Writing for Grammar: Editing S to X

sans serif
A typeface that does not have a serif (crossline) decorating the main strokes of the characters.

sentence style
Capitalization style for heads and titles in which all words are in lowercase except those that would be capitalized in a sentence. Also called initial cap only.

serial comma
Comma preceding and or or in a list of items (one, two, andOxford comma.

serif
A decorative line crossing the main strokes of a letter in some type styles such as Times Roman.

sidebar
A short article or news story that complements or amplifies a major article or story.

signposting
Cross-references to topics previously discussed in a document.

sink
Distance from the top of a printed page to a specific element on that page.

solidus
Name of the / character. Also called slash or virgule.

specs
Type specifications indicating typeface, point size, spacing, margins, and the like.

stet
Latin for "let it stand." Indicates that text marked for deletion should be restored.

style sheet
Form filled in by a copy editor as a record of editorial decisions applied to a manuscript.

subhead
Small headline in the body of a text.

T of C
Short for table of contents. Also called TOC.

TK
Short for to come. Refers to material not yet in place.

trade books
Books meant for general readers, as distinguished from books intended for professionals, scholars, or students.

trim
To reduce the length of a story. Also called boil.

trim size
Dimensions of a page of a book.

UC
Short for uppercase (capital letters).

UC/lc
Short for uppercase and lowercase. Indicates that text is to be capitalized according to headline style.

unnumbered list
Vertical list in which items are not marked by either numbers or bullets.

widow
The last line of a paragraph that appears alone at the top of a page. Sometimes also refers to an orphan.

x-ref
Short for cross-reference.

Writing for Grammar: Editing K to R

Killing orphans and marking up roughs.

kerning
Tighten spacing between the letters of a word.

kill
To order deletion of text or an illustration.

line editing
Editing copy for clarity, logic, and flow.

linespacing
Space between lines of text. Also called leading.

mark up
To put composition or editing instructions on copy or layouts.

MLA style
Editing conventions recommended by the Modern Language Association in the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing--the primary style guide used for academic writing in languages and literature.

monograph
A document written by specialists for other specialists.

orphan
The first line of a paragraph that appears alone at the bottom of a page. Compare to widow (later).

pass
Read-through of a manuscript by a copyeditor.

pica
A printer's unit of measure: 12 picas equal one inch.

point
A typesetting unit of measure used to indicate font sizes.

query
An editor's question.

ragged right
Text aligned at the left margin but not the right.

redline
On-screen or hard-copy version of a manuscript that indicates which text has been added, deleted, or edited since the previous version.

rough
A preliminary page layout, not in finished form.

rule
A vertical or horizontal line on a page.

running head
One or two lines of copy, such as a chapter title, set at the top of each page of a document. Also called header.

Writing for Grammar: Editing D to H

In the editing world, a bastard title is really nothing to be ashamed about, but it should be kept out of the gutter.

dagger
Name for the † character.

dead copy
Manuscript that has been typeset and proofread.

dingbat
An ornamental character, such as a smiley face.

display type
Large type used for chapter titles and headings.

double dagger
Name for the ‡ character.

ellipsis
Name of the . . . character. Plural ellipses.

em dash
Name of the — character. In manuscripts, the em dash is often typed as -- (two hyphens).

en dash
Name of the – character.

endnote
Reference or explanatory note at the end of a chapter or book.

face
The style of type.

figure
An illustration printed as part of the running text.

first ref
First appearance in a text of a proper name or of a source in reference notes.

flag
To call someone's attention to something (sometimes with a gummed label attached to hard copy).

flush
Positioned at the margin (either left or right) of the text page.

flush and hang
Way of setting indexes and lists: first line of each entry is set flush left, and the remaining lines are indented.

FN
Short for footnote.

folio
Page number in a typeset text. A drop folio is a page number at the bottom of a page. A blind folio has no page number though the page is counted in the numbering of the text.

front matter
Material at the front of manuscript or book: title page, copyright page, dedication, table of contents, list of illustrations, preface, acknowledgments, introduction. Also called prelims.

front slash
Name of the / character.

glance
A brief listing of information that accompanies a story.

gutter
The space or margin between facing pages.

head
Title that indicates the start of a section of a document or a chapter.

headline style
Capitalization style for heads or titles of works in which all words are capitalized except articles, coordinating conjunctions, and prepositions. Sometimes prepositions longer than four or five letters are also printed in upper case. Also called UC/lc or title case.

headnote
Short explanatory material following a chapter or section title and preceding the running text.

house style
The editorial style preferences of a publisher.

Writing for Grammar: Editing A to C

In the editing world, sans serif is not a holiday resort and curly quotes aren't a cheese snack.

Copyediting (or copy editing) is the work that an editor does to improve a manuscript or a report or a proposal. Here we reveal some of the jargon of the copyediting trade: terms and abbreviations used by editors in their efforts to produce copy that is clear and correct.

