Castle Walls Editing

Category: Uncategorized

  • I Come to Bury Verbs, Not to Praise Them

    Mourners of the soon-to-be-buried verb looked on as the coffin descended into the open grave. The question mark hunched over in grief. The exclamation point stood bolt upright, its posture a salute to its good friend’s passing. Three periods stood side by side, a single space between them. They looked off into the distance, elliptical expressions only hinting at the emotions roiling within.

    As a pair of quotation marks prepared to say something profound, a single, overriding concern passed among the congregants: Why, cruel Fate? Why?

    Every day, all across the land, people are burying verbs. The practice undoubtedly seems like something that happens elsewhere, something that happens to other people, in other neighborhoods. The truth, however, is that it occurs closer to home than most would care to think.

    A buried verb, also referred to as a smothered verb or nominalization, results when a verb is hidden within a noun phrase. If a person says “She made an agreement” instead of “She agreed,” then that person has buried the verb.

    The following are a few other examples of buried verbs:

    • take a look (instead of “look”)
    • make a recommendation (instead of “recommend”)
    • make the argument (instead of “argue”)

    One consequence of using buried verbs is that the writer is unnecessarily adding words. Another is that the writer is obscuring meaning. By their nature, nouns are less active than verbs, so employing a noun to do the heavy lifting for a sentence deadens the language.

    The verb is the engine that makes the sentence run, and people can always improve their writing by using stronger verbs. For the same reason, as Stephen King recommended in his fantastic book On Writing, people should not use adverbs to cover up weak verbs.

    This does not mean that people should never use buried verbs or adverbs, but a careful writer is aware of their potentially adverse effect on a sentence. When editing your work, these are two more things to keep your eye on. And honestly, considering the doleful expressions in the scene above, burying a verb may not be worth the guilt that is sure to follow.

    Note: In the first paragraph, I used the phrase “side by side.” This phrase is not hyphenated when used as an adverb, as above, but it is hyphenated when used as an adjective (“side-by-side periods”). A similar expression, “face-to-face,” is hyphenated as both an adverb and an adjective. No wonder people have such a difficult time with hyphenation!

  • I’m in the (Subjunctive) Mood for a Melody

    I wish I were the subjunctive mood. So mysterious. So misunderstood. If I were the subjunctive mood, only the cool crowd would get me, man. People would want to plumb my depths, find what lurks beneath these still waters. But my innermost nature would remain an eternal mystery, because I’d be like the wind, baby.

    The subjunctive mood has been referred to as a linguistic fossil, and as fewer and fewer people understand it, it falls farther and farther out of use and someday could conceivably disappear entirely. What a pity that would be.

    Of the people who do use it, one has to imagine that a good portion of those don’t know why they use it beyond recognizing that it “sounds right.” Someone might sing, “If I were a rich man,” but if pressed on why he or she sang “I were” instead of “I was,” the person would likely have no real idea—and might even fear that an error had been committed.

    The Merriam-Webster definition of mood is the “distinction of form or a particular set of inflectional forms of a verb to express whether the action or state it denotes is conceived as fact or in some other manner (as command, possibility, or wish).” (I could have paraphrased the definition right off, but this way I can recommend Harm∙less Drudg∙ery, an informative and entertaining blog from Merriam-Webster lexicographer Kory Stamper.)

    To put it more simply, mood shows the mode or manner that thoughts are expressed. Most people are much more familiar with the indicative mood, used to express facts and opinions and to make inquiries, and the imperative mood, used to give orders and make requests.

    The subjunctive mood, marked by seemingly odd verb forms and sometimes known as the malady-sounding conjunctive mood, is used to express statements that are contrary to fact or conditions that are doubtful or unreal, such as wishes and possibilities. Clauses beginning with if are a frequent hideout for subjunctive verbs.

    The following are a few examples of subjunctive verbs:

    • If I were taller, it would be you looking up to me.
    • I wish it were a sunnier day.
    • Her command was that we all be on our toes.

    Unreal states, wishing, longing even: yes, the subjunctive mood is a dreamer, and what a beautiful thing to be.

  • A Look at Scrivener

    During my college years (e-mail was as yet all but unheard of, and kids could still smoke in dorm rooms, if that gives you a general time frame) I was mystified by the processes other students employed during their studies. I took notes in class and would review my textbooks, but that was the extent of it, and that worked for me.

    For some students, however, studying seemed to consist of painstakingly highlighting so much of their textbooks that I wondered whether the few words left unmarked were in fact the ones of greater significance.

