Edit High #4: Grammar Rules
Break ’em all, rather than write something outright barbarous.
I once worked on a business news desk in Johannesburg with two revise subeditors, who fought a bitter war over hyphens that lasted literally for decades. As a down-table copy sub, I was caught in the middle, since I never knew which one would pick up my edited version and check it. The one revise sub had a hyphenated first name, which he had loathed since he was a child, and he avoided using hyphens absolutely wherever possible. The other was a highly pedantic triple-hyphen-when-necessary OCD case.
I would routinely be berated by each revise in turn, as I changed the copy and then changed it back to try and please them. Eventually, I sincerely offered to prepare two versions of each article, in their respective styles, so that we could at least all agree to disagree and save a lot of time. Neither of them would compromise.
On the main news desk of that paper, the chief night sub was a paranoid control freak who kept changing the style to make sure that no one ever knew what was correct, forcing us to consult him all the time on the smallest of things. He would get very vague and contradict himself on a weekly, sometimes daily basis. I eventually gave up asking him anything and reverted to what I have always told newbies is the single best style guide you can find, which is yesterday’s newspaper, or at least, the one that got edited yesterday. That way, if Charles told me something I had done was wrong, I could say “Well, it was right in this morning’s paper.”
This same chief night sub once went to the chief day sub and said he wanted to discuss a few matters of style, just to get things straight. The chief day sub, an ex-military type, said fine, let’s step outside and have a little discussion about straightening things out, shall we. The two never spoke a word to each other again, despite working in the same building for years.
He’d stopped doing it by the time I got there, but the chief sub on another Johannesburg newspaper, the infamous Citizen, would apparently arrive at work in the evening and put a huge loaded revolver in front of him on the desk. I saw quite a few fist fights there between the copy subs, either about grammar or girls, but no one ever meddled with the top table.
So the first rule of grammar is that the rules are always shifting, and it is the guy on the revise desk with the gun who makes the final grammatical calls. Language changes day by day, especially in this era of social media. Yesterday’s tweet is today’s meme is tomorrow’s headline, and it’s all forgotten the day after. Everyone is making up the rules as we go.
George Orwell, in a famous essay on writing, gave a few guidelines, and then said: Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. And I really think this is the most important issue. Remember, you are the editor here, not the writer. Your job is to make yourself as invisible as possible. I pride myself in being one of the lightest editors imaginable, I don’t lift a finger until I’m really sure something needs to be changed. Some editors compulsively meddle with everything they see. I compulsively leave things absolutely alone, until it’s clear beyond doubt that I have work to do. Believe me, there’s enough work for me in this sorry vale of blood, text and tears. But when the time really comes to act, I will break every rule in the book to get my writer’s message across, and fight tooth and nail over a comma, even with the guy with the loaded gun.
Break all the rules before you bend them, that’s funny. In my opinion.
One of the worst problems for an editor is having a writer who clearly knows a few of the rules and then sticks to them religiously. You’re scared to break an infinitive with these types, even when they do produce something barbarous, like “to lend happily a hand”.
If you are serious about editing, you need to be aware of the terminology of grammar, so that you can at least argue intelligently, or ask intelligent questions, about grammatical issues. You need to know what a preposition is, so you that you can understand the guideline (certainly not an absolute rule) that you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition. Winston Churchill famously gave this dictum as an example of grammatical fascism by telling an editor who had changed his copy (according to the Oxford Companion to the English Language): “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.”
One magazine style guide I worked from contained a long essay about “its” and “it’s”, recounting an argument the author of this guide had had with a certain subeditor, who insisted that it was perfectly correct to use the possessive apostrophe in this instance. If a dog has a bone, and the dog is designated as “it”, then you can talk about “it’s bone”, the same way you talk about “the dog’s bone”. Perfectly logical.
The guide agreed that this was actually a valid argument, and that these things are all quite arbitrary, and that one could certainly make a case for this usage before the court of eternal grammatical justice. However, the style guide also made it clear that this pedantic sub got fired, in case anyone else felt like engaging in long and tendentious arguments about apostrophes on deadline.
For some reason, the issue of reported speech always