Digression for Christmas

I have been lying in bed for four hours, trying to fall asleep. I was exhausted when I went to bed, and I'm still exhausted, yet sleep is nowhere in sight. Insomnia isn't uncommon in people my age, and usually I read until I'm sleepy, but tonight I really just wanted to fall asleep because I was so tired.


As usual when waiting for sleep to arrive, my mind is a beehive of activity, and tonight is no different. I'm worrying about my apartment, which really needs a good vacuuming; I'm worried that I have not completed my Christmas baking, owing to a peculiar lethargy and a really bad migraine attack that kept me in bed for two entire days this week. After I have these episodes, it seems to take several days for my brain to function again. So, for instance, I went to Whole Foods and bought food for Christmas dinner but forgot to buy lavender soap for the sink. I was supposed to have a guest for Christmas, but she's not coming until the 26th, which means I'll be alone on Christmas. This, too, has happened before, but I never take it well.


Maybe it's because Christmas is a holiday that has always promised so much pleasure and delivered so little. It has seemed to me, since I was a child, that there should be one day a year when no one had a fight with anyone, when everything was beautiful, and when there was real joy everywhere (in spite of the commercialism of the holiday). But in my life, the promise has seldom been fulfilled, and certainly not when I lived with my family of origin or when I was married, for various and tedious reasons.


Anyway, I thought I could handle everything okay this year, so I put Messiah on the stereo, pretty loud since I don't think any of my neighbors are home except the drunks, who always have their own music on. It is one of my favorites, and when I could sing and did sing, I was in several performances of excerpts from it. My recording is particularly fine and I was enjoying it. I even sang along with some of the songs until my voice gave out. But I dropped my kitchen work to listen to the "Hallelujah" chorus. I sang along pretty well, quitting only on the high Fs, Gs, and the single A, until we got to the final "Hallelujah," when I inexplicably began to cry.


It's been quite a few years since I decided I just didn't believe some of the basic tenets of Christianity, namely the virgin birth, which is scientifically impossible since Mary would have had a clone of herself, not a boy; the Affirmation of Faith, which I could no longer attest to since I did not believe in its central tenets; and finally, the act of Communion itself, which seems totally barbaric to me, as well as cannabalistic. Eat the body of Christ? Drink his blood? It seemed like a throwback to a time in Judaism where they practiced human sacrifice, only in Christianity it had been sublimated into a symbolic act, without any real flesh or blood involved. Yet there it is, one of the central Mysteries of the religion, and the thought of it made me nauseated.


We all go to church and participate in these rituals without thinking about them, or at least I realized that I had always done so when I was a member of the Methodist church. But one year, I had decided not to eat sugar, so I didn't bake my usual thousands of cookies, and I had this little satori: my relationship to Christianity was basically one of habit and sentiment. After that I started to look at the rituals with clearer sight.


This is, after all, what the Buddha says we must do. We must see things clearly. All things. Everything. In order to become enlightened we must accept what we see. So I saw these things and realized I couldn't be a Christian. It wasn't that I wouldn't or didn't want to be; I could not be one anymore.


One would think that would be the end of it, but alas, it is not. Nowadays when I walk into a particularly beautiful church, I cry. I cannot sing hymns from my childhood without crying. When I try to sing certain Christmas carols I dissolve into tears, just as I did today. For many years I asked myself why I had turned into such a crybaby about things having to do with the church of my childhood.  Finally, this past year, I decided that what was happening to me was grief. It's one thing to say you no longer believe something, and for very rational and sensible reasons, but quite another to persuade your heart, which isn't rational or logical or even sensible. And after being a Christian for nearly forty years, off and on, giving up on it is more difficult than I could have imagined.


For me, as a singer, God was in the music. My primary form of "worship" was singing, literally raising my voice in song. When I sang, I would feel that I was touching the divine. Feeling that I couldn't go into a Christian church anymore and couldn't sing made me simply stop singing entirely. That's why the Fs, Gs, and As were hard to sustain. It's been over five years since I sang a note, even around the house or in the shower. I'm telling my readers this so they will know that nothing comes without a price, at least in my experience. I never realized I'd stop singing if I couldn't sing music from The Sacred Harp or by Handel. When I stopped believing, I didn't realize what it would mean—really, really mean. And it isn't just church music; it's all music.


What does a person do? I don't know. I suppose the Buddha would instruct me to meditate in order to find peace in the decision, but right now, my heart is torn, shredded. Who will I sing the "Boar's Head Carol" to? It's supposedly the oldest carol in English. Who knows it? I do. But who would I sing it to and why? I've always felt that music was separate from words, and that for church singing, the words weren't that important; it was the music itself. But it's the words and the music together that seem to cause the manifestation of grief, not the one or the other.


I made the decision, though, and somehow I must work it out. The monotheistic religions are what Jung would call extraverted. God is somewhere "out there," while a spiritual belief such as Buddhism is introverted. The individual him/herself must find the divine "in here," in him/herself. The monotheistic religions allow only one god, which causes many wars; but Buddhism says only that if you look inside yourself and live by certain precepts, such as loving-kindness and not killing things, you will eventually be able to see everything as it is, and one hopes, end one's suffering. Monotheistic religions rely on continual suffering—guilt, revenge, the desire for a superficial perfection, and persecution of infidels—while Buddhism relies on the attainment of clarity of perception to bring about a more peaceful reality.


Frankly, I don't see anything wrong-thinking in this comparison, every though it's simplistic and I know it. It's also basic and fundamental to the differences between the four great world religions, three of which are the reason for so much war and death in the present day. The god of Abraham is a jealous god, and the world gets to be the stage upon which this jealous contest is fought. Seems like a pretty pitiful historical record to me.


Well, in any event, and out of my tears of grief and loss, I wish anyone reading this a happy holiday season. I'm sure I'll solve my dilemma eventually if I keep working on it. And believe me, this is probably the first and last serious entry I'll make in this blog.

Digression: Apology

I want to apologize for not writing in the blog at all last week. I wanted to do more work with proper prepositions, but I had so many errands to run and projects to complete, that I never had time. Yes, I do have to earn a living through means other than writing in the blog!

So it's Tuesday and instead of writing purposefully, I'm just going to make it short and sweet and not at all serious.

If I have time between now and Christmas, I'll write some more entries. If I don't, well I'll be back after the holidays. Right now I'm making a card and trying to get it mailed to everyone, trying to do some holiday baking and cleaning, and in general trying to organize my apartment and life, to make art and think up new subjects to write about. I promise more about prepositions ere long.

Happy Holidays to everyone.

Misuse of Prepositions

"an organization headquartered in downtown Cleveland that has been unusually successful in helping struggling Ohioans to hold onto their homes. " Sentence found in today's New York Times. Italics are mine.


I've seen this usage so frequently in the Times that I wondered whether the rule had changed. I checked my trusty Collegiate Dictionary and found . . . nope, it has not changed. The proper verb in question here is to hold on, which means that when you want to hold on to something, you do not hold onto it. In writing, this misuse of the preposition with the verb is probably one of the most common there is. I cannot say how many times I've seen it handled the wrong way. I suppose what was shocking to me was that the Times misuses it frequently. Are their copy editors brain dead or what?


Another one that squeezes bile out of my brain is oblivious to. The proper preposition to use with oblivious is of. You are oblivious of the suffering of the poor. This one is from Roger Cohen's editorial in today's Times: "against a Democratic president portrayed as oblivious to — or complicit with — the threat." Italics are mine. 


