ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

When I was active as a copyeditor (USian term, sorry), the standard book to follow was Karen Judd's Copyediting: A Practical Guide. If I chance to leaf through it nowadays it seems dated, and very focused on practical aspects of paper-based work.

Speaking as an ex-newspaper employee and ex-journalism major, I agree with Aimless's post. It's more important to show you can make murky things clear (and correct the most howlingly egregious errors) than to master every nuance of using em dashes, en dashes, hyphens, etc. Most of those are issues of style rather than right/wrong.

I hire editors from time to time, and I like to look for a basically chill, audience-centric philosophy of editing. Vastly prefer that over dogmatic rigidity or encyclopedic memorized technical knowledge.

Consider one or more books by Bill Walsh, whose irreverent, pragmatic attitude is very much simpatico with my own. Look for The Elephants of Style if you can.

speaking as someone currently employed as a proofreader and someone who has taken (and passed) a lot of editing tests, you are almost definitely overthinking it. virtually every copy editing test I've taken has focused on basic grammar, punctuation and usage errors, possibly some AP/Chicago style points (for a newspaper, you're probably going to deal with AP). editing for clarity/brevity generally doesn't show up, probably because those things are A) subjective and B) harder to deliberately insert into a story than a misspelling. as far as style, I've taken a surprising amount of editing tests where they just give you a style guide and dictionary during the test.

so if I were to brush up on anything before an editing test for a print publication, it'd actually be proofreading marks.

katherine speaks wisdom

thank you!!!

it’s def prob just paranoia/overthinking. i just worry that i’m underqualified. i’ve been writing for a very small publication & i am not sure if my skills measure up, even tho i really want the job.

Lopez' or Lopez's - both look, not great.

The latter is correct (per Chicago at least)

de Lopez

kidding; definitely the second.

apostrophe s unless you're dealing with an archaic set phrase ("good friend for Jesus' sake forbear")

thanks all. makes sense.

i tend to go without additional s tho have some rules that i can’t remember right now where that doesn’t hold. failed at lopez tho without the s looked wrongerer.

in fact why i ever began to think it might be lópez’ is now alarming me. i haven’t been sleeping much recently.

I tend to follow Chicago on this, as in most things. But there is another school of thought that how you punctuate should reflect how you would say it. Which may vary depending on your dialect, your speech community, and the tone of what you're writing.

That is, if you would say "Jennifer Lopezzes career" then write Lopez's. If you would say "Jennifer Lopezz career" write Lopez'.

But that approach is too loosey-goosey for me.

If the 's' at the end of the word sounds like an 's', than use apostrophe-s.

If the 's' at the end of the word does not make an esss sound, just use the apostrophe.

"Illinois' roads are better-constructed than Arkansas' roads."

But Lopez is so close, but not exactly an 's', so I'd use an apostrophe. We have an editor here, let's say her last name is Fritz, and we use only the apostrophe for its possessive form.

Wait a minute, I think I confused myself there.

S at the end of the word - don't use an apostrophe.

huh?

the basic gist of the Chicago rule (at least in the 16th ed.; I don't have the 17th) for possessives is that you leave off the second s only when the word is plural, so "Illinois's roads" versus "many states' roads." No need to follow CMOS of course, but using pronunciation as a guide could get tricky as YMP said. For example, I'd be curious how pplains's rule would work in the part of Illinois where I grew up; there we pronounced Des Moines, "duh moyn," and Des Plaines, "dess plains."

I favor making every singular noun possessive with apostrophe s, no matter what sound they end in, including s and z. I have never (until now) heard anyone advance the claim that a silent s should be treated differently.

The historical set phrase thing is an exception that I grudgingly accept if people think it's important.

Every regular plural noun gets s apostrophe. Irregular plurals (like people or children) generally get apostrophe s.

Usually this discussion bogs down around weirder cases like Joneses', where you have an existing s or z sound plus an additional s/z sounds that signal plural and possessive usages. Usageses. Usages's's. DAMMIT

my spouse bought me a magazine containing this sentence:

"Either/Or, her stylish North Williams breakfast bar-cum-drinking den."

do you think this was on purpose?

that is a correct usage afaik

but I would have used a different phrase in that context...

It would only be correct if there were a hyphen between drinking and den, imo.

