Language vs. punctuation

Language—what linguists primarily concern themselves with—is what we humans speak. The very word language comes from the same root as the word tongue.

But what I concern myself with as an editor is not quite the same thing as our mother tongue. I work instead with the writing system, which is at best a mere shadow of the language—a projection of it onto the plane of paper or monitor, a flattening, to be sure, but also and inevitably a formalization and conventionalization of it.

What do I mean? I mean that writing is not a transcription of speech. And edited writing is not the natural stream of words that spews from the writer’s keyboard, let alone the writer’s mouth. Instead, it is an arrangement of formal symbols—the alphabet, some punctuation marks, various sorts of spaces, and so forth—that somehow evoke in the reader’s mind something akin to what the writer might be trying to say aloud were he or she in the room. And I mean that careful writers and editors usually try to follow some consistent set of conventions, embodied in a style guide, for the way those symbols are arranged. Readers don’t, as a rule, pay a lot of conscious attention to those conventions, but the conventions nonetheless help the reader glean meaning.

Conventions change over time. Pick up a book from as recently as fifty years ago and immediately the vocabulary, sentence structure, spelling, and punctuation will be noticeably different from that of a book published this year. This is independent of linguistic change—the change in the spoken language. It’s specifically about changing fashions among editors.

And at any given time, there are specific conventions in a state of flux.

One that came up today on a mailing list is the use of commas to set off a year or a state or country in constructions such as, “The Declaration of Independence is dated July 4, 1776, and was signed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by 56 people.”

Pretty much all of us editors agreed that those commas are necessary, before and after 1776 and before and after Pennsylvania. But we all have noticed that unedited manuscripts often omit one or more of them. It would not be unusual to receive a manuscript reading, “The Declaration of Independence is dated July 4, 1776 and was signed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by 56 people.”

So I proposed a test.

Here is a sentence you might read somewhere, perhaps in dialogue. It’s not a particularly graceful sentence, but that isn’t the point. The question is, if you were to encounter the sentence, would your reading be stalled, would your stomach churn? Rank these in order of preference—not how you would edit the sentence if you had the chance but how you would react upon encountering it in the wild.

1. The last time I went to Boston Massachusetts was in the summer.
2. The last time I went to Boston, Massachusetts was in the summer.
3. The last time I went to Boston Massachusetts, was in the summer.
4. The last time I went to Boston, Massachusetts, was in the summer.

This is not a question about right and wrong; it’s a question about the way conventions drift.

Responses in the comments, please.

Vote early. Vote twice.

The well-respected Preditors & Editors site conducts a poll every January, a statistically meaningless popularity contest that nonetheless has some promotional value for those who do well in it. The rules permit people to nominate themselves, and this year I’ve done just that, in two categories. Last year I finished in an ignominious tie at the bottom of the listing, and this year I’ve resolved to do better.

I’m asking for your vote. If presidential candidates can beg, so can I.

So please click on the book editor and writer’s resource polls and vote for me!

I thank you for your support.

Kid in an eye candy store

I meet interesting people in this business. Steph Slater is one of those interesting people. Steph’s genius expresses itself in his visual sense and his sense of space. This led him naturally enough toward the study of architecture. But rather than pursuing a career directly in that field, he became a construction consultant and primarily works as an owner’s representative. Steph came to me with an idea for a book, a guide for project owners—typically board members of nonprofits, Steph’s usual clients—to help them understand how a large project gets designed and built and to help them understand their own roles and those of the other players in the process. But Steph also wanted the book to be a rich visual experience for the reader with some instructive illustrations but also with inspiring images of great architectural examples. Serendipitously, Steph had access to the images at Shutterstock, and he took full advantage of it, selecting lots of great eye candy for the book. Because of Steph’s strong visual sense, working with him on the design of the book was a great collaboration. He didn’t come to the project with a visual vocabulary related to books, but he learned quickly as we went along and was ready with immediate and specific feedback as the design took shape. He also trusted me with the editing, because, as with a lot of strongly visual people, the details of grammar and spelling sort of sail below his radar. And then there was the website [Note that I’ve given up on “Web site” and have made the transition to solid, lowercase website. Language marches on.]