When do writers need to understand these terms? When they have the privilege of working with a conscientious copy editor, or working as a conscientious copy editor.

Both are fun.

AA
Short for author's alteration, indicating changes made by an author on a set of proofs.

air
White space on a printed page.

ampersand
Name of the & character.

angle brackets
Name of the <> characters.

CP style
Editing conventions recommended by The Canadian Press Stylebook (usually called the CP Stylebook) and The Canadian Press Caps and Spelling—the primary style and usage guide for most newspapers and magazines.

apos
Short for apostrophe.

art
Illustration(s) (maps, graphs, photographs, drawings) in a text.

back matter
Material at the end of manuscript or book: appendixes, endnotes, glossary, bibliography, index.

backslash
Name of the \ character.

bastard title
Usually the first page of a book, which includes only the main title, not the subtitle or author's name. Also called false title.

block quote
Quited passage set off from the running text without quotation marks. Also called extract.

boilerplate
Text that is reused without changes in multiple documents.

box
Type that is framed in a border to give it prominence.

brackets
Name of the [ and ] characters.

bubble
Circle or box on a hard copy in which an editor writes a query or comment.

callout
Note on hard copy to indicate the placement of art or to signal a cross-reference.

caps
Short for CAPITAL LETTERS.

character
An individual letter, number, or symbol.

Chicago style
Editing conventions recommended by The Chicago Manual of Style--the style guide used by some social science publications and most historical journals.

clean up
Incorporating an author's responses to the copyediting into the final hard copy or computer file.

close paren
Name of the ) character.

content edit
An edit of a manuscript that checks for organization, continuity, and content.

copy block
A sequence of lines of type treated as a single element in design or page makeup.

copy edit
To prepare a document for presentation in a printed form. The term copy edit is used to describe the kind of editing in which errors of style, grammar, word usage, and punctuation are corrected. The spelling copyedit is often used in magazine and book publishing.

copy editor
A person who edits a manuscript. The spelling “copyeditor” is often used in magazine and book publishing.

copyfitting
Calculating how much space a text will need when typeset, or how much copy will be needed to fill a space.

corrigendum
An error, usually a printer's error, discovered too late to be corrected in a document and included in a separately printed list. Also called addendum.

credit line
Statement that identifies the source of an illustration.

Writing For Style: Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988) was a short story writer and poet. Carver is considered a major force in the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s.

Carver is my favourite author along with Raymond Chandler. I don't often put down a book and stare into the middle distance, but Carver does this to me frequently. He gives me shivers and shudders, he makes me glad I'm who I am and not one of his characters, yet he does it in such a gentle way-no gore, little violence, much is implied.

Carver Quotes:

It's been a continual series of starting-overs for me.

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places...

Carver cites Isaac Babel's dictum, "No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put in just the right place."

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.

"Writers don't need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing - a sunset or an old shoe - in absolute and simple amazement."

His writing feels like that melancholy bittersweet of a mourning dove cooing at sunset. I feel sad every time I remember he is gone and that there will be no more from him.

There's more on the Raymond Carver page of Writing Tips at Moore Partners.

Writing for Style: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Marquez, also known as Gabo (born March 6, 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia) is a Colombian novelist, journalist, editor, publisher, political activist, and recipient of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. García Márquez has lived mostly in Mexico and Europe and currently spends much of his time in Mexico City.

Widely credited with introducing the global public to magical realism, he has secured both significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success.

• In Evil Hour 1962
• One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967
• The Autumn of the Patriarch 1975
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold 1981
• Love in the Time of Cholera 1985
• The General in His Labyrinth 1989
• Of Love and Other Demons 1994
• Memories of My Melancholy Whores 2004

His work seamlessly combines the real and the unreal, and his writing is more sensual than intellectual. You can feel and smell and hear his novels. They are eaten and breathed as much as read.

There's more on the Marquez page of Writing Tips at Moore Partners.

Writing for Style - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who died in April 2007 at the age of 84, was one of the most playfully distinctive stylists in modern American literature.

I was introduced to Vonnegut through Cats Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five and I was completely captivated. I had never read anything like those books and, I guess, neither had anyone else.

He also had some useful stylistic advice to pass along. In 1982, Vonnegut wrote a short piece for the International Paper Company titled simply, "How to Write with Style." He begins the essay by considering why we should strive to improve our writing style.

"Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead--or worse, they will stop reading you."

He then offers seven deceptively simple principles:

• Find a subject you care about.
• Do not ramble, though.
• Keep it simple.
• Have the guts to cut.
• Sound like yourself.
• Say what you mean to say.
• Pity the readers.

There's more on the Kurt Vonnegut Jr. page of Writing Tips at Moore Partners.

Writing for Style: Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler's Tough Guy Prose Style

Modified from About.com

Chandler (1888-1959) is probably my favourite author, but then I think that L.A. in the 30's was heaven on earth.

