BSL 101: British as a Second Language

A book had been lurking on my schedule for months. Author told me about it last fall and sent me a draft in November to begin working on it. A few weeks later came a replacement chapter, then another. Thankfully I hadn’t begun working on the original yet, but I requested that when the entire manuscript was set, that’s when I should receive a complete new version. Author agreed.

Then the author said, I believe, one of the other chapters was undergoing heavy revision, or there was a new chapter or something, so everything’s on hold. OK.

Revised manuscript comes in February, followed by an email that some of the documentation needs to be reworked, and here’s what needs to be done. I wrote back and said, again, when you have a complete, finished manuscript, please send it to me. My point was not to be a jerk, and I explained that to the author. I’m not the one closest to the material. I’m not the subject expert. It’s not up to me to make substantive decisions about what’s in or not in the books.

About five hours later, the author sends me the completed manuscript, which I’ve now returned to the author, edited and tidied up. Great book, author is very pleasant. All’s good, although I do have one concern. Author said that the publisher’s deadline for the manuscript is August. I have a feeling the copyedited manuscript will not reside unmolested until then; rather, I fear that the author is going, by way of fact checking, to show this manuscript to a bunch of potential buyers of the book and tweak it for the next five months.

So, of course, down the line, some poor sap of a proofreader might be seeing When Versions Collide.

Oh. That would be me. Happy days.

The author is publishing the book with a UK press, so when the original manuscript came in last November, I had Colleen (dba interngirl) go through their 20-page style sheet and try to highlight all the differences from Chicago and any weirdness that didn’t look Amerkun. She marked plenty.

All her work was mostly for naught as I needed to refresh myself on all of it five months later anyway (formatting, a lot of things), but the press’s style sheet did spell out for me some things about British English that had baffled me. I’m not sure it does any less now.

Full point after abbreviation only where last letter of word omitted: Dr, Mr but etc., Prof., but not after contractions or in acronyms: Dr, St, Mr, BBC, UNESCO, USA. Note especially: ed. / eds, vol. / vols, Ch. / Chs, but the exception: no. nos.

Let that roll around in your head for a minute.

I’d always wondered why I would see “ed.” but “eds” in bibliographies when dealing with British works. Now I know. I probably miscorrected it in some volumes years ago. Live and learn. But to me, that’s too much to think about. Just put a damn full stop at the end of the abbreviation.

Include ‘e’ in forms such as: ageing, judgement, likeable.

> Use –ize and –ization; recognize, criticize; but use analyse, paralyse, electrolyse. Note that a number of verbs have no alternative to the ‘ise’ spelling, including: advertise, advise, circumcise, compromise, despise, devise, enterprise, exercise, franchise, improvise, revise, surmise, supervise, televise.

What the British taketh away in punctuation, they add back in unnecessary letters. I’ve never liked “judgement,” and of course. “acknowledgements” is the bane of editors and proofreaders everywhere in the United States. I don’t know what’s up with Use –ize and –ization. Nor do I understand the -lyse exception, which they don’t identify as such. In the book, I ran across other -lyse words. Do they fall under this rule? Could be argued either way.

Ellipses: … No space between points; space after only if leading to new sentence, no extra point if at end of sentence.

OK, class. Think about this one. Not only are the butt-ugly “points” (wait, here they’re not full points?) set tight, but no space around them, unless the following bit of copy is a sentence. Let me demonstrate:

The umpire was hot...and tired.

The umpire was hot, tired... He threw the manager out of the game for dropping the M-bomb.

I actually grew to like this style in the course of copyediting the book. Not saying I’d want to change to it, but it is efficient.

The ellipses, that is. Not the umpiring.

Round brackets should be used within round brackets where necessary. Square brackets should normally be confined to editorial comment.

By this point, I’m enraged. It’s like, “What the hell have you people done to our language?” I want to go into a Sam Kinison rant, “Have you ever heard the word ‘parentheses,’ people? What the hell is a ‘round bracket’?” So, in this book we have some parenthetical — I guess that would be round-bracketal — in-text citations that read “(blah blah blah (Smith and Jones 2000)).” Joyous.

Use minimum numbers for number spans except in ‘teens’, e.g. 25–8, 136–42, 150–1, but 12–16.

Whatever.

Formatting:

En Rules (and Em Rules)

> An en rule is longer than a hyphen and is used to replace ‘to’ in number spans, e.g. ‘24–8’. As there is no en rule key on the standard keyboard you should indicate en rules between numbers using the normal short hyphen.