We had started out with a straightforward design for a static HTML website for Steph’s consulting business and to promote the book. Blecch! It was duller than the roof of the used GMC van I once owned. So Steph rooted around at Shutterstock and came up with the image he wanted to use for the site background. Only there were a couple of problems. First, the laptop screen was not exactly vertical and rectangular. It was tilted toward the viewer and trapezoidal. Okay, Photoshop to the rescue on that one. I isolated that part of the image, distorted it to make it rectangular, and then did some other Photoshoppy things to fill in the skinny blank triangles that maneuver created on the sides of the screen. No big deal. The second problem was that I had to accommodate the wide range of browser resolutions people use. I did not want anyone to have to scroll down to find the menu buttons or scroll across to find the page contents. And if I made the image small enough to accommodate the smallest browser, the contents would be unreadable on a high-resolution browser. That meant I had to figure out how to scale the background image to the browser size. In the end, the site turned into the biggest JavaScript project I’ve done, and I leaned on the expertise of a number of other people who got me out of one jam after another. The site is not for everyone: It requires that you permit JavaScript and it really requires a high-speed connection, because otherwise you’ll be able to cook breakfast while the site loads. But visually, I think the site came out looking good. And for Steph’s potential clientele, all of whom can be presumed to have the latest and greatest laptop and a high-speed connection, the technical requirements won’t be impediments. Anyway, I beat the deadline (books should be on hand any day now) even if I never got a chance to go Christmas shopping. And I learned a ton of JavaScript. I also learned a lot about developing a construction project, which will come in handy in real life.

Typographic notes from all over IV: About that gift card...

Okay, I wasn’t going to take the time, but this is seasonal.

Have you ordered any holiday gifts on the Web to be shipped to friends and relatives with an enclosed gift card? Have you received any such gifts?

What is wrong with these people? The merchants, I mean. “We’ll enclose your personalized note.” I guess I’d rather have a personal note, but I’ll settle for personalized. What I won’t settle for is a personalized note limited to 100 characters (including spaces) and printed on 20 lb. copier paper in 10 pt. Arial bold, all caps. Is that as personalized as these people are capable of?

Oh, it isn’t every catalog. The ones that are primarily in the gift business, rather than just running a little gift sideline at this time of year, put in a little more effort. Maybe they choose a slightly friendlier font and go to the trouble of printing on an attractive card. But they still limit the length of the message ridiculously and they still print it out in all caps.

Here’s a clue: Computers have been able to print lowercase letters since 1963.

We are experiencing particularly heavy call volume

Please call back at another time. Meanwhile, enjoy the holiday season. I will return to blogging after I get caught up on pressing deadlines. Ho! Ho! Ho! and all that.

Blog news: feed subscribers can now access comments

Back in October, I asked for some feedback on the blog, and Doug Geiger pointed out that people who read the blog through an RSS feed cannot easily click a link to add comments to a post.

I looked into it a bit and found a short script to enable that, but when I tried to upload it to the blog, the feed service objected (even though I obtained it from their own catalog).

Well, over the weekend, I had a bit of a blog template disaster (it was just a stupid-human trick, nothing to get excited about) and had to rebuild the template from scratch. Then today, I decided to check into the comments problem again, and I discovered that the same problem was occurring. So I looked at it a little harder and found the problem—a missing space in one line of code. I fixed that and uploaded the patch. The upshot is that for those of you using a feed reader, you should now see a Comments link at the foot of every post and you should be able to click it to access the comments, where you can then add a comment and, if you so choose, subscribe to the comment stream for that single post (that part seems silly to me, but it’s part of the deal). All this works in theory. If the stars are properly aligned.

Feel free to write back if you find it doesn’t work as advertised.

No statistical difference

NPR reporter David Greene, in a report this morning on the run-up to the Iowa presidential caucuses, called the race for the Democratic nomination a three-way “statistical dead heat” and, within the same sentence, commented on the interesting fact that Obama is edging out Clinton. He said it twice, actually, in different words.

Um, no. If there is no statistical difference, then there is no statistical difference. Nobody is edging out anybody. If you’re going to report on statistical results of polls, you should understand at least that much about poll results. Attaching political significance to statistically insignificant differences is irresponsible journalism, and claiming you weren’t a math major is no excuse. Shame on you, David Greene!

Numeracy matters.