Another often misused construction is different than. Now I admit that sometimes even I find it hard, when making a comparison, to not want to use this construction, so maybe someday it'll change, but right now it is still different from. This house is different from the one next door. In a more complex comparison, though, the changes in wording one must make to use the correct formation lead to wordiness, and it's in these places where I wonder why I can't say the former rather than the latter, simply for the sake of economy of words. So maybe it'll eventually change. But then again, maybe it won't. In the forty years I've been working with print the rule hasn't changed.


I'm starting this entry early in the day. No doubt as the day goes along I'll find more bad constructions and add them. There is another wonderful reference work I haven't mentioned, Words Into Type. Whenever I want to double-check the right preposition to use, WIT has a wonderful list of them and I turn right to it. If you don't have this book, get it. Save yourself the embarrassment of using the wrong preposition. Will other people notice? Maybe yes, maybe no. And since you don't know which ones know the correct usage and which ones don't, it's better to be right than wrong.

Sunday's Digression—Cookies

I'm sorry I didn't write in the blog yesterday. I had been intending to write every day, but it snowed in Chicago, and I needed to pick up some prescriptions and do some shopping, so off I went. By the time I got all the stuff, lugged it upstairs, unpacked it, parked my car, and talked to my sweetie for an hour or so, I was totally exhausted.

The first snow, naturally, turned to slush right away because the ground isn't completely frozen. And in Chicago, homeowners are not penalized for failing to shovel the sidewalks in front of their homes, so getting back from my car involved a process of shuffling along over packed slush so as not to slip and break my back or an arm or, god forbid, my precious brain case.

One of the things I scored at Target was two very nice tins for cookies or fruitcakes. I'm not making fruitcakes, so cookies it'll be. I worked on a cookie book this year so I'm wheedling my friend for a copy so I can use some of the author's recipes. Of course we have family traditions, but I'm tired of those cookies. I've been making pecan crescents since I was twelve. Gads! When my son was a child we made a cookie to roll out and decorate, which I've actually made since. Boring. I want to try sablés and tuiles, macaroons and amaretti. These are cookies I've never made. What a challenge. But of course, they could all be total failures. Although I don't usually fail at baking (she said modestly), I must admit a friend gave me a recipe for oatmeal and almond crisps last week and I rushed to make them. All went well until I left the kitchen and let the timer count out the 14 minutes they were supposed to bake. Well forget that. When I went back, they were all slightly burned. I ate them anyway, but I could never have used them for gifts. Henceforth I'll bake them for 10 to 12 minutes and keep an eye on them.

That last part is the real secret of baking: keep an eye on the goods. Although my oven always seems to run at the correct temperature for recipes, there was apparently some error in this recipe. I know they're really fine little cookies because my friend made them for me when I was visiting Massachusetts in November, so I'll do them again, and for my own information, I made a note in pencil on the recipe.

Cookbooks are, in reality, suggestions of recipes in many cases. Many cookbook writers include recipes they've never tested themselves. I know. Very odd. But when I was working at Random House, right around the corner from Bridge Kitchenware, Mr. Bridge told me this when I bought a tube pan from him. I've tried recipes when I'm working on cookbooks and found them to be really horrible. I'm not going to name the author, but I tried a recipe for scones in a cookbook written by a well-known English cooking personality, and it was dreadful. Too dry—I had to add extra milk—and when baked, the scones were totally uninteresting. Just wrong. I can't say it any other way. I couldn't believe anyone had tested the recipe, since it was such a disaster.

I always give a recipe one try to see if it was written properly and whether it works. If it does, fine. But if it doesn't, depending on how big a disaster it was, I start changing it to make it work better. If the disaster is too great, there will be a recipe for it elsewhere and I'll just try someone else's version. Or if I generally like it but see ways it could be improved, I make notes on the recipe.

Lemon bars have been the most difficult to pin down. I have a friend in Massachusetts who has the perfect recipe, but I've never been able to get it from her. Nearly every other recipe I've tried has had faults. The one in the new Joy of Cooking is by far the worst ever. It uses far too many lemons. When I made it, the acid of the lemons actually burned my mouth and gave me indigestion, so ultimately, I ended up throwing most of the batch away.

I always make notes in pencil about changes I think I should make in a recipe, or never to make this recipe again. All of my cookbooks have pencil notations somewhere, and I think any good cook or anyone who wants to become one should pencil away. Cookbooks are meant to be written in, have food spilled on, and in general be mistreated by their loving owners.

Clauses, Commas, Semicolons, and Colons (Part 3)

Before you can use commas, semicolons, and colons sensibly, you need to know something about clauses. My discussion is going to begin with the easiest clauses for today.

Restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses
According to the Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed.) (and what I learned in seventh grade in the Days of Yore), these two types of clauses are relative clauses. As you can guess from their names, a restrictive clause restricts something of meaning in the sentence, while a nonrestrictive clause does not. If the clause is restrictive, the sentence as a whole makes no sense without it; if the clause is nonrestrictive, the sentence can be understood without it. Believe it or not, as I was trying to fall asleep last night I was trying to think up examples of each type of clause. It's not even as remotely effective as counting sheep, no matter what anyone thinks. So here goes:

• A man having a limp and using an unusual cane walked a Golden retriever in the dog park.

If the police are asking you if you saw anyone in the dog park, telling them you saw this man would be very important, since omitting mention of the limp and the cane makes the man much more general and less specific. Therefore—and this is the important part—no commas separate the clause "having a limp and using an unusual cane" from the rest of the sentence. As soon as you bracket that clause with commas, you make the man much less specific, and this is obviously a particular man.

[A disclaimer here: Unlike Microsoft Word's menu of styling choices, this blog program doesn't give me a choice to simply indent a paragraph or a list without using either numbers or bullets. I'm choosing throughout the blog to use the bullet, but in general, one would not use a bullet.]

• My dog, a Golden retriever, used to like to escape so she could run wild and free and bark at all the neighbors.

You don't need to know that Molly, the dog in question, was a Golden retriever. It may be interesting to know that she was, but it's not important to know it; therefore, there are commas before and at the end of the clause. It is nonrestrictive because I could leave it out and you'd still understand the sentence.

Use of That and Which with Restrictive and Nonrestrictive Clauses
There is no more confusing a rule in our language than this one. Very few people understand how to use that and which, and most people misuse it. I found when I was copy editing scholarly works that academic writers constantly misused "which." Maybe they thought it sounded more "hi-class" to do so, but that doesn't make it right. This idea may have arisen because British English writers seldom make the distinction and use them interchangeably, but in formal American English, it is customary to make the distinction (per CMS 5.202.)

• My apartment building has three addresses: one for each wing and one for the center, which is hard to see because it's behind a hedge.

Although it's interesting to know that house number for the central part of the building is behind a hedge, it isn't necessary for the essential description, which is that it has three addresses. In this case, you need to know what the clause is modifying: the building or the center of the building. Clearly, it describes only the center part. Further, the clause falls immediately after mention of this central address. That's actually a clue. The clause that begins with a comma and "which" is almost always going to follow the word or part of the sentence it modifies.

• The cape that I wear for much of the winter was made by the Navajo of New Mexico.

There is no mystery here. Yes, the cape was made by the Navajo, but what's important about it? I wear it for much of the winter. I could have changed the wording to

• The cape, which I wear for much of the winter, was made by the Navajo of New Mexico.