    While mindlessly highlighting line after line of text, these students might not have been doing any real, actual studying, but in their minds they were following the processes of studying and so were in fact studying, even if it didn’t translate into the point of the whole exercise: learning.

    I’ve always been wary (note the use or wary rather than weary, so commonly confused) of embracing processes that give me a false sense of accomplishment. People often spend so much time going through the motions and getting their processes in order that they never truly engage in the pure, undiluted work of whatever art it is they are practicing.

    Get ready to accuse me of burying the lead*: The preceding paragraphs are meant as a (perhaps unnecessarily long) lead-in to my thoughts on a tool I have approached cautiously but am nevertheless finding myself excited by.

    Scrivener software is a content-generation tool for writing and organizing documents such as novels, screenplays, research papers, and nonfiction works. The software allows writers to view their work in a number of different ways and allows writers to break their work into separate scenes. Writers can therefore open the program, go to their work in progress, and select a specific scene to work on. Scrivener provides a corkboard, index-card view as well so that writers can view the arrangement of their scenes and rearrange them with ease.

    The program is also notable for easily accessed folders where writers can store research and character and scene sheets. At any point, writers can compile their scenes and format complete documents.

    Scrivener is available on a thirty-day free trial, and I downloaded the trial software yesterday. The price of the full software is $40, and even with only a few hours of testing, I am certain it is a purchase I will make.

    Another reviewer, who writes long, research-heavy nonfiction works, noted that the software has become almost indispensable for him, even though it won’t do the hard part of actual writing. This brings me back to my introduction, in that writing is always core, whatever methods one employs. No one wants to fall into the trap of thinking and talking about writing more than doing the actual work of writing, but I can see the benefit of this software.

    Visualizing one’s work is often difficult if it’s viewed as one unwieldy mass and not as a collection of parts that work together to create the whole, so this index-card view of one’s work could be beneficial. There are certain works I would want to lay out on the corkboard, scene by scene, before diving into the actual scenes themselves. Having written primarily with Word, the ability to go to a certain scene without managing different files or locating it within one large file is extremely attractive. Scrivener also allows users to import and export one’s work easily with programs like Word and Final Draft, so it isn’t necessarily the only software one would use when working on a project.

    In short, whatever one’s method, I think this software is worth a look.

    * The introductory section of a news story is also called the lede, but, and I would appreciate someone with a more extensive journalism background correcting me if I’m wrong, I believe the expression is more properly burying the lead.

  • The Second Time Through

    In preparation for this week’s release of Justin Cronin’s The Twelve, I spent a good part of last weekend rereading its predecessor, The Passage. Here is a sentence from Cronin’s epic work:

    “By nightfall they were fifty miles past Oklahoma City, hurtling west across the open prairie toward a wall of spring thunderheads ascending from the horizon like a bank of blooming flowers in a time-lapse video.”

    A number of things struck me about this sentence. There’s tremendous movement, for one thing, and there’s the use of the word thunderheads, which seems to me suggestive of someone who’s spent a great deal of time looking at the sky over an open landscape. The imagery of flowers is beautiful and also cinematic (time-lapse photography has been employed with weather quite effectively in numerous films). Writers are correct to exhibit concern over using too many prepositional phrases, which can suck the life from a sentence, but I think they work here.

    Though obviously outside the realm of authorial intent, the sentence did put me in mind of these lyrics from the Alice in Chains song “Brother”:

    Roses in a vase of white

    Bloodied by the thorns beside the leaves

    That fall because my hand is

    Pulling them hard as I can

    Something I picked up during my second time through the book is the theme of falling that follows the character Wolgast. At one point, Wolgast is carrying the girl Amy, who is unconscious, up a ladder in an air shaft. He has to lean out with her and maneuver her into a duct above him, and there’s this line:

    “He began to fall. He’d been falling all along.”

    Caught in the moment, I only read this the first time as coinciding with the physical action of the scene. But on my second reading, it brought tears to my eyes, because it said so much more.

    And then there is this line, which I found devastating the first time through and just as affecting the second. Notice again the reference to falling.

    “Amy, he thought as the stars began to fall, everywhere and all around; and he tried to fill his mind with just her name, his daughter’s name, to help him from his life.”

    This sentence is dear to me, and I have trouble speaking it aloud without being overcome. Cormac McCarthy, whose stunning work The Road was frequently referenced in reviews for The Passage, is famously quoted as saying that semicolons and exclamation points have no place in literature. McCarthy is a brilliant writer, but I think the semicolon works well here, and I also enjoy the way exclamation points are used in the works of Sarah Langan (a writer whose fiction blows me away) and Swamplandia! author Karen Russell.