Oh, and breakfast and bar too.

sorting out how to properly hyphenate that lengthy series of modifiers is reason enough not to try it tbh

Or just drop the hyphens altogether. Xpost

In this case, cum is used as an unassimilated latin word rather than an English one (as in summa cum laude) and it means "with". I wonder whether the drinking den really is attached to the bar as a separate entity, or if author is just cheerfully misusing the word to mean "that might also be regarded as a".

that is a correct usage afaik

It is normal for a sentence to have a verb. Although, it is possible that where rushomancy called it a sentence and inserted a period it would have been more accurate to call it a phrase and inserted an ellipses.

ellipsis, ellipses is plural

you're right.

as for the phrase at issue, i would rewrite, because i don't think the unwritten linkage in the phrases "breakfast bar" and "drinking den" -- while it's certainly there, which is why they don't absolutely demand hyphenation -- us strong enough to override the written linkage of the hyphens round cum: the problem isn't that you can't decode it on reread, it's that you stumble (and chuckle if you have an evil mind) on first read

hyphenating everything puts all the linkages at the exact same level, which doesn't get rid of the hiccup
no hyphens is asking for dirty-mind trouble

"drinking den and/or breakfast bar" works i think (certainly it dodges the slight weirdness that Aimless is noting, that "cum" is arguably slightly misused here? and also the "he said cum teehee" thing)

us s/b is

stylish North Williams breakfast-and-drinking bar

doesn't really even need the hyphens

^true. use hyphens to eliminate ambiguity, which you're not really in danger of here.

i don't mean it as a technical grammar question. maybe i should have put it in "Words, usages, and phrases that annoy the shit out of you". the writer drops in a particularly unnecessary loanword in a context where one can't help but read it as the identical vernacular word.

Big style book changes at @nytimes: Since yesterday, we've dropped the courtesy titles – "Mr. Whatsisname", "Ms. So-and-So" – for stories about movies, pop music and TV 😱

— Matthew Anderson (@MattAndersonNYT) October 9, 2018

rip mr. loaf, mr. pop

hullo gaga, bostic, elllington

doctor sir warrior would be concerned if (a) not dead (b) ever once mentioned in the times anyway

https://i.imgur.com/ZZPl6u1.jpg https://i.imgur.com/c2yC8gD.jpg

guardian 1, bbc nil

seen on my Waitrose voucher
"this does not include infant formulae"

there are many types of formula I guess, but there are also many types of, say, milk and it would be weird to pluralise to 'milks'?

Yeah that's definitely wrong

That is not ungrammatical, strictly speaking, but is certainly a strange choice of expression. Also, when pluralizing Latin words that have been assimilated into daily English use, it is preferable to use the English form of plural, viz. formulas.

not sure “formula” needs pluralizing

it doesn't, and in terms of style, it oughtn't.

I quite agree with Aimles. I often want to stop people from pluralizing loanwords according to the pluralizing conventions of the source language. Especially when they are wrong. But people mistakenly think they're being scrupulously correct, which is sad. Pedants have misled them.

I dislike "syllabi," "octopi," "memoranda," and (perhaps especially) "matrices."

"octopi" is wrong anyway, even with the Greek origin it's "octopodes"
But with the voucher text, you wouldn't have a problem with "does not include fruits and vegetables" right?

I dislike "syllabi," "octopi," "memoranda," and (perhaps especially) "matrices."

Syllabi and memoranda are way more elegant than buses and dums. Octopuses also sounds terrible, imo octopi is the correct English plural and octopodes is an also-fun technically-correct plural. Matrices is elegant, but matrixes is simple and clear, I’d allow them both.

I also strongly endorse one Aimles, two Aimless.

But with the voucher text, you wouldn't have a problem with "does not include fruits and vegetables" right?

actually I'd go with "fruit" for that as well, fruit being a mass noun

I don't mind Latin plurals - it was only recently my workplace style guide stopped using 'data' as strictly plural, and not without some mutterings - but I don't expect to see it on a supermarket voucher so it kind of made me smile

it's good, english needs more inflective noun endings, it's a mongrel language and shd flaunt this

a pod of octopus is an octoplural, this is obvious and transcends rules or style

I also strongly endorse one Aimles, two Aimless.

As Aimless, I contain multitudes.

What the heck is a “breakfast bar” anyway?