His style is distinct. Here's the opening to a short story called Desert Wind, written in 1938:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband's necks.

Anything can happen.

Raymond Chandler, Creator of Philip Marlowe, Red Wind, 1938

"She's dark and lovely and passionate. And very, very kind."
"And exclusive as a mailbox," I said.
---The Little Sister (Chapter 19)

"It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way--but not as far as Velma had gone"---Farewell, My Lovely (Chapter 41)

"I put the duster away folded with the dust in it, leaned back and just sat, not smoking, not even thinking. I was a blank man. I had no face, no meaning, no personality, hardly a name. I didn't want to eat. I didn't even want a drink. I was the page from yesterday's calendar crumpled at the bottom of the waste basket "---The Little Sister (Chapter 25)

"I never saw any of them again - except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them." ---The Long Goodbye (Chapter 52)

"I'm an occational drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard." --"The King in Yellow"

"The big foreign car drove itself, but I held the wheel for the sake of appearances." --Farewell, My Lovely (Chapter 9)

There's more on the Raymond Chandler page of Writing Tips at Moore Partners.

Writing for Style: Norman Mailer

adapted from from Your Guide to Grammar & Composition.

Sorry for the long gap in posting, but I’ve been working on my Moore Partners website. Today starts a series of Writers on Writing. To keep the posts reasonably short, I’ve included website links where you can read more.

One of the best known and most controversial American novelists of the second half of the 20th century, Norman Mailer is mostly remembered for his private life of excess and activism. Mailer was married six times, and had several mistresses. He had eight biological children by his various wives, and adopted one further child. For many years, he had a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights as well as a house on the Cape Cod oceanfront in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Like many novelists of his generation, Mailer struggled with alcohol and drug abuse throughout his life. Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel.

Armies of the Night, Mailer's narrative about the march on the Pentagon, won the National Book Award in 1968 and the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Twelve years later, The Executioner's Song, his "true-life novel" about convict Gary Gilmore, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

That is the book of Mailer’s I remember most vividly. It knocked me out in the same way as In Cold Blood did. And the TV movie starring Tommy Lee Jones as Gary Gilmour was superb.

"I will certainly be remembered as a journalist," Mailer said to interviewer Gregory Kirschling (Entertainment Weekly, 2007). "In fact, I think the irony may be that I've had much more influence as a journalist than as a novelist."

In the more than 300 interviews given by Mailer over a long career, he freely expressed his views on a broad range of topics:

The Spooky Element in Writing
One Simple Rule
Doing What's Necessary
The Fiction of Nonfiction
The Value of Writing Classes
Style
The Influence of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner

All are under Norman Mailer on the Writing Tips page of Moore Partners.

Writing for Style: The Freight Train Part 2

Richard Lanham, in Analyzing Prose (2003), called a succession of compound written structures a running style—sentences that appear to spill from the mind as a "rambling, associative syntax of conversation."

And, in The New Oxford Guide to Writing (1988), Thomas Kane characterized the running style as the "freight-train style". Kane said the freight-train style was useful when you wish to link a series of events, ideas, impressions, feelings, or perceptions as immediately as possible, without judging their relative value or imposing a logical structure upon them.

This style directs our senses much as a camera directs them in a film, guiding us from one perception to another, yet creating a continuous experience. The freight-train style, then, brings experiences closely together and can achieve a high degree of fluidity.

In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens uses the running (or freight-train) style to give an impression of the contradictions of the time:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

The freight train style can be effective in short bursts, but its limitations lie in its lack of subtlety. Thomas Kane comments that the downside of the freight-train style is that it implies that the thoughts it links together with grammatical equality are equally significant. But usually ideas are not of the same order of importance; some are major; others secondary. Moreover, this type of construction cannot show very precise logical relationships of cause and effect, condition, concession, and so on.

The only writer I know who can sustain the freight train style is Roddy Doyle. In his hands it conveys passion, excitement, complexity, and the pull of fate. It can be spectacular.

From A Star Called Henry:

(My Mother) walked into my father. Melody Nash met Henry Smart. She walked right into him, and he fell. She was half his weight, half his height, six years younger but he fell straight over like a cut tree. Love at first sight? Felled by her beauty? No. He was maggoty drunk and missing his leg. He was holding himself up with a number seven shovel he'd found inside an open door somewhere back the way he'd come when Melody Nash walked into him and dropped him onto Dorset Street. It was a Sunday. She was coming from half-eight mass, he was struggling out of Saturday. Missing a leg and his sense of direction, he hit the street with his forehead and lay still. Melody dropped the beads she'd made herself and stared down at the man. She couldn't see his face; it was kissing the street. She saw a huge back, a back as big as a bed, inside a coat as old and crusted as the cobbles around it. Shovel-sized hands at the end of his outstretched arms, and one leg. Just the one. She actually lifted the coat to check.