I write articles for several different publishing sites and I do try to get my spelling and grammar correct. Honestly, I do try. I am not always successful and I wonder how the gentle reader views my authority on a topic when I do make a mistake by using an incorrect (albeit correctly-spelled) word or poor grammar.
It’s not just words though. Correctness is more than its own reward in publishing; it is almost mandatory. Nothing turns a reader against you or your point of view faster than an incorrectly-constructed sentence that includes poor grammar, misspelled or incorrect application of chosen words.
What comes to my mind most recently is an article that I read a few days ago on another publishing site, a site which shall remain nameless. On the secure (private) forum the author invited other members of the site to read her articles in exchange for her reading theirs in return. Well, whatever.
“Read me = read you” is and always shall be an invalid bargaining tool for readership and in the case of earnings per view, a potentially corrupt endeavor. –It is highly prone to not succeed anyway.
Anyway, I read ten of her nearly sixty published articles just out of curiosity and professional courtesy. I left comments on seven of her articles as well. The last two articles had some spelling errors that I opted to politely point out to her. The article that sticks in my mind even now was a very intense and heartfelt poem which ended with an unintentional humorous climax due to its incorrect use of a common word. Near the end of the poem the author spoke tenderly of “…losing something presses to me” while clearly in the context of the prose she meant to use the adjective “precious” and not the verb “presses.” Suddenly her tender, intimate poem became trivial. She lost credibility on the subject she was trying to convey.
A SpellChecker would not catch the word "presses" as an error as it is spelled correctly. A grammar syntax checker however might flag this word as possibly being an error. A human copyeditor proofreading this would definitely see that it is the wrong word. I will never know how many times my best, first suggestion to a writer is to use a trusted spellchecker and if necessary, a thesaurus when in doubt of the meaning of an otherwise correctly-spelled word.
Copy editing (copy-editing or copyediting, both are also correct forms of the term) enhances the validity of the work by improving the formatting style and accuracy of the document. It is however not the job of the copy-editor to alter the content of the manuscript, only the accuracy of its formatting. Altering the facts of the content is solely the domain of the author. Here in this article I am assuming that the author and the copy-editor are different people but we can all learn from what the copyeditor does. Most of us that write freelance are both author and copy-editor for our works. I assume that large news sites with professional authors have copyeditors, so mistakes are fewer and harder to find. But it happens.
Even the Big Sites Make Mistakes
On May 12th, 2009 the ca.Yahoo.com portal ran an article on a mishap involving a passenger plane. While on the tarmac the plane inadvertently sucked some cargo into one of its engines. The story reads “Plan evacuated as container is sucked into engine.” I captured a screenshot of the error and the corrected storyline which appeared minutes later. Notice the difference in the text portion of the two images below. The second image correctly reads “Plane evacuated as container is sucked into engine."
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Above: the Before (incorrect) text.
and the follow-up image, screen-captured just minutes later:
Below: the After (corrected) text.
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(two image screenshots by author)
Helium Balloon over Colorado Causes Nationwide Panic
More recently, October 15th, 2009 comes the story that unfolded involving a homemade helium balloon that escaped from the backyard of a family in Fort Collins, Colorado. The story riveted millions to their television sets as it was initially feared that a 6-year old boy may have crawled inside a compartment beneith the ‘flying saucer-shaped’ balloon before it slipped its mooring and got away.
For over two hours the balloon sailed across central Colorado with news helicopters giving chase, broadcasting the story live to a worried and concerned nation held captive to their television sets. The path of the balloon disrupted air traffic and involved multiple ground rescue agencies across several counties that gave pursuit along the balloon’s path.
The balloon finally came to rest on its own accord and was discovered by authorities to be unoccupied. The little lost boy was found later at home allegedly hiding in his parent’s attic over the garage. It is now believed that the drama that played out may have in fact been a staged hoax, a publicity stunt. Local, state and federal aviation authorities were involved in the search and rescue events and if this turns out to be a hoax, it is an expensive one. It is possible that if this was an intentional staged hoax that Class 3 misdemeanor charges may be laid against one or more of the family members involved, charges that may include conspiracy, filing a false report and child endagerment. Federal charges may be added as well.
Sources report that these charges could carry a 6-year prison sentence and a $500,000.00 fine involved. It’s not a game to play such a hoax on a nation. The news portal MSN.com ran follow-ups on their home page as the event was unfolding. Here is a small screenshot of an artist’s rendering of the homemade helium balloon with the size of an adult male for comparison and the content of the paragraph in which it appeared.
(image screenshot by author)
Note that the byline reads “…and said he once flew a place around Hurricane Wilma’s perimeter in 2005.” Again, I am pretty sure that the word “place” should be “plane” which makes the sentence have meaning.
Maybe I’m just being a hardhead and I probably come across sounding rather anal-retentive but seeing errors like this can lead me to think that the writer is either hurried, doesn’t know the difference or worse, doesn’t care. In the case of the helium balloon story I am quite sure that the writer was hurried. Events unfolded very rapidly with this story and as of this writing are still being revealed.