But do you then know how long or how often I wear it if I omit the clause from the sentence? No. You don't even know that I own it or that I and the cape have any connection with each other. So the clause is restrictive and can't be handled as if it didn't add meaning to the entirety of the sentence.

Independent and Dependent Clauses
An independent clause is basically a complete sentence. It contains a subject, verb, and an object or predicate. But there are times in writing when several short sentences in a row would be jarring to the eye or to read aloud.

• He wanted a new suit. He went to the corner and caught a taxi. When he arrived at Nordstrom's he got out of the taxi and went inside. He bought a suit and a new shirt to match.

Well, we certainly know what he did, but do we care?

• He wanted a new suit, so he went to the corner and caught a taxi to take him to Nordstrom's. Not only did he buy a suit he liked, but he also found a shirt to match.

First, note that I linked the first two independent clauses with a comma and a conjunction. Then I shortened the third sentence and incorporated it into the first two. Finally I made two clauses out of the last sentence and joined them with a comma and a conjunction and expanded the description a little to make the whole thing sound more natural.

If I decided to get rid of one of the comma-conjunction constructions, I could have said it this way:

• He bought a suit he liked; he also found a shirt that matched it.

The important part about using a semicolon to link two independent clauses is that with a semicolon, in this construction, you never use a conjunction. Even if you are creating a series, you do not use a conjunction.

• He bought a suit he liked; he also found a blue shirt that matched it; the suit and shirt made a complete ensemble for his business lunch on Friday.

It's not the most graceful example, but it's correct. A smoother version might be structured this way:

• He bought a suit he liked, then he found a blue shirt to match. The suit and shirt made a complete ensemble for his business lunch on Friday, when he hoped to discuss the terms of his new position with the company.

In several of the examples I created, I also used dependent clauses, but to clarify, a dependent clause cannot stand alone. It is usually not a complete sentence, and most of the time it needs the rest of the sentence, the independent clause, to give it meaning.

• Mary wanted a suit like her sister's if she could find it.

The same sentence could also be worded like this:

• If she could find one, Mary wanted a suit like her sister's.

You can see in the first example that the dependent clause—if she could find it—is not preceded by a comma, but when the dependent clause introduces the sentence, as in the second example, you must use a comma. The dependent clause achieves its meaning by being integral to the sentence, and without it, the sentence would not only be less informative, we would not know whether Mary had a plan for getting a suit like her sister's.


Colons
Finally, a few words about the colon. Think of a colon as an equals sign (=). What you write on one side should equal what you write on the other. A colon used as I did in the example above fulfills that function. On the one side is "A smoother version might be structured this way:" and then I proceed to give the example of just that thing. The colon is also used to introduce a list, as above.

The colon also stands in for the verb to be, so it must be included in a sentence as you would that verb.

• The contents of the purse were the following: a wallet, business cards, a glasses case, and a pair of leather gloves.

If you omitted "the following" you would in essence be saying:

• The contents of the purse were were a wallet, busines cards, a glasses case, and a pair of leather gloves.

I cannot even count the number of times this construction is misused. When I took writing courses in the communications department at American University, the professors pounded it in our heads that when introducing a list with a colon, we had to say "the following: or as follows:"—no ifs, ands, or buts. So far as I know, this rule hasn't changed over the years, and it still holds true (CMS 6.65). If you read the entries in the Manual that follow the one about using a colon with as follows or the following, you'll find other useful information about this interesting and frequently misused punctuation mark.

A colon may never be used the same way a semicolon is. They do not serve the same purpose, so even though as terms they seem related, they are not.

Don't confuse collaborate with corroborate - chicagotribune.com

Don't confuse collaborate with corroborate - chicagotribune.com

Printing Terms and Other Memorabilia

A number of years ago I think someone wrote a book entitled A Computer Is Not a Typewriter; It's a Typesetting Machine. For anyone using a word processing program it's really important to know this, because whereas many of the Adobe programs are clearly meant for use by people who understand printing terms, word processing programs tend to keep this knowledge hidden, and you can only discover it if you use the style sheet part of the program.

Printing terms I'm going to begin my discussion with printing terms and where they came from. When I was the copy editor on my university's newspaper, The American University Eagle, back in the Days of Yore, the editor and I would make the weekly trip out to the shop where the paper was set into type. I talked a lot with the woman who ran the typesetting machine. She impressed me when she told me she made more money typesetting than she did with her master's degree in English.

Type that looked rather like dies was kept in wooden trays on the upper portion of the typesetter's machine. The capital letters were stored in the trays, called cases, at the top, while the little letters were stored in the trays at the bottom, thus the common printing terms uppercase and lowercase. Newspapers and magazines did not use small caps, so when the copy editor meant for a letter to be made cap because someone had typed it lowercase, he or she would just underline it twice. In book publishing, caps are indicated with three underscores, because two mean small caps. Small caps are fonts unto themselves and not just full-size caps made smaller.

The lines of type were made out of lead, so when a newspaper wanted to fill out a column to make it align with the column it was next to on the page, they would take small slices of lead and add more space. To this day, this action is still referred to as leading. For most text type, the leading between the lines is indicated by a figure measured in points. Points are fractions of a larger measure called a pica. These days, 6 picas equal 1 inch, but in the old days, before computers, 6 picas equaled slightly less than 1 inch. Then as now, there are 12 points in every pica. I had to buy a special ruler for my typography class that measures in computer type sizes, not the traditional picas and points. If the typesetter wanted to make a short line fill a line in a column, she would kern the type, meaning she would add little pieces of lead between the letters.

(The following information, while commonly known, is borrowed here specifically from Designing with Type: A Basic Course in Typography by James Craig and William Bevington, published by Watson-Guptill Publications in 1999.) Lowercase type is usually measured by something called the x-height, because the x hits both the baseline and meanline of the type. The bottom of the x rests on the baseline while the top hits the meanline, an imaginary line that runs along the top of most lowercase letters.

"Typeface refers to the specific design of an alphabet. . . . Each typeface is identified by a name," frequently that of the person who designed it, or other considerations. "Traditionally, a font [my italics] was one size of one type style in a particular typeface." "Font" is used today is used more loosely and no longer refers specifically to one size of type. It is very easy to confuse the terms for font and typeface, and people, including me, do it all the time. The easiest way to remember the difference is to recall that Garamond is a typeface, while Garmaond roman is a font, Garamond italic is a font. In the days of hot metal, they would each have their own cases of dies. Nowadays, the computer eliminates the need for such rigid definitions and divisions.

The type itself is measured in points; however, it is measured from the baseline of one line to the baseline of the line below, expressed as B/b. Thus, 12/14 points means that the letters are 12 points in height with 14 points being occupied by both type and space; in other words, there are only 2 points of space between each line. For simplicity, word processing programs usually use only the most common sizes of body type, such as 8 pt, 9 pt, 10 pt, 11 pt, 12 pt, 14 pt, 16 pt, and so on up to 72 pt. In order to change the default space between the lines of type, one must go to the style menu in the program and reset it by hand; otherwise it will always be either auto or 12 pt. In typesetting programs such as InDesign, there is much more flexibility in the sizes of type and amounts of leading between lines of type.

When I speak of the height of the type it's important to understand that the measure is calculated by the tallest letter in the typeface, usually the tallest capital letter. You measure from the top of that letter to the bottom to obtain the type size. Fortunately, most of us don't have to do this; the computer does it for us. But it often can help to understand what you're doing at a keyboard when you select a typeface for your project.