  • Have You Seen My Towel?

    The hyphen is an unassuming little bugger, isn’t he?

    He’s happy to break a word between lines, but he doesn’t expect you to take much notice of him. He seems content to say, “The rest of the word is down there, on the next line.” The hyphen practically waves his hands in the air, bashful as always: “Really, just pretend I’m not here.”

    Hyphens are also known to disappear over time. Words such as “teen-ager,” which once used hyphens, eventually abandon them: “teenager.” It’s as if the hyphen eventually begins to feel extremely uncomfortably and simply says, “Well, I’m not needed here any longer. Don’t worry, I’ll show myself out.”

    Hyphens will even stand in for their bigger brother the en dash (–) when a typeface won’t accommodate the lesser-known mark. An en dash is the length of a capital N and is used for number ranges (1940–1960) and to hold together certain compound expressions that require a mark stronger than the hyphen to hold the expressions together (a Nobel Prize–winning scientist, for instance). Because the vast majority of the population can’t pick the en dash out of a lineup, the hyphen all too often gets away with this impersonation.

    A mark more people are familiar with is the em dash (—), which is the length of a capital M and is often just called the dash. The em dash can be used in a sentence in place of parentheses, to indicate an interruption in dialogue, or, as more and more seems to be the case today, to set off dramatic statements—or supposedly dramatic statements.

    Unlike the unassuming hyphen, the em dash is all bravado. Increasingly, writers are using em dashes with a frequency they can’t seem to control. These em dashes are like spontaneous erections. The writer might be a bit embarrassed by them, but that doesn’t stop them from popping up all over the place—quite frankly, it’s enough to give anyone a headache!

    It’s not that the em dash doesn’t have its uses, but with its almost ubiquitous presence in today’s writing—especially on the Web—a little propriety might be in order.

    One might also think just how all this celebration of the em dash makes the humble hyphen feel. You can hardly blame him for wanting to avoid public showers.

    Note: Although en dashes and em dashes are commonly understood to correspond to the lengths of upper-case N’s and M’s, respectively, their actual lengths vary by font.

    Reading Update: Last night I began reading The Double by the extraordinary writer José Saramago. I have always been fascinated by doppelgangers, so you can imagine my excitement.

  • Mommy and Daddy Still Love You

    Commas are often like confused children who have to learn different sets of rules for each of their divorced parents’ homes. At Mom’s house, it’s perfectly acceptable—in fact, it’s mandatory—to jump into place before the word and in a series.

    “You need to do your homework, eat your dinner, and get to bed!” insisted Mom.

    But at Dad’s place, things are different. Dad, at his grumpiest, recently told the comma, “Quit fooling around with that and! Do your homework, eat your dinner and get to bed!”

    The comma does his best to do the right thing, but even when he knows he’s in the right place, Mom and Dad still give him trouble. At Mom’s house, he took his rightful place behind the state name in this sentence: “Solomons, Maryland, is a wonderful place to live.”

    “What in tarnation are you doing there? You don’t belong there!” chided Mom.

    At Dad’s, he rightfully slipped in behind the year: “January 1, 2013, is going to be the best New Year’s Day ever!”

    “Get out of there, boy. You being there just ain’t natural,” cried Dad, horrified.

    And the poor comma certainly never meant to come between Mom and Da—er, the subject and its verb.

    The comma Mom favors in our first example is referred to as the series (or Oxford) comma. It is considered more exact and it helps to avoid confusion. This, however, is a style choice, and Associated Press style, favored by most newspapers, allows this comma to be dropped.

    So neither Mom nor Dad is more correct than the other, though Mom has plenty of friends who support her point of view and Dad has his own pals who think he’s absolutely right. It’s all very confusing for a young comma struggling to find his place in this upside-down world.

    At least there’s one thing Mom and Dad can agree on: It would be nothing but trouble if their little comma started hanging out with semicolons.

    Reading update: I’m currently enjoying James Newman’s The Wicked, his spin on a 1980s-style horror novel, and Ian McEwan’s debut collection, First Love, Last Rites.

  • Grammar Questions

    Early in his career, English footballer Michael Owen celebrated goals by rubbing his hands together in a joyous “Goody! Goody! Goody!” show of enthusiasm. Book lovers feel something similar when learning of a book that captures their imagination and produces a swell of anticipation that is almost inevitably more expansive than whatever pleasures the book has in store.

    I felt such a surge after reading reviews for a collection of stories by Lydia Davis, an author whose works I was unfamiliar with. I particularly enjoy short stories, and she is a short story writer of much acclaim, as evidenced by the following praise for The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis:

    “A body of work probably unique in American writing . . . I suspect that The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis will in time be seen as one of the great, strange American literary contributions” (James Wood, The New Yorker).