I should be more generous with the praise and more frugal with my analytic. I am sure that I make countless errors myself in spelling and grammar and I would hope that someone points out in a respectful manner these errors that I may be given an opportunity to correct them.
Curse of the Copyeditor: Incompatible Text Editors (MS_WORD, etc.)
A lot more can be said regarding proprietary formatting and text editors like Microsoft’s MS_WORD. It adds formattng elements that are for the most part incompatible with other text editors, online content publishers and so forth. Often the culprits are simple character entities like apostrophe, hyphen, double quotes and the like. The copyright symbol is another commonly mal-formed entity. For HTML web pages, the character entity would be typed as © which the web will render as the letter "C" with a circle around it. Some word-processor programs have a special character for copyright but it shows up on web pages as a geometric square, a question mark or some other malformed substitute.
These malformed character entities usually appear as nonsensical text and numbers upon the user agent (a computer monitor, hand-held device, etc.) For instance, instead of an apostrophe "s" we sometimes see strings like "ae“." Below are some examples taken from the web of what I am talking about. Notice in the first image the word "McDonald’s" and the word "can’t" in the second image.
(screenshot by author)
And below, the imported text created on another text editor creates incompatible characters. The word is supposed to be "can’t."
(and corrected text below)
(images by author)
In these cases it is probably best to do a final copyedit of the article in the text-editor of the publishing site to ensure compatibility. As a web page builder I encounter this character entity and content formatting anomaly all the time. Correcting it constitutes a fairly large portion of my work. Removing proprietary formatting and punctuation entities that do not transmit correctly for the web makes the content more readable which in turn lends greater authority to the author. That is the duty of the copyeditor; to make what the author wrote look its very best.
As a rule I try avoid the use of contractions like "can’t" in favor of the more widely readable "cannot." It can solve a wider cabal of formatting problems for the lone writer whom also copyedits their own work.
Once in Awhile They Get the Grammar Right
A science fiction/multi-media convention here in Toronto has a new logo which is supposed to show the epitome of its name, Polaris. “Polaris” is also called “The North Star” or “The Pole Star.” It is located in the tip of the handle of Ursa Minor, the “Little Dipper” and for Earth-bound navigators, is very near the apparent magnetic north pole. Saliors, hunters and navigators for centuries have used Polaris/the North Star to determine which way is true north.
and 
(image screenshot by author) and (image source)
This poster for a science fiction/multi-media convention gets a number of things right not the least of which is Ursa Minor and the Pole Star are in the correct position. At first glance the Little Dipper looked malformed. I thought it looked skewed somehow. It has been awhile since I studied star constellations. But it is depicted correctly; the constellation we call “Little Dipper” actually appears this way and it does look more like a small meat cleaver than a water dipper.
The larger constellation Ursa Major (Big Dipper) on the other hand looks a lot more like a water dipper. Some cultures and nations see other things in these two constellations ranging from a bear, a plough, a horse cart, and of course the previosuly mentioned meat cleaver.
The repeated use the Ursa Minor constellation on the branding text is mildly confusing at first take. I was expecting to see the Big Dipper here but is a mirror image of the Little Dipper that uses the star Polaris to place the tittle (the diacritic ‘dot’) over the lowercase letter “i” in “Polaris.”
I wanted to point out the correct use of commas in the descriptive text below the convention name. The phrase “Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Beyond” is correct and the use of the second comma to separate “Fantasy” and “and Beyond” is called the “Oxford Comma.” It correctly separates the last two disassociated items in the list. The use of the Oxford Comma here better matches the spoken cadence of the sentence. It is British and likely goes against what we learned in the States, but this is Canada and we lean towards Queen’s English. "Polaris" (formerly known as "Toronto Trek") is a Canadian science fiction/media convention held here in Toronto every year.
Too often I see such a phrase such as this written “Science Fiction, Fantasy and Beyond.” Note that the absence of a comma after “Fantasy.” This implies that “Fantasy and Beyond” are the same thing or somehow intimately related. They are not or they may not be the same entity. ‘Fantasy’ may not be ‘beyond’ and ‘beyond’ may not be ‘fantasy.’ Therefore, they are grammatically mandated to be separated by a comma as being seperate items of a list.
It can be noted that ambiguity can arise whether or not to the use of the Oxford Comma on some grammatical lists. A ‘serial comma’ might be used in some cases instead. An example might be one of “Milk, Cookies, peanut butter and jam sandwiches” (three items) makes more sense than does “Milk, Cookies, peanut butter, and jam sandwiches (four items.)
Here, the second example (serial comma after "peanut butter") would be the incorrect form to use. The sandwich is inclusive of both "peanut butter" and of "jam" and is natively considered to be one item. Seperating the two items with a comma implies that the sandwich is a "jam sandwich" and the peanut butter is a lone item. Confused? -You are not alone.
Commas can be tricky so nods and accolades to the Polaris Convention Committee and their copyeditor whomever s/he is for getting this tricky piece of grammar correct.