Rules for better typesetting Newspapers continue to lead out columns and kern type, but magazines and books generally do not. Both noticeable kerning and extra lead between lines are considered in these media as bad typography. When computer typesetting houses began taking over from letterset houses (or hot metal typesetting, as it was called) we had a terrible time getting them to align type across a spread (two pages side by side), meaning no leading, and using kerning with great care. Now that typesetting has taken another change in development and moved to the desktop, one sees the same errors in typography all over again. (There are exceptions to this situation, as when the columns are very narrow and it is difficult to align type or fit enough words into a line to fill it out. But these should be challenges to the designer, not things to ignore. Sometimes I think it's the case that these new typesetters simply don't know the old rules about good page makeup anymore.)

Typewriter FAILs I was horrified to learn that typing instructors are still teaching people to type by adding two spaces after a period and a colon. I believe that was the point of the book I mentioned in the first paragraph of this post. In print, the space after a period and colon is just one space, as it is after all other punctuation marks. You will find that no matter what font you choose for your document, especially for a resume, it'll look a lot better if you only add one space after a period or colon.

For anything you choose to make on a computer, you should never use an even-space font such as Courier or American Typewriter. These fonts are not proportioned, and they look like old-fashioned typewriters used to. Basically, the i takes up no more room than the m. In all the other fonts you can choose from, you get proportioned type, where the m is always going to be larger than the i.

Setting tabs efficiently All word processing programs come with tabs automatically set at every half inch. It isn't at all necessary to use this setup. You can, through using style sheets, set up however many tabs you need, placed as you need them placed (left, centered, or right) by entering the measure on the ruler that you can make visible on your page using the "Page Layout" selection and by selecting to have the rulers show. Thus, if you need two tabs, you set them and don't have to space every half inch across the page to get the text where you want it. And if you want to format your page so that certain elements start from a right-hand tab, you can set it that way. This one step alone saves hundreds of unnecessary keystrokes in any document you make. Things you type actually align perfectly. It's worth the trouble to figure it out.

A word about fonts Here is a paragraph I've added from the New York Times, David Brooks's column for December 7, 2010: "People remember information that is hard to master. In a study for Cognition, Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel Oppenheimer and Erikka Vaughan found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than information transmitted in easier fonts."

There are two types of fonts you should not use, say, on Facebook or for e-mails or other kinds of normal writing: YOU SHOULD NOT USE ALL CAPS, nor should you use all italics. Both fonts are difficult to read. Selection of fonts is all about ease in reading, so you should try to use fonts that are inviting and easy to read. There are many exceptions to this rule, of course, because book designers often use different fonts to differentiate elements in the book's design from one another. But that isn't really what I'm talking about. 

• If you want to make a flier for some event your church or organization is sponsoring, avoid putting the important information in all caps or italic. 
• Avoid using type that is too small, and so on. 
• If you are writing a cover letter for e-mailing a resume, it is of utmost importance that you don't use all caps to write it, and that's the sort of usage I'm talking about.

To learn more about how these different elements work, you should try using the style palettes in your word processing program to set your type size and leading. Now that I've given you some basics, you'll be able to interpret and understand the terms used in the palettes to give you flexibility and choice.

Spelling Questions, with Some Answers

Tonight I'm planning to work on a novella written by my building manager (of all things!). I've completed about half of it and I'm pleased that he's not a bad writer. It's much more pleasant to work with writers who know how to put together a sentence than the ones who don't and call it their "style," or people who simply don't know the difference between good and bad writing because they never paid much attention to the rules. All those rules! And so complicated!

Well, yes. English complicated, but it is also capable of expanding to infinity, something like pi. Words come and go in popularity, but English can always make room for more. We have no shame about adopting words from other languages and giving them our own, Americanized pronunciation. We aren't particular about foreign and domestic words, and as they join our everyday speech, we use them with pleasure and enthusiasm. We even invent words that never existed before someone in our country said them: no Greek roots, no Latin roots, no French or Middle English roots. Just words that came from us but within a short time we all understand and use them.

Yet there are rules. Some words must be spelled correctly or they mean something quite different from what the speaker or writer intended. Those are the words people have problems with and why spelling is so very important, even for a made-up word like Blam!

I once worked with an author who insisted that the thing over his fireplace was a mantle. The copy editor had changed it to mantel. Every time I saw a new stage of proof, the author insisted on restoring his original version, and with increasing exasperation and many exclamation points, demanded his preferred spelling. I trotted around the his editor's office and explained that the thing over the fireplace was a mantel, while a great sweeping cloak was a mantle. In context, his spelling made no sense. She agreed with me, but what could she do? Finally I told her that I would not leave a spelling error in the book, and somehow I also learned that this author tended to overindulge in alcoholic beverages, so when the book went to press, the correct spelling was in place. Strangely enough, the author did not write a letter accusing us of duplicity for spelling the word correctly. One of those mysteries of publishing that remains unsolved to this day.

For people who are self-publishing, things are more complicated. For instance, if you decide you want your chapter numbers spelled out and you haven't checked with the Chicago Manual of Style to see how to handle the upper/lowercase problem that exits in the decision, you may find yourself spelling them like this: Chapter Twenty-One, Chapter Thirty-Two, and so on. The problem here is that twenty-one, thirty-two, and ninety-nine are all permanently hyphenated compound words: two words that equal one thing. So they need to be capped only at the first letter: Chapter Twenty-one, Chapter Thirty-three, and so on.

(Tomorrow I'm going to write a special section on publishing terms—where they came from, what they mean, and why a computer is not a typewriter; it's a typesetting machine. For now, just hang in there. I think you'll get the meaning from the context of the sentence you're reading.)

Compound words are one of the most complex subjects in spelling. When is a word a compound, when not; when is it a temporary hyphenated compound; when is it a permanent hyphenated compound [Hint: Use the dictionary!]? Why permanent? Why temporary? And what about words that were once permanently hyphenated only to morph into completely closed up words (such as lifestyle)? Frankly, I think it's such a complicated subject that I'm not going to tackle it in one blog entry. Over the coming weeks, I'm planning to devote individual entries to discussing them.

For tonight, I'm doing that real work to help this budding author improve his prose. Good luck to anyone who reads this post and forages ahead, through the spelling jungle our language creates. Have fun. May the Force be with you.

Sunday Digression

Today I had a panic run for my car, scared I'd parked where the city was planning to do street cleaning on Friday, but thank the parking space gods, no ticket decorated my windshield or side mirror. Fate smiled on my car, for a change, but probably not for long.

I thought I saw on a weather forecast last night that it was supposed to warm up a bit today. Warm up from what to what? I still needed my gloves and hat, so I ran back home and picked up my mail. A notice to pay some money for earlier parking tickets awaited me. One year I paid $554 in parking ticket payments. I felt personally responsible for supporting the city. Nowadays, though, they are giving us more than 12 hours' notice of street sweeping, as they were when I first came here.

Well, in Chicago, it's considered progress. What can I say?

Remember: I can help you put together a great resume or proofread your self-published book for $22 an hour, flat rate. No mysterious charges for pencils or Post-its, no "service fees," and for most projects, postage is extra while electronic files come and go for free. I use the U.S. Postal Service generally, but if you want overnight service or any other special treatment, you can have it, along with the receipt for what it cost. I ask for a down payment in advance of the work, based on what it is and how long I think it'll take me to complete the job. Special privileges accrue for repeat clients.


