and never having met these people before, well, to my shame, I didn't. Fortunately the conversation turned to misspellings (or possibly mispellings), to general relief.

When I tell people what I do, they tend to nod and agree that proofreading is very important and that correct spelling and punctuation and removing typos is essential for a professional reputation. But they never seem to think it applies to them. It's other people, those uneducated masses, who get it wrong. If you're in the know, you can proofread your own work. Well, yes, up to a point. My knowledge of grammar and spelling and punctuation is accurate enough to know when to break the rules and when the rules are fluid (editors like nothing better than to endlessly debate the relative merits of different style manuals - that's one reason I don't get invited to many parties). But I'm not ashamed to admit - because it's obvious - that I don't always pick up all the errors in my terrible typing. Sometimes it's late, sometimes I'm busy, usually I'm just plain lazy. I know how it is, how there always seems to be something better to do. But proofreading your own work is only the first level of defence. The second level is to find someone who will look at it objectively; being free from creative baggage, I have no difficulty in correcting other people's work. A fresh eye - a fresh perspective - will tidy and polish the text, and replace it gleaming on the mantlepiece of public opinion. Even if the public isn't all that sure what that opinion ought to be.

To shamelessly overload on the metaphors, adding an extra squeeze of icing is so much easier, and so much cheaper, than melting it all down and starting again.

Why I should have been a lawyer

I'm going to go off on a tangent before I've even established a straight line, but time spent trying to get the hang of Twitter does make you want to luxuriously expand into the endless space of the Blogger edit box. I went into the bank to sign up for a business account but rather than HSBC holding open their welcoming arms for me to run giggling into, they took some notes, made me play telephone pingpong with their business advisor and then made me commit to spending my lunch hour next week driving into town to meet her for what will probably be a sales chat. And it won't be me selling to her. Although that nicely brings me back to my straight line.

When the cashier noted the nature of my business, she wrote that I was planning to be a "copyrighter". The point at which I realised that publishing is the realm of the underpaid, the under-appreciated and the over-educated happened to coincide with the point at which I realised that my college peers with their law conversions were wisely trying to eliminate the underpaid aspect of their careers. I like the sound of being a copyrighter - "Do you have permission to plagiarise that hackneyed old quote, Mr Higginbottom? Dd you even bother to give it a little creative spin? I thought not. Copyright application dismissed!"

Most people just don't know what copywriting and copy editing are. And worse, most people think they know. It's not law - there are no years of intense study or overuse of technical jargon... oh, hang on. There are. It must be complicated because my conversations with my mother go like this:

[In the interests of family unity, I've self-censored my paraphrase of a typical phonecall with my mother. Which is a pity, because it was funny. Let's just say that she is concerned that copy editing is not a good use of my education and intelligence. And that her friends all look blank when she tells them how I'll be earning a living. And then casually adds that her friends' kids are all high powered lawyers. Probably dealing with copyright cases.]

Well, she's right. Not about copy editing wasting my talents, obviously - as we all know, clear communications will save the world, and even I would forgive a misplaced comma in return for universal peace. But people still won't know what it means, or what it's for, or why it's needed. Just look at my redundant publishing team, all trained up and no place to edit.

Demonstrating the value - and complexity - of written communications is hard in this age of txt spk and hash tags. The nature of quality can be argued forever, but when it comes down to it, clear, accurate prose in books, on the web, on the back of smoothie Tetrapaks (love that Innocent brand identity) will not only save the world but also, more importantly for small businesses, will convert into sales and maintain and even enhance their reputation. And that's a great way to earn a living.

Apart from the being underpaid, under-appreciated and over-educated part, of course.

Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we edit

A cafe in town has been refurbished. Its vulgar lighting, hard chairs and clinical green decor have been transformed into a softly lit maroon-and-buttermilk oasis dotted with curvaceous sofas. It looks like my sort of place. But what is this? A sign etched across the window reads:

Salads and sandwiches made fresh

What a revolutionary idea! Bring your droopy lettuce and mouldering sarnies and they too will be refurbished - look, good as new!

Oh, do you think they just mean "Freshly made salads and sandwiches"? How disappointing.

Will the error directly affect their income? Will potential customers think, "I don't drink coffee in cafes with ungrammatical signage"? Unlikely. But, actually, ambiguous advertising can provoke detrimental responses. If they can't clearly describe what they do, can they really do it? If their attention to detail is lacking, what else have they forgotten? Well, who am I to criticise? It is easily done - dashing off a blog late at night, my own attention to detail isn't what it could be (as you rightly point out, Andrew, and I do appreciate it!) and I'm an editor. Cafes should get on with what they're good at, whether it's making fresh food or making food fresh, but all businesses need to be aware of the impact on their reputation - and possible impact on their profits - if they get it wrong.

So today's inspiration? That there is a place in the world for us poor underrated editors. To check your work before making it public [Julia gives her post a second read-through]. Oh, and to invent a food freshener, if that cafe hasn't done so already.

Editing: a quiet revolution

I told my brother about this blog today. He responded:
I debated about which of my email favourite folders to keep the link in and decided against 'Rovers', 'Roleplaying', 'Buying', 'Jobs' or 'Other' and in the end felt that it could only really fit into 'Art'.
Which I'll take as an endorsement. Of course, if he became a follower (hint, dear reader) then he wouldn't need to bookmark it at all. Blogging As Art will be the subject of a future post (I bet you'll be lying awake waiting for that one) but today my thoughts run less to writing and more to editing.

If there's one editorial error that makes me suck in my breath through gritted teeth (and, let's face it, there isn't one; there are thousands), it's this:-

Aha, you were waiting for some text then, weren't you? But it really was this:-

Or, more frequently, this :-

It's the dog's bollocks. Which these days means something positive but (apparently) typesetters coined the phrase to describe such a wanton misuse of punctuation. I have no idea if this story is true but, oh, I do hope so - what a fine description it is. Although the family-friendly description, half a smiley, is almost as evocative.

People seem to be afraid of the poor wide-eyed colon, teaming it up with hyphens or (equally horrifyingly) replacing it with the lewd winking semi-colon, as if to draw attention to its ugliness, its innate wrongness.

Am I a petty pedant? Of course. Does it really matter? Of course. Am I shouting into a void? Of course. My organisation has decided that publishing services are dispensible in a forward-thinking, streamlined (cash-strapped) non-departmental public body. After all, anyone can proofread. All you need is a dictionary and Track Changes enabled in Word. Who cares whether you use a semi-colon to introduce a bullet list? It's just punctuation, right? Surely forward-thinking, streamlined (cash-strapped) NDPBs have better things to do than ensure their communications are clear, consistent, forward-thinking and, er, streamlined... right?

It's always seemed to me that a sign of good editing is its invisibility. 99% of errors may have been picked up, and nobody notices, but that tiny overlooked typo is the one that makes the reader question the authority of the text. Perhaps it's due to the proliferation of blogs like this one - even I don't proofread my own copy very thoroughly, and have to edit my posts later for those embarrassing misspellings (mispellings? mis-spellings?) that I've left behind. But, to an extent, that's fine - this is an informal medium and some level of flexibility is acceptable. But in a health and safety manual, that additional zero might cause a death. In an exam paper, that ambiguous question might rob a student of their profession. That grammatical error in a direct mail leaflet might stop a potential customer from parting with their cash. The editor smooths the way for the reader, quietly removes the thorns that might prick them. It's silent work, and us editors are self-effacing types on the whole, and that's our downfall. Without us, perhaps the text works. But does it live? Does it dream? Does it fly?


Editing. It's the dog's bollocks.