    “Magnificent . . . Davis has made one of the great books in recent literature, equal parts horse sense and heartache” (Dan Chiasson, The New York Review of Books).

    One of the reviews for the collection mentioned the story “Grammar Questions,” in which the narrator, whose father is dying, employs a kind of grammatical logic to explore her emotional landscape. A father of two wonderful children, I have a disastrous relationship with my own father, so I am drawn to stories of fathers for two very different reasons. (Not surprisingly, I was greatly affected by both the father-and-son relationship in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the fatherly role Wolgast establishes with Amy in Justin Cronin’s The Passage.)

    And the story involves grammar. Goody! Goody! Goody!

    “Grammar Questions” is a damn good story, and I would recommend exploring Lydia Davis’s work. In addition to being a finely wrought contemplation of death, the story provides numerous examples of the proper use of punctuation with quotation marks. At the end of a sentence, a question mark or exclamation point goes inside the quotation marks if it applies to the quoted material. The mark goes outside the quotation marks if it applies to the sentence as a whole.

    Look at the following examples from the story:

    Now, during the time he is dying, can I say, “This is where he lives”?

    and

    If someone asks me, “Where does he live?” should I answer, “Well, right now he is not living, he is dying”?

    Style Note: Titles of novels, albums, and collections, such as The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, are generally set in italics. Short stories, poems, and songs are generally enclosed by quotation marks.

  • I Can’t Take Any More of This! I Can’t Take It Anymore!

    Early Saturday on my balcony. September. Over the horizon, the sun idles, seemingly as cool as the morning air. My coffee steams. I treasure this time for reading and shouldn’t let anything spoil my enjoyment of an entertaining tale. Yet even the smallest editing mistakes can do just that.

    When the scene above played out, I was reading a horror anthology on my Kindle, where one can expect to find a host of errors: missing hyphens, random hyphens, words run together, and other such issues. (To be fair, some e-books are better edited and formatted than others, and this is a problem with e-books in general and not with any particular device.)

    The errors, though, were particularly bothersome because they occurred in a story written by a crime writer of immense talent. It’s much easier to dismiss these kinds of glitches when you’re not thoroughly enthralled by the story.

    The first error was the misuse of anymore, which is properly employed as an adverb: “I don’t eat meat anymore.” However, when used as an adjective, one should write it as two words: “I can’t eat any more meat.”

    The other thing that caught my eye (and took me out of the book!) was an incorrect punctuation mark. An apostrophe is used to indicate the omission of letters, such as in the contraction can’t. When letters are omitted at the beginning of the word, such as with ’Stang (if, for instance, you wanted to shorten Mustang), then you place an apostrophe at the beginning of the word. You do not place a single opening quote; the apostrophe always faces in the same direction and always looks like a single end quote.

    The difficulty is that word-processor programs assume that you want a single opening quote even when you want an apostrophe, so pasting in the proper mark requires a little bit of effort. I know of one reader, however, who will appreciate that effort, and he’s sitting in my chair. ’Tis true!

    Fall Reading: I’ve decided to wait (or at least attempt to wait) until January to read the two most recent books in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. Reading those novels in the dead of winter is too delicious a prospect to pass up. I’m currently reading the gonzo horror novel John Dies at the End by David Wong and am fairly salivating at the thought of two upcoming releases: Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth and Justin Cronin’s The Twelve. Both are major publishing events. I’ve already placed my order for the signed, limited edition of The Twelve being released by Cemetery Dance, who produced a beautiful edition of the book’s predecessor, The Passage.

  • Words That Shimmer

    A word or phrase that conveys nothing but its surface meaning to one person brings with it a whole host of associations for someone else. Literature—great and otherwise—abounds with allusion, so one is never just reading a single work but also all of the works being referenced. Scholars happily—and, yes, smugly, often insufferably so—spend their lives picking out allusions from works like James Joyce’s Ulysses.

    To fully appreciate an author’s work, and the context of that work, one would have to read all the books that that author had read, but then one might as well assert that a person would have to live through all of that author’s experiences as well. Even if one were to attempt either, both paths are blocked by obvious limitations. Even so, and without going too far down the road toward Pretentious Assville, I can say that there’s a great deal of joy to be had by welcoming other works into what would otherwise be a single, isolated reading experience.