Coming up this week:

• More advice about resumes
• More discussion about semicolons
• More, more, more . . . of everything

A Skills Resume

I said in my first entry that I would help people with their resumes, and in several entries I've mentioned subjects that pertain to resumes. But in this post, I want to talk about one particular kind of resume, one that is based on jobs that all have skills in common.

If you are trying to structure a chronological resume, one that is based on the job titles you've held, with the jobs listed chronologically, you would use a form where each job is featured, and the duties you fulfilled for each position, any honors or awards you received, or any particular kinds of praise you were singled out to receive would all be structured similarly.

(I'm apologizing in advance for certain quirks in this blog program. I could not get it to give me even space above and below heads, so to get rid of some of the obnoxiousness, I eliminated a line space after the heads, but on your resume, you should try to have a line space.)

But what happens, for instance, if you work in the restaurant business, particularly in the kitchen? The restaurant business is still one of the most open types of job you can go into, if you like it. You can take a job as a dishwasher, knowing absolutely nothing about kitchen work, and you will be taught by various people who work with you to do chores they need help with. One of the first responsibilities you might be given is food prep, along with your normal dishwashing duties. Prepping means washing, cutting, slicing, cleaning, or whatever is needed for the foods the chef plans to serve for the upcoming meal. You might be asked to wash ten heads of lettuce and run the leaves through a salad spinner. If you got the dirt out of the lettuce and there were no customer complaints about grit or bugs, you might find yourself washing lettuce every day.

But what usually happens is that you are taught how to use knives, how to stir a pot of stew or soup, how to cut vegetables for certain dishes they serve, and so on. Every day you go to work, you may be asked to do two things you've done before and one you need to be taught. But the method is to train you to dig in and help the staff get the orders to the customers in a timely fashion.

In a larger establishment you might be promoted to doing nothing but prep and not doing any dishwashing again, unless the dishwasher called in sick. In this way, you can learn each station in a professional kitchen or in a diner or some other type of eatery and advance.

However, if your employer goes under, suddenly you need a new job and how do you find one? If you're used to making burritos, how can you apply for a job making crepes? What a lot of people do is go to work for specialty temp agencies that send you out to this kitchen or that one for a short-term gig or a long-term one. Suddenly, in the space of a month, you've worked at ten different places, and if you do the temping for any length of time, you will have worked at dozens of places, many of them more than once. So the chronological resume is no longer of much use to you. If you simply list the temp agency you worked for, it doesn't give a prospective employer any idea of the kinds of jobs you did, and listing all the places themselves could become a spider web of overlapping assignments--lunches at one place and dinners at another.

If you're in this position, a skills-based resume can be the answer. Here is a possible template for such a resume:

OBJECTIVE
To find a position where my six years' of experience in the restaurant business can fulfill the business objectives of my employer

[You should always include an objective, and it should always be worded in such a way to make it clear that you want to contribute your effort to your employer's success. It's always a phrase, no period, and avoid saying "I." Never say anything about needing a job or something to the effect you want a job to make money. These things are obvious. The business owner wants to know specifically how you can contribute to his/her success. In one phrase.]


SKILLS
[Since all the positions in a restaurant utilize similar skills and responsibilities, you can make a list of the six or eight most important skills you've learned and give them as a bulleted list right here. The absolute best place to go for the best wording and most thorough summaries of any kind of job is http://online.onetcenter.org. On the splash page, or home page, go to Find Occupations. The first entry you'll see, on the upper left side, is "Keyword or O*NET.SOC code." In that box, type the term for the most prestigious position you held, such as "saucier." As it so happens, there's only one place it takes you to: Cooks, Restaurant. If you click on that, you'll see a bulleted list of duties for a saucier.


However, if you want something more inclusive and general, you can use the terms "dishwasher" or "food prep" or "grill man" or something else you may have done. You will then get a list of all the different positions that are part of the organization of a restaurant kitchen. 


When you use O*Net, you can copy and paste the items you need, but you'll have to customize them to your own preference in order of jobs and maybe even choice of words. Just make sure you spell anything you add correctly. These listings are from Department of Labor sources for all the different kinds of jobs there are in our society, so you can use them as they are without fear of plagiarism. If you make your resume in Microsoft Word, which I recommend, there are buttons for setting up bulleted lists, and you should use them.]

• Inspect and clean food preparation areas, such as equipment and work surfaces, or serving areas to ensure safe and sanitary food-handling practices.
• Ensure food is stored and cooked at correct temperature by regulating temperature of ovens, broilers, grills, and roasters.

[These two items were taken verbatim. I think they sound a bit wordy, and I'm sure most sauciers would know how to word these responsibilities better, but I did this to give you an idea of how the process works. Note that I copied and pasted, and the entries came in blue and in Arial. 


When you are working on a resume, avoid Times or Times Roman and Arial. They are so common that when people on the other end see them they could just toss your resume in the trash rather than read it. On the other hand, don't choose an italic font or a really fancy one. Stick with the ones that come with the program.]


EMPLOYMENT
[Here, instead of trying to make a chronological list, just set up a one-, two-, or three-column list and give the names and addresses of all the restaurants where you worked. Give a supervisor's name only if you have the first and last name of the person; otherwise, leave it out. Give city, state (as a Zip code abbreviation), and Zip code; phone number if you have it. Do not give intersections, approximate locations, or any other nonspecific way of expressing an address. If you cannot be exact, put nothing. The best way to resolve the problem, though, is to use Google maps to find the place. If that fails, put nothing, but be aware that it counts against you should anyone check. If you can, buy a small notebook to keep track of all the places you've worked, how to spell their names, and their exact addresses and phone numbers.]


Finally, do not list your references on the resume. Do not put "References available on request." Instead, type your references on a separate sheet of paper and when the prospective employer asks for references, have it with you to give to the interviewer.

EDUCATION
Give a simple list of your education, for as high as you went. If you graduated high school, give the name of the school and the city or town where it's located. If you got a GED, give the name of the place where you earned it and omit any mention of the high school you attended.

If you earned a bachelor of arts or a bachelor of science, give the name and location of the granting institution. Do not bother to give the name of your high school. If you started your graduate work but did not finish it, give the name of the school you attended, years of attendance, and leave out any mention of a degree. If you started college and dropped out after a month, leave it off your resume. This advice goes for undergraduate as well as graduate work. You just look like a person who can't stick with a job or responsibility. If you got a certificate from someplace like the Culinary Institute of America, definitely include it.

Do list any honors or awards you have in your field under a head for HONORS AND AWARDS or something similar. If you are/were a member of a professional organization, union, or hold an office in your church, put that down. Under a head for VOLUNTEER ACTIVITIES, list anything you do such as work at the local food bank, work at the food pantry at your church, deliver hot meals to shut-ins, and so on. These special activities help you look employable. If you coach your child's sports team, likewise.

In closing, I hope this form of resume will help people who have only performed one kind of work all their adult lives. The one thing you want to do not want in your resume is a lot of repetition. Remember, you have 60 seconds to make a good impression!

Happy Thanksgiving Digression

Today is not only Thanksgiving, and I not only have a dinner to prepare, it's also what would have been my maternal grandparents' 101st wedding anniversary. So Happy Anniversary, Herb and Minnie Thrall. I still think of you often and love you dearly.

Lie, Lay, They're, There, Their, etc.

I recall with clarity Bob Dylan's song "Lay, Lady, Lay" because there it is, one of the most common grammatical errors I hear people saying. Unless Bob picked her up and put her on the bed, "lay" isn't the correct verb. If he's encouraging her to come to bed with him, it should be "Lie, Lady, Lie." Maybe he didn't want to use "lie" since it sounds as if he's encouraging her to tell lies, but nonetheless, that's what it should have been. Just as it should be when you want your dog to lie down. You don't say "lay down." In order to "lay" anything, you must pick it up an put it down somewhere. It's a transitive verb for that reason.

