Pity the Author Didn't Learn to Spell While There

"I taught—and learned to teach effectively—at Such-and-So Middle School in Tuscon, Arizona."

For All You Self-Publishers Out There: CreateSpace

Bob, I just sent book out last night and it's due to arrive on Tuesday (I couldn't bring myself to spend $45 for Monday!)  As a product of CreateSpace, it is all you said it would likely be; in short, stunningly disappointing and defective in just about every way. (In my own defense, I tried hard to get our team to go to another publisher; the numbers were just too good for CS.) If you would like to point out any defects, feel free, and we will try to fix the ones we can.

Their margin of error is a whopping 1/8 inch, so bindings almost all off center, the books are all wavy, the cover stays open after a single perusal and bends skyward, the bold of one author’s story bleeds too much (we are going to use a different typeface; if you have any recommendations of other ways, typefaces to set his story off, they are most welcome), and our designer said the back print job is worse than the local Kinko's would do. Other than that, pretty good inside, except the color is stark white, so we are going to try to change to a cream or beige.

Hometown Gets No Respect

Myrna and Harvey Frommer argue that the general practice in New York City politics was to run, for the slots of mayor, comptroller, and president of the city council, one man from the Bronx, one from Manhattan, and one from Brooklyn, one Irish, one Jewish, and one Italian. Residents of Staten Island and Queens, women, and people from other ethnic or racial groups were decidedly and deliberately left out. [emphasis added]

Some Things Never Change

From the Jim Crow era, but just as true today:

As the Washington Evening Star put it, “It must be viewed as one of the ironies of history that the Confederacy, which was never able to capture Washington during the course of that war, now holds it as a helpless pawn."

Well, You Know I'm Not Watching College Football

Today’s project:

"From 1962 to 1964, he was in the U.S. Army and served as an aide to the commanding general of the Military District of Washington. A social aide to President John F. Kennedy, [Richard] Lipsey was the only nonmedical attendee to oversee the president’s autopsy."

I wonder, How is he still alive?

+++

Ripped from the headlines:

"E! and other celebrity news media said on Friday that Odom had opened his eyes, saw Kardashian at his bedside and uttered a few words before falling back to sleep."

Headline, LandonDemand News Service:

"Oh, Christ, I’m Not Dead Yet?”

_____

[I believe I have overcome the white Gmail background. Must be a mistake.]

Sounding It Out

I don't often copyedit with an ear toward a book being read aloud, but I just couldn't let slide an all-encompassing reference to the Judeo-Christian deity as "s/he/it."

Three Books in a Row, It Seems Like

Vocal chords.

Not Yet Appealing to My Prurient Interests

Working on a Marxist-feminist study of Cuban women's hips. Should be more engaging.

Quote of the Day

"There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?"
—Henry Kissinger, 1969

Quoted in Donald F. McHenry, Micronesia: Trust Betrayed (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1975)

Quote of the Day

From correspondence with an author, and the label for the post is a little deceiving, given that the author is in the UK:

"I think down-sizing is the way to go. However, it's really, really hard! We all want simpler lives, yet the complications of getting to that point leave one's mind boggling!"

Words I Never Expected to Type in an Index

zombie apocalypse

Damn Overachievers

He's known for his charitable works and activism (although I also seem to remember stories about some domestic abuse against Darryl Hannah), and many of the Eagles' more tolerable songs are his, but how the hell do you write such lyrics as those below at age 16?

[Lyrics reflect Nico's version on her first album. She and the songwriter were an item back in those days, when he was all of 18 and she was in her post-Velvet Underground period.]

"These Days" (Jackson Browne)

Arranged by John Cale; backing musicians: John Cale and Lou Reed

I've been out walking

I don't do too much talking these days

These days

These days I seem to think a lot

About the things that I forgot to do

And all the times I had the chance to

I stopped my rambling

I don't do too much gambling these days

These days 

These days I seem to think about

How all the changes came about my way

And I wonder if I'll see another highway

I had a lover

I don't think I'll risk another these days

These days

And if I seem to be afraid

To live the life that I have made in song

It's just that I've been losing so long

La . . . la . . . la . . . 

I stopped my dreaming

I won't do too much scheming these days

These days

These days I sit on cornerstones

And count the time the quarter turns to ten

Please don't confront me with my failures

I had not forgotten them

More APA Rage

White
Black
New York, NY in Biblio
Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press
353-365

Makes a body appreciate Chicago, IL

Smart and Dumber

I am constantly amazed at what some otherwise highly educated people think passes for correct punctuation.

The authors whose books I read for theological and university presses are supposed to be experts in their fields. Said authors didn't get that way, one presumes, by watching Wheel of Fortune while pounding Cheetos and Mountain Dew.

They've read books and scholarly articles. Lots of them.

So, when writing their own, why do they flaunt the most basic of grammatical standards?