    After complete, happy immersion in Dan Simmons’s novel The Terror, which I picked up after Stephen King named it to one of his best-of-the-year lists, I grew more and more eager for Simmons’s next novel, Drood. Because Drood concerned Charles Dickens, and particularly his last, unfinished work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, I read that in anticipation of Simmons’s novel. I also realized that I should read Bleak House as well, as Simmons’s Drood contains a counterpart to Bleak House’s marvelously drawn character Inspector Bucket.

    Simmons’s Drood is told from the perspective of Dickens’s contemporary Wilkie Collins, a successful writer in his own right, but a lesser light than Dickens by far, and an opium addict to boot. (In Simmons’s novel, Collins quaffs laudanum by the glassful.)

    Having read both The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Bleak House (which to that point I should have read long before anyway!), I dove into Simmons’s Drood. I wasn’t far into the novel, however, before I realized that I should read Collins’s work as well, because it was heavily referenced in the text. So I read Collins’s The Moonstone, read a bit more of Simmons’s Drood, read Collins’s The Woman in White, and then finished Drood.

    The inclusion of these other works in my journey through Drood resulted in a nourishing, cathedral-sized expansion of the reading experience. So often allusions feel impossibly far off from the work referencing them. They can feel like something dead spoken of by the living, but in this experience, the works seemed to interact and speak to each other as though they were doing so in the present.

    ***

    The thoughts above resulted from a reflection on my previous post (“Toast”), in which I used two words, passing and limelight, that shimmer for me. Some words do that, whether they reference a song or a movie or a novel. I’ve encountered passing, in its archaic meaning of “surpassing,” most recently in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, and I’ve always loved that particular usage. Because my last post involved the NFL, I could not resist employing the phrase “passing strange,” for obvious reasons.

    As for limelight, there’s a great quote in the enjoyable—but decidedly not-great—thriller Ricochet, in which Lindsay Wagner (the Bionic Woman, of course) says to Denzel Washington, “You wanted to be in the limelight. It’s a hot seat now, pal.” If I ever happen upon a situation in which I can use that line, you can be damn sure I’ll drop it without shame or hesitation. In the meantime, I’ll slip in limelight on its own from time to time, and, even if I’m the only one who knows why, I’ll enjoy the way it shimmers.

    ***

    A few grammar notes:

    Traditionally, the possessive of singular nouns ending in s is formed by adding apostrophe-s, so you would have “Dickens’s” and “Simmons’s.” Associated Press (AP) style, which most newspapers follow, however, does not employ the final s, so you would write “Dickens’ literary acumen.” People will try to beat you over the head with what’s right and wrong, but as with so many of these arguments, it’s a style issue.

    Titles of works are generally set in italics, but when forming a possessive of a title (and whether you should do so or not is another argument), set the title in italics but the apostrophe-s in roman (non-italic) font.

    The names of book series, such as Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, are not set in italics. Also note that series can be either singular or plural.

    When using words as words (“the word limelight”), set that word in italics.

  • Toast

    I’ve never applied eye black before tackling a manuscript. My reading glasses, I’ll readily admit, don’t even come close to saying badass the way that eye black does. Still, with the kickoff of the NFL season scant hours away, it occurs to me that there’s a position on the gridiron not all too dissimilar to that of copy editor: the cornerback.

    Strange, you might think (or passing strange), to compare a position held by one of the world’s finest athletes to the role of copy editor, but there’s one obvious link: a copy editor, like a cornerback, can only screw up. We can only get burned.

    If a copy editor does his or her job correctly, no one notices. By the same token, if a cornerback shuts down a receiver, the ball doesn’t get thrown to that side of the field, and the corner and receiver might as well be invisible. It’s only when the receiver slips behind the defense and hauls in a big gain that the now-hapless-looking corner gets his name called. Any editor who’s missed something (and all editors miss from time to time) knows that feeling of getting schooled. (Thankfully, our moments of shame aren’t broadcast on national television.)

    Like a corner who’s just bitten on a really good fake, all we can do is shake it off, try to learn something from the experience, and remind ourselves that we’re damned good at what we do. What just happened won’t happen again. Not on my watch.

    I don’t want to completely discount our moments of glory, either. Snagging an interception and taking it to the house is a surefire way to bring a crowd (happily spilling beer and overpriced concessions) to its feet. Copy editors enjoy their own time in the limelight, even if pointing out a dangling participle isn’t likely to make any sports channel’s top-ten plays of the day.

    These moments, however, are few and far between. Our lot is to toil in obscurity, the garbage men of publishing, cleaning up unsightly errors while the rest of the world sleeps.

    I enjoy my work. I think it a noble profession. I like leaving a manuscript in better shape than I found it.

    I’m happy to play my position.