I'm going to lay this magazine on the table while I lie down to take a nap. "Lie" is intransitive.

They're coming to dinner, meaning they are coming to dinner. It's a contraction.

There are six people lying on the floor. Pronoun. (Look at it this way: Anytime there is any tense of the verb to be, both subject and predicate must equal each other. You never have an object when you use this verb; you always have a predicate. If you picture the verb as an equals sign [=], you'll get a good insight about how it works.)

Their coats are slung in a pile in the corner. Meaning the coats belong to them; it's possessive.

There's a joke about a woman who visits her friend, who happens to have one of those German shepherds that likes to smell people's crotches. "Lay down," she keeps telling the nosy dog, with no results.

Her friend comes in the room to get her coat so they can leave, and the woman says, "I've been telling your dog to lay down and he just keeps pestering me. Doesn't he understand any commands?"

"Yes, but you'll find he responds much better to 'Lie down,' than to 'Lay down.'" Needless to say, she had the pleasure of being able to stick her nose a little bit up in the air, knowing that her dog knew better English than her friend.

Other Mix-ups

Here's another common one: its, possessive; it's, contraction for it is. Since most possessives are formed by adding 's to the word, this exception to the rule causes endless confusion. "It's my coat but it used to be my sister's. When she wore it, its lining dragged underneath the fabric of the coat, and she was too lazy to fix it or have someone else fix it."

Then and than. I said, "My dog is smarter than yours," then the other dog bit my leg. One is a comparison, the other is a preposition. I think a lot of the time the mix-up is caused by a typing error, but not noticed because the spelling and sounds of the two words are so similar. Many words in English have the same sounds but quite different meanings. Sometimes they are spelled very similarly; other times their spelling differs quite a lot but they are pronounced alike. Or in some cases, mispronounced alike.

If any reader knows of more examples, please feel free to contribute to the list.

Michael Pritchard's water filter turns filthy water drinkable | Video on TED.com

Michael Pritchard's water filter turns filthy water drinkable | Video on TED.com

How to Structure a Recipe (Part 1)

I know I said on Saturday that I'd talk about series and semicolons, but I have a migraine today so I'm going to talk about how to structure a recipe. I didn't include the recipe for the applesauce cake I made yesterday because although it's hand-written and hanging on my fridge, it's not in any shape to type or share with others.

I've spent a good deal of my adult life involved with the food and recipe business. In the 1980s I worked for three summers and two winters at a bistro-type restaurant in Massachusetts, starting as a food prep person and at the end a cook. But it was a small place so I continued to prep food, bake bread, make certain appetizers, and whatever else was needed.

When I worked as a production editor at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, in the trade division, I learned how to edit cookbooks so I could instruct copy editors and proofreaders on how I wanted it done, as well as indexers on how I wanted the index prepared. Afterward I copy edited cookbooks for a while, and now I just proofread them. When I go online to look for recipes for dishes I'm curious about, such as tres leches cake or key lime pie or pecan pie (there are dozens of versions of these common recipes, too, so I had to figure out which one might turn out the best), I find myself guided to many sites where recipes are published, and this is where the tragedy (others might call it comedy) begins.

It seems that people who blog about recipes or contribute recipes to web sites have never read cookbooks or noticed that there is an order to things. A recipe is like a chemical formula: one mistake and the dish could be ruined. I know as I write that this statement is not always entirely true, but if it's a recipe for a cake or for most baked goods, it is more often true than not.

So, for those who want to learn, if for no other reason than sharing recipes with friends, here's the basic rule: Ingredients are listed in the order of use. If you're making a stew where you brown all the flavoring and aromatic ingredients, such as onions, garlic, tomatoes, celery, and potatoes, then you add the meat, the meat ingredient is not the first thing you list. Of course there are exceptions. For instance, suppose you want the cook to buy a chuck roast then cut it into 1-inch cubes. If so, that could be the first ingredient, but you could also give the ingredient like this:

     One 2-pound chuck roast, cut into 1-inch cubes

In which case, you'd put it at the place where you add it to the other ingredients, not before them. The best practice is to read cookbooks and see how things are done. The best examples are going to be the cookbooks published by Knopf, Artisan, and houses that specialize in cookbooks and have been doing so for many years. Try The Fanny Farmer Cookbook. The Joy of Cooking is idiosyncratic, so I wouldn't suggest following its style; Julia Child's books are all instructional, so she also tells you what pans and bowls to use, which is helpful if you're learning but a nuisance if you already know. One of the games I play in the kitchen is to see whether I can save using all the pans, bowls, and implements Julia calls for in preparing one of her dishes.

You can always save steps in the body of the text that instructs the reader on how to prepare the dish by including the description of the way you want the ingredient prepared in the ingredients list.

Make sure you don't omit ingredients or instructions. It is very easy to forget to list an essential flavoring such as salt, and if you want the cook to use freshly ground pepper, that's the way you must always word it in the ingredients list. If you're making pumpkin pie and you want the cook to use freshly grated nutmeg, that's how you must list it. If you want the cook to use fresh cilantro, you can list it is several ways: whole fresh cilantro leaves, to taste; fresh cilantro, coarsely chopped; 1 tablespoon finely minced cilantro [or cilantro leaves, if you want to be really specific], or a combination of any of these approaches.

Also note that this cilantro list is an example of a series of things containing both semicolons and commas. It is constructed this way because each item contains a comma, so the semicolon provides a more definite division among the items. Using nothing but commas would cause confusion.

Make sure you don't omit steps. Some cookbook writers number their steps so that they are easy to follow, but others do not. It's kind of a custom to separate steps into individual paragraphs, but if that's the case, it's easy to drop a paragraph somewhere along the way. It's easy to drop a word or a sentence, especially if the recipes are basically all very similar, such as would be found in a cookbook of nothing but ice cream recipes. It's easy to miss reading a step that's combined with another one in the same paragraph. There is nothing more frustrating to a cook that to be going along, following the steps, and find that suddenly, like Wile E. Coyote, they're falling down a cliff wall into the nothingness of instructionless hell. What's supposed to happen with the liquids? Do they go in all at once or in parts?

When I was seventeen, my mother gave me a meatloaf recipe over the phone. She told me all the ingredients to add to the meat, including "a can of tomatoes." I thought it might be interesting to add some Italian seasonings too, so I put in some oregano and basil. Needless to say, I couldn't make a meatloaf out of the mess I got, and endless cooking in a Pyrex loaf pan did not get rid of all that tomato juice. My family tried to eat it, but everyone ended up saying they weren't hungry, then sneaking into the fridge all evening to look for something to eat. And worst of all, when we offered what was left to the dog, good old Buster, he took one sniff and walked away from it.

Cookbook writers need to tell cooks when to drain the juice off a can of tomatoes as well as perhaps advising them of what seasonings work best in their recipes. This doesn't mean that people won't experiment on their own, but it only takes one time to learn that certain combinations of flavors and textures really are revolting.

Sunday Digression

Today I'm not going to write about grammar. Instead, I'm going to talk about a cake I just baked.