> The en rule is also used to link two items of equal weight, e.g. ‘Nazi–Soviet pact’. To indicate words which should be linked with en rules (rather than normal hyphens) type a double hyphen, e.g. Nazi--Soviet pact.

> Spaced en rules are used as parenthetical dashes or pauses. Type a single hyphen with a space before and after to indicate a dash.

> Only use em (—) rules to indicate a deliberately obscured word.

So, em dashes don’t appear. An em dash is for their purposes an en dash with spaces around it. In the bibliography, instead of the 3-em dash for a repeated author, they use an en dash.

And what everyone wants to know:

> If following UK style, always use single quotation marks for dialogue and quoted material in the text. Reserve the use of double quotation marks for quotes within quotes, e.g. ‘Edward found the trappings of “royalty” hung heavily.’

> In UK style the full stop only falls inside the quotation mark if the material quoted is a complete sentence, e.g. He called it “my house”, even though it belonged to Clara.

Now, I think I get it. But why oh why did they use double quotes in the last example, and why did they refer to a “full stop” when a comma appears? Is a comma also a “full stop”?

I’m going to have to relearn all this stuff again at some point. I think I’ll see this book again even before it goes to the publisher. Just a guess.

A Most Unlikely Result -- Intern '11, 1

An intern from a local college worked with me during this last school semester — a coed, as the vernacular goes, or went. This intern, we’ll call her “Colleen,” wanted to find out about the world of editing, and she’d receive two hours of college credit for doing so: 10 to 14 hours per week for about 12 weeks, soaking up the heady Land on Demand corporate atmosphere.

Colleen is the third intern who’s worked with me over the last six or so years. What’s made this hosting-of-intern slightly different is that Nicole is between my sons’ ages. Spending this amount of time over the last few months with someone in college — while my two are as well — was interesting. I think I was well prepared.

I'll discuss the internship in more detail later. Colleen and I both were required to write summaries of the experience to complete the process (and I needed to provide a number/letter grade), so maybe I’ll mine those writings for some future postings. My contribution was more of a strengths-and-weaknesses assessment.

Another intent of a perhaps future arc (ugh) on the internship would be to try to move back to where this blog mostly started: discussions of work-desk issues. Way too much miscellania these days.

Before the internship was over, I asked Colleen to write a blog posting on her experience, which follows:

===

I have done the impossible (improbable at the very least) and completed an English major in two years. On top of all my regular work, I chose to register for an internship to experience the life of an editor. Along the way I have gained a huge respect for copyeditors and proofreaders. Someday I hope to call the work mine.

This semester just happened to also be the time when I am working on my senior project, a mini-thesis, if you will. Working as an editorial intern for roughly 14 hours a week added to my 18-credit-hour class load has definitely taught me how to organize my time. I will say that the organization skills for my project have been spurred forward by my work with Bob. I’ve been exposed to countless styles of writing and formatting, and have found strengths and flaws in all of them. I would like to think that these observations have shown through in my own writing, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I were stuck in my own ways as a writer—I am an 82-year-old woman stuck in a 21-year-old body, fifty cats and all.

It would be nice to be able to apply everything that I have learned to each of my assignments for class, but who am I kidding? Switching from MLA to Chicago is a challenge in itself, let alone having the added stress of Bob follow my work with his own. In the beginning, I assumed that I would get faster the more comfortable I became with the work of an editor. I stand corrected. . . . He has me always double-checking my work, and I’m right most of the time, but sometimes I remain lodged in my old ways. I will say that one of my proudest moments was when Bob commented, “I passed the ‘Colleen inspection.’” Yes. I have an inspection named after me.

Coming into this internship I knew that I wanted to do something along the same lines that Bob does, but I wasn’t quite sure yet. My first week here, I was proofing the index for a religious book. The entire index was made of biblical references and had to be re-alphabetized by hand, not with the automatic word-by-word alphabetization that Word does. Considering that the index was probably close to forty pages at this point, I thought I’d hate working here the moment the stack of papers plopped onto my table. As I got into the work, the time flew by and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was enjoying myself. Later on in the semester, I worked on a few different indexes and enjoyed each one better than the last. Call me crazy, but I think I found my destiny: indexing.

I’ve always had an eye for mistakes or confusing wording, and have enjoyed helping other people with their writing, so I chose this career path as the obvious option. While I dabble in creative writing and poetry, I really enjoy editing and indexing; I want my career to be my passion. Bob has shown me that it is possible and that I can enjoy what I do with my life. This lesson negates all else that I have learned this semester—not on my internship evaluation, of course.

In my final week of interning with Bob, I hope to keep learning and experiencing the life of an editor. Or indexer in my case.