Editor dilemmas (exercise)

Grammar, Spelling, Punctuation and Diction study guide

Important dates

Time and place crossword puzzle 2 (HTML) (PDF)

Mark Twain: Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses (essay)

Mastery of the language -- from the rules of grammar and punctuation to the nuances of meaning -- is the basic skill necessary for good copyediting and headline writing. Copyediting is more than just fixing the mistakes in a story, however. A copyeditor must have the courage to decide when a story is incorrect or when it has the wrong emphasis, and he or she must take on the responsibility of putting it right.

Good copyediting is indispensible to any publication, and good copyeditors are extremely valuable people to have around. They can lift the quality of the publication in ways that no other journalists can match.

Notes

Discussion notes: Editing for the web. Do you need to talk with your editing students about the special considerations of editing for the web? Do you need to get your online journalism students up to speed as editors? JPROF.com has put together some discussion notes that you can use to introduce your editors to some of the things they will need to thing about in editing for the web, things such as linking, wordiness, chunking, pull quotes and other devices. More. (Posted Feb. 7, 2007)

Editing for the web. The web is a different medium. Then why do we keep seeing so much shovelware -- articles that were written for print -- on news web sites. One reason, of course, is that news organizations (particularly newspapers) do not invest in enough people who can change print stories into web-friendly packages. Another is that editors do not understand the needs or possibilities of the web. To get my students shifted from print to the web, I have developed this example of how a print story can be turned into a web story. (Posted Sept. 14, 2006)

The death of the clever headline? Headline writing is one of the most difficult tasks in journalism and certainly one of the most difficult things to teach for the journalism professor. Now -- as if accuracy, clarity and a bit of wite weren't enough -- there is a new challenge: search engines. Steve Lohr writes this week in the New York Times about how news organizations are tweaking headlines in an effort to get their links picked by Google and its kin and thus drawing readers to the site. If the Google consideration becomes a major one, we could see yet another shift in the practice of journalism.
More (Posted April 14, 2006)
Update: But worse than the boring headline is the useless one. Here is Steffen Fjaervik's take on this. (Posted April 14, 2006)

Discussion notes: Responsibilities of the editor. Getting your editing students in the right frame of mind to become editors is a challenge for any editing teacher. JPROF.com has a set of discussion notes that contain many of the points you might want to make with your students at the beginning of an editing class. Above all, students should be taught that editors are the people who make decisions about the entire publication or web site, and they have to take responsibility for what is included in the publication. A reporter's mistake becomes their mistake if they do not take steps to correct it. More

Expensive misspelling. Tell your students (as you undoubtedly do) that they need to spell correctly and that they should check their spelling. Not doing so can turn out to be an expensive proposition. That's what the folks in Livermore, Calif., found out in 2004 when they spent $40,000 for a mosaic for their new library. The artwork contained 175 words, many of them names of writers, scientists and artists. Some 11 of those words were misspelled. They included Shakespeare (Shakespere), Einstein (Eistein), and Gauguin (Gaugan). The Miami artist who executed the work at first claimed artistic license (maybe some of your students have used the same excuse) but later said she would fix the problem words. Unfortunately, the city of Livermore is having to pay her $6,000 plus expenses to do that. California law requires that public artwork cannot be changed without the consent of the artist. Some people are blaming city and library officials as well as the artist, saying they should have checked the spelling before approving the artwork. You can read more about this in the news stories of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Contra Costa Times. (Posted Aug. 10, 2005)

FDR, the editor. Franklin Roosevelt, who died in office 60 years ago this week, was a notorious and exacting editor. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his handling of the speech he gave to Congress on Dec. 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed. Roosevelt took the draft of the speech and by careful editing made it into one of the most famous speeches in American history. (The History Channel has produced a special program on Roosevelt's presidency and along with it a web site with many resources.) More (Posted April 17, 2005)

Attacking wordiness. Most of the editing students I have taught over the last three decades share this trait: they are reluctant to change anything in an editing exercise, even when it is obviously wrong. Getting them to where they will correct grammar, spelling and style errors in the first step. But to be good editors, of course, they must go far beyond this. They must learn to recognize and attack wordiness – the heart disease of good writing. Here are some lecture/discussion notes about what to tell editing students about wordiness – how to recognize the symptoms and cure the disease. (Posted Feb. 10, 2005)

Notes on accuracy. The first lesson that beginning journalism students should learn is they are obligated to present accurate information to their audience. Many of the procedures of journalism are directed toward achieving accuracy. Editing students need to be reminded of this goal, too. It is the editor's job to ensure accuracy. This web site contains a set lecture/discussion notes that I use for my editing class when talking with them about accuracy and how to achieve it.

An additional note: John Early McIntyre, assistant managing editor for the copydesk at the Baltimore Sun, has an excellent piece on the Poynter web site about the importance of editing. In it, he cites a 2003 conference on Editing for the Future held at the First Amendment Center in Nashville. The web site for the conference contains many resources for those interested in editing, including a session devoted to accuracy. That session was led by Margaret Holt, customer service editor of the Chicago Tribune. During her presentation (which can be viewed on video at the site), she told the story of the time when the Tribune got serious about guarding against inaccuracies:

Since 1992 the Chicago Tribune has hired a proofreader to do an errors-per-page annual report, so the newsroom can track errors from year to year. "We were abysmal starting out," she said. "I think we were as high as 4.82 errors per page."

However, the Tribune's accuracy program kicked into high gear in 1995 when it suffered an accuracy "meltdown." A senior writer misidentified a top Tribune executive in an obituary of a beloved editor. That executive was "not happy," Holt said. The obit was published on a Saturday, and by Monday, the executive ordered the Tribune to establish an error policy.

(Posted Feb. 9, 2005)

Editor dilemmas. George Daniels, my friend and colleague at the University of Alabama, has developed an excellent exercise on some of the management dilemmas that editors face in dealing with reporters. The exercise is based on some of the guidelines that editors should use in building their relationships with reporters that are outlined in Chapter 12 of Journalism: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How. These dilemmas are designed to get students to think about the dual roles editors have as keepers of the journalistic culture and as managers of people. (Posted Feb. 2, 2005)

Twain takes aim. In a famous 1895 essay, Mark Twain delivered a stinging critique of one of America’s 19th century literary icons, James Fennimore Cooper. Twain was very much a modern writer, advocating active, descriptive verbs and short rather than long words. His essay is worth reading, not necessarily for what it says about Cooper, but for what it says about writing itself.

In a defense of Cooper, Lance Schachterle and Kent Lyungquist say Twain manipulated the evidence against Cooper and was ultimately unfair to him.

The eighteen rules for effective fiction that Twain claims Cooper habitually violated fall under three heads: he could not formulate a plot that got anywhere; his characterization was vapid, inert, or unconvincing; and his diction was  wretched. Twain seeks to win the reader's assent to this view of Cooper by alternating elegant and brassy variations of his own critical judgment with illustrations apparently drawn straight from the text. Precisely by his choice of examples Twain reveals his satirical strategy. With "circumstantial evidence," Twain actually distorts what Cooper wrote and presents the illusion of conclusive proof without any real substance. By carefully manipulating Cooper's texts, willfully misreading, and sometimes fabricating evidence, Twain leaves the reader with the impression that he has polished Cooper off. By looking at Twain's treatment of plot, characterization, and especially diction in The Deerslayer, we can lay bare Twain's rhetorical strategy and satirical distortions.

Fenimore Cooper's Literary Defenses: Twain and the Text of The Deerslayer by Lance Schachterle and Kent Ljungquist  (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Studies in the American Renaissance, 1988.

Read Twain’s essay and see for yourself.

Dates for the journalist. Even if history teachers have stopped making students memorize dates, journalism teachers shouldn't. Dates are important for a full understanding of events, and students should have precise knowledge of the important events in American and world history. The list of dates on this web site, adapted from The Complete Editor, is a good place for the student to begin acquiring this knowledge. Once the students have studied this list, they will be ready to tackle the two crossword puzzles contained on this site. You can download these puzzles as HTML or PDF files. (Posted Jan. 10, 2005)
Time and place crossword puzzle 1 (HTML) (PDF)
Time and place crossword puzzle 2 (HTML) (PDF)

A key to good editing. One of the most difficult things to teach beginning editing students is, somewhat oddly, attitude. While no one should be cocky or uncivil, a good copyeditor must have the confidence not only to spot errors but also to change the copy to make it better. That is reasonably easy to do when they are dealing with technical matters – spelling, grammar, style rules, etc. – where the rules are explicit. It is much more difficult when changing copy calls upon editors to use their judgment and to have confidence in that judgment. An editor must consider any piece of copy his or her own – must “take possession” of it, in the modern phrase. A good editor does not hesitate to see what it wrong, recognize how it should be changed and then change it.

Grammar, Spelling, Punctuation and Diction exam. When I taught at the University of Alabama, I would give a 100-question grammar, spelling, punctuation and diction exam to beginning writing students. The test was a difficult one, but students had to make at least a 75 on the exam to pass the beginning writing course offered by the College of Communication and Information Sciences. That exam is not available on this web site, but the study guide developed for it is. This is an excellent primer on the basic grammar and spelling rules and concepts that a student should know.