I didn't invent the recipe; it's an adaptation of an adaptation of a recipe from Maida Heatter. Her recipe was for pumpkin cake and the cake contained a lot of fruit and nuts. I didn't care for the idea. How would anyone taste the pumpkin? So the first time I made it, I omitted the raisins and nuts and used a lot of candied ginger instead. It was an instant success. I've made it many times for the holidays and at other times. It lasts well and needs no frosting.

I had some unsweetened applesauce that I'd got by mistake and thought I'd try making an applesauce cake, and I came up against the same issue. All the recipes I could find contained a lot of raisins and nuts. How would a person taste the applesauce or even get an apple taste? So I tried substituting the applesauce in the pumpkin cake recipe. It wasn't bad, but it just wasn't what I wanted. Maybe a few raisins and nuts plus the candied ginger would be better. I also decided to make my own applesauce, which was pink because I left on the skins of the Macintosh apples I used. Macintoshes are a tart apple and get mushy quite easily. Also, for some reason, the apples were a bit on the young side. I used only a small amount of water (I think cider might have been better but I didn't want to buy a half gallon of cider for a quarter cup of liquid).

In any event, with about two pounds of apples I obtained a really thick, almost dry applesauce. Then I cut down on the amount of cinnamon (I'm not crazy about too much cinnamon with anything made of apples) and increased the amount of freshly grated nutmeg, and added three-quarters of a cup of white raisins and toasted pecans along with the half cup of chopped candied ginger.

Boy, what a cake! It's absolutely delicious. Needs no frosting either, and I'm pretty sure it will last well. So this year, instead of pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, I'll be eating applesauce cake.

Remember: I not only write about grammar, spelling, and punctuation, I also offer a proofreading and resume-writing service for a fee of $22 per hour.

More Uses for Commas (Part 2)

Since I didn't think I was organizing a multi-part discussion of commas, my last entry did not start as Part 1, but you may consider it the first part.

The first thing you can start with is noticing how I used commas in the above sentence. The first part of the sentence is an introductory clause that is separated from the next part of the sentence by a comma. What does the comma do here? It indicates a slight pause. A period is, as the British say, a full stop, so if you're reading something aloud you can take a breath when you come to a period. But a comma is just a hesitation, barely a heartbeat in length. In the above sentence, it merely separates the other two clauses in the sentence from the introductory clause, which means that it is more of an aside, an additional thought I wanted to use to introduce you to my main topic.

The guts of the sentence come in the second clause, which is independent, meaning it can stand alone and still be understood because it contains all the elements of a complete sentence: subject (my last entry), verb (did not start), and predicate (as Part 1). Now I grant you, this is a loose interpretation, since "start" is the verb; however, without the modifiers (did not), it would not make sense in the context of the entire sentence. Then I added another independent clause and separated it from the first one with a comma and a conjunction. Sometimes you can leave out the comma, since with a conjunction it isn't always necessary. I made the judgment that I wanted to use the comma because I wanted the little pause.

I could also have used a semicolon and dropped the conjunction, but frankly I feel the change would have been too abrupt. A semicolon in this case would be almost the same as a period, and if you think about it, you see that the clauses rely on each other for sense. Very often, in choosing one punctuation mark over another, you must decide on the inner meaning or workings of your sentence, which you learn through repetition and writing many sentences many times. One of the reasons creative writing teachers often suggest that their students keep journals is so that they get used to thinking as writers, becoming a bit more self-conscious about the ways they present their ideas. (I find the technique enormously helpful and have been keeping journals for thirty-seven years.)

So, commas can be used to separate clauses in a sentence as well as items in a series. In a future entry, I will discuss some of the kinds of clauses that seem to give writers the most grief. But for now, I wanted to concentrate on commas used to separate clauses.

In general, it's best to use commas to separate a series of brief clauses rather than a mixture of long and short clauses. Too many clauses and the reader loses track of what's going on in the sentence, and the sentence itself becomes a run-on sentence and a big no-no in writing. (I omit James Joyce and William Faulkner from this discussion intentionally.)

I have a bias, and I must admit to it upfront: I favor a direct style. You say what you mean and mean what you say. This doesn't mean I don't write long, involved narratives. Obviously I do, because I like to be thorough. But my sentences are carefully considered and I try to pay attention to the "rules" when I write, even if I choose to break them sometimes.

My choice of writing style differs inherently from the preferred academic style, which uses far too many instances of the passive voice (as in an idea expressed this way: "It was observed that Eve ate the apple the Serpent offered her." Who did the observing? What or who is "It"?). Using the passive voice implies an unwillingness to take responsibility for the things the writer is saying, and this sentence falls right into that category of obfuscation. Anytime you hear a public speaker lapse into passive constructions, you'll know that he/she doesn't really believe or wish to take responsibility for what he/she is saying. It's just bad writing, in my opinionated opinion.

If you are constructing your resume, never use the passive voice and never appear to obfuscate. You are selling yourself and your accomplishments, so you say "I improved sales in my division by 25 percent during my first six months with the company." Not "Sales improved in my division by 25 percent during my first six months with the company." You may mean that you improved sales, but the sentence implies they improved by themselves, without any effort on your part. The sentence may not be strictly in the passive voice, but the ultimate outcome is that you are not taking responsibility for something you did, which would go against you when someone reads your resume. It appears that you might be taking credit for something you did not do.

You should use commas to separate a series of brief clauses, such as: "I packed for a trip to California, taking my camera and camera bag, carrying a backpack and a book, and dragging my suitcase behind me." Each clause contains more than one item, yet they all work with the comma because in each case, the names of the items have a relationship with one another. Also each clause is introduced by a verb.

In my next comma discussion, I'll also have to describe some functions of the semicolon, since there are many kinds of series, and commas can only be used for simple ones.

Some Thoughts on the Series Comma

I approach the subject of the series comma with trepidation, I admit. There are entire sections in the Chicago Manual of Style devoted to each punctuation mark, and for the final word on commas, I strongly recommend the reader go to the source. However, there are other style manuals in use that use other rules, and since I've worked in the industries that use, for instance, the AP style book (from the Associated Press) I decided it was worthwhile to discuss one of the main differences that I know causes writers a good deal of confusion.

One of the major differences between newspaper and magazine style and book style is the use of the series comma, or as some call it, the terminal comma. Journalistic (AP) style does not use it; books do. So far as I've been able to tell from reading all sorts of things on the Internet, there is no particular style, which is unfortunate, since having some kind of style in mind helps set limits on how a writer puts together a sentence. In fact, I find writing on the Internet and the Web just terrible. Fingernails on a blackboard or rusty nails being yanked out of wood. Jarring, and worse, unintelligible. Just read some of the incoherent comments put up on Facebook or MySpace and you'll see what I mean. And more than likely, these people are your friends and family!

The series comma separates items in a series of things. For instance: "I'm taking my new shoes, some socks, and a few scarves with me on my trip." Note that the item "socks" is separated from the final item in the series by a comma. AP style would have it this way: "The alleged thief took a set of sterling silver candlesticks, a wide-screen TV and a walnut buffet from the apartment." The sentence remains intelligible; however, when I worked on magazines, I found it constraining because at times I felt like I was boxed into writing a sentence that would be easy to misread, such as "Throw your father down the stairs his hat." I constructed the sentence so that the last two items were very different from each other, but what if they were very similar, or two parts of one item? That's where leaving off the final comma presents problems. Thus, I prefer to use it and think everyone should. However, I doubt whether any journalistic entity is going to change its style based on my preferences.