I'm working on a book now in which the author routinely puts punctuation inside close parentheses that should appear outside of it. A few examples follow, with some words changed to protect the guilty:

Some institutions prefix a letter or two to denote the type of image, and some have a code number unique to the donor (especially if they are repeat donors.)

A private lender was anxious about placing his historic firearms in the museum for a required six-month period (the usual display time for firearms is no more than three months.) 

Always leave a note in it’s [sic] place stating: 1) what it is; 2) the date it was removed; 3) the reason it was removed (e.g. for a loan, photography, conservation;) and 4) the approximate date of return. Imagine seeing a note that simply states “Object Taken” (as has been seen.)

Make sure your doors have weather-stripping, sweeps and thresholds (gaskets,) and block all other small areas of possible insect entry.

Do these examples suffice? Imagine 142 pages of this style. Thankfully the volume is short.

The point of the post is that I don't understand how multiple-degreed, professional people who are highly respected in their fields can write sentences as if they're unfamiliar with the concept. 

Another example, which I see frequently enough to drive me to distraction -- and a form of which also resides buried somewhere in this blog -- is

"Where did my car go," Jim wondered?

My question has always been, "Has this author ever seen another publication present punctuation in this way? How can this even look correct, even from a visual standpoint?" 

I guess that's the case if someone has spent a lot of time reading. There are other ways to make it in the world.

. . . Not that I'm familiar with them. I'd say I'm open to suggestions, but at this point I'm pretty untrainable, and you don't want me in your workplace. Not if anyone there likes microwave popcorn.

Must Have Been Interesting in the Green Room

It was an unusual display of star power considering that [the Erie Benedictine Sisters], which soon disbanded and was never heard from again, shared the stage that evening with Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, singer Petula Clark, comedian Alan King, and the Muppets in their first TV appearance.

Just Finished Proofing a Book by Her and Now Indexing Her Biography

Everything that is written about us is written without us. The only input that the [Catholic] church takes on the women’s issue is what we do on the steps outside your closed doors. After you issue your bulletins defining us as lower and lesser kinds of human beings, we react to them. Dissent is the only ministry a woman has in the church. And when we react, you call us radical feminists and heretics.

--Joan Chittister

Mascot

Meet the proprietor in a rare moment of dozing, with four-month-old Franny:

Yah

Slavery made many free white Jamaicans very rich; by the middle of the eighteenth century, Jamaicans would be the wealthiest Britons outside of Britain. As historian Trevor Burnard has shown, the average white man in Jamaica was more than thirty-six times wealthier than the average white man in the thirteen mainland colonies. Only four men in all of New England and the middle colonies had wealth that exceeded the wealth of the average white Jamaican. (emphasis added)

Today's Great Customer Comment

One of my publishers asks me to bid on a large novelization of some ancient stories. Large, like 800-900 manuscript pages, and you can look at my rate sheet and do the math yourself.

The author responds, "I already spent a lot of money with a content editor. Why should I spend more on a copyeditor?"

Very reasonable question, to which I can usually, through a page or two of sample editing, offer quite damning evidence of why a copyeditor provides essential value.

The managing editor for the press asks if I can do a sample edit to show the author what he'll get for his money. In perhaps the first time in -- well -- forever, I tell a client that, indeed, the manuscript is in such good shape that the $4K or so spent on copyediting would be misused funds . . . and it would be such easy money. Through a sampling of different parts of the document, I can find virtually nothing I would change.

The publisher is presently recovering from a serious operation (N.B., DB: not a lobotomy). The managing editor passed along that the publisher thought she'd taken too much Oxycontin before reading my email.

What was that old image I used? Maybe those days are behind me.



But don't count on it.

Oh, Those Wacky Academics

Even though the topics may change over time, much of my labor still involves pressing my nose to the trappings of supposedly informed discourse: footnotes (or author/date citations) and bibliographies. Nothing like editing 12 hours of such documentation to the exclusion of any running text. But I guess that's a production decision.

Such citations are important, one is given to understand. My grad-school son and girlfriend were at the house during finals period in the spring and had me giving their APA documentation in a semester-end paper the once-over.

One of my esteemed publishers -- esteemed because they send me paychecks, albeit a bit sluggishly -- has me edit the text and then deal with the author's review of my copyedit. In other words, I get to see what edits they override, what mistakes I overlooked (he writes, mea culpingly), and what they choose to ignore.

I'm presently reviewing a manuscript that I sent back to the publisher in October 2014, for chrissakes, and the author just managed to get around to reviewing the text. That cutting edge dulls a bit with time, buddy.

Routine queries involve places in which the author/date citations don't match up with the bibliography or where the author should be citing a particular fact.

Author for this book has simply deleted many of the queries where the information disagreed -- and deleted the citation itself as well. Simply too busy to do the legwork, I guess. So now what appears? Either what seems like an unsubstantiated fact or a wee bit of something that smacks of, uh, violation of fair use -- or perhaps lack of intellectual integrity. Is there a nicer word for that?

A representation of a null set, so the site sez