One thing about writing that is really important to understand is that no matter what style you choose to follow, you must stick with it. Copy editors detest mixed styles and will adjust your inconsistencies to be consistent, but if you are self-publishing, no one will make the adjustment for you, most likely. So your book could possibly present a reader with difficulties in figuring out what you mean. This is definitely a situation you want to avoid.

If you are writing your resume, from the printed materials I've seen and from resume-writing programs such as WinWay, you have to make the decision yourself. WinWay omits the final comma in a series, and when I used it to help my clients put together their resumes, I just left the entries as the program had them. I felt it was too difficult a discussion to get into with a client and perhaps too technical. On my own resume, however, I use the series comma. Nonetheless, there are no rules for writing resumes regarding a series comma, and you are always free to use the style you prefer. But the rule about consistency still applies: Whatever style you choose, use it consistently all the way through the document.

Webster's Third International Dictionary

There was a time, back in the 1950s, when the dictionary of choice was Webster's Second International Dictionary. It was used throughout the worlds of elementary schools, high schools, colleges, universities, journalism, and publishing because it was considered the ultimate source for "correct" spellings. Then, in 1961, something revolutionary happened. Merriam-Webster decided to issue a complete revision of their big dictionary, making one important change to the manner in which words were spelled and thus included in the new edition, the Third International. Rather than continuing to be the arbiter of "correctness" in spelling, they decided to include current usage and spelling. This meant that words people used every day were now spelled in the most common, recurring way rather than any "correct" way.

When I started working as an editorial assistant for a magazine in Washington, D.C., in the mid-1960s, the reporters and copy editors assured me they would have nothing to do with "that thing." So they clung to the second edition, even as the pages became worn and tattered. For years, The New York Times refused to use the third edition and only gave in to it when they couldn't find any more second editions in good enough shape to be used. They wrote a news article about the change, so important did they consider it.

These very large dictionaries are the ones that need their own special table, something like a podium. They are meant to stay open rather than closed, to preserve the binding. They weigh many pounds. (I actually use mine to press leaves in the fall, it's that durable and that heavy.)

Obviously they aren't going to release a new edition of this book every year. It would be far too cumbersome and expensive, and no one would buy it. Mine cost $99 when I got it in the mid-1990s. So what they do is publish a smaller dictionary with all the words in current use with spelling and capitalization given as they decide it should be. So words like "blog," which wouldn't have been in any dictionary in the 1990s, will now be in their most recent small dictionary, Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed. Every time there's a new edition of the Collegiate Dictionary, it contains the most up-to-date information about words in current use and the way to spell and whether or not to cap the first letter of them. If you want to learn the newest words, this is your master source. But be advised, spellings change with each edition, so the word "chick-pea," which came up in a lot of cookbooks, is now "chickpea."

As a copy editor and proofreader, I must have both. I recently came across a compound word I had never heard of, "niddy noddy." (A compound word is a term made from at least two words, sometimes connected with a hyphen, sometimes not.) The author of the book had used a hyphen in the word, and since I'd never heard of a niddy noddy, I looked it up in the Collegiate. No big surprise; it wasn't there. So I went to "the big guy," as I call my Third International, and there it was, with no hyphen. It was an exciting moment. What is a niddy noddy? In the sense this author used it, she meant a hand reel for yarn. It also means to nod to and fro.

This adventure is what I like about dictionaries. I was never a champion speller like my ex-husband or my friend Trent. Since I have ADD, when I was younger I used to make up spellings of words I'd heard or thought I'd heard. That's what kids with ADD do. One of my college roommates told me she thought I was really well-read and cultured until she figured out one day that I made up a lot of words to sound like other words. Exposed! So for someone like me, the dictionary came to be indispensable.

I remember kids in school complaining that if you didn't know how to spell a word, how could you look it up in the dictionary? What was the point? Here's the answer, from one who went through the process herself: you look up what you think the word is spelled like, then you read dictionary entries until you find the right spelling! Almost every time I do this, I not only find my word, but I find unusual words I've never heard of before. It's actually fun, mostly because some of the words you find are just plain odd. I have a little component in me that likes odd words, like niddy noddy, so I remember them. Since I'm not a weaver, I'll probably never have occasion to use it, but should I become one, well, there it is. And I can probably google it (note use of Google as a verb) and find places that sell niddy noddies. What could be more fun?

If you are serious about writing, you need at the very least, the latest edition of the Collegiate. Other companies use "Webster's" in titling their dictionaries, but they may not be published by Merriam-Webster, so check the title page carefully to see who published the book. Some people think highly of the Oxford dictionary, which is usually published in England. It is rumored to have every word in the English language, as I recall, but in the United States, it is generally not used by professional organizations. It's an interesting curiosity for word lovers, but I confess, I've never owned a copy. Also recall that the English still use the Frenchified endings for certain words, like colour, which were dropped from American usage a long time ago. There are many differences between American and British usage that I won't go into now, just be advised they continue to cause confusion for readers everywhere.

The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed.

The sixteenth edition of the book we in trade publishing call CMS but the publishers of the book call CMOS has just been released. If you are interested in the minutiae of publishing this tome, check the Subversive Copy Editor's latest blog post: www.subversivecopyeditor.com/my.weblog/cmos16-outtakes.html. Really, laughs for longtime users abound.

Of course now I must purchase it, and I'm sure it'll cost a pretty penny. Business expense, of course, but still . . . sigh. However, if you are putting together a collection of reference works on writing, whether scholarly, for the web, or for print, this is the most important book you can own, standing side by side with Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed.

The University of Chicago Press publishes the book, and it is the style used throughout the publishing world as well as in many colleges and universities. It tells you everything you need to know about books, from what frontmatter is, to how to construct notes, bibliographies, and reference sections. It deals with grammar, usage, punctuation, syntax, and more than I can write down without quoting an entire table of contents. If you want to know how to use commas and semicolons, CMS is the place to look. When do you use a colon and how? What about dashes, long and short? You'll find all the rules and then you'll have to decide which ones you can let an author or, if you are the author, which ones make sense to break and which ones should never be broken (probably on pain of death from one of the editors of CMS).

I will talk fairly soon about reference works in general, but I read the Subversive Copy Editor's blog and just had to pass along the fun.

Want Help with Writing or Editing?

Creating Resumes; Updating Resumes

I decided to start this blog to help people with writing problems.

I've been helping people create and rework their resumes for three years and I can help you do the same. In today's job market, it's even more important to have the right kind of resume. Most people don't know, for instance, that if their resume is received by a human resources department in a small company, the person who reads it will spend less than 60 seconds looking at the cover letter and resume. If this person doesn't see certain key words or ideas expressed, the resume is doomed.

Larger companies will use a scanner that does the same things, only the scanner will spend 10 seconds on the resume. Therefore, clear presentation, succinct phrases, and a clean set-up are absolutely necessary.

Proofreading


Many people are self-publishing their writing through online book publishers. These organizations simply don't have the financing to be able to have competent copy editors or proofreaders work on manuscripts. Sometimes a book is published with many or all of the author's original errors intact, which means the work, no matter how nicely packaged, appears amateurish.

I have helped such authors by proofreading their projects for them after the online publisher has set the work into print. I could also edit the manuscript before it is set, which would save the author even more money in the long run. The choice would be up to the author.

I charge a flat fee for anything I do of $22 per hour. If you have checked online resume services, you know that the least they charge is about $45. Many resume preparation services cost much more than that. Also, when I work for publishers in New York, my rate is between $22 and $26 per hour, so I am working within industry standards.

I hope I can help you. Check my blog for comments about writing and contact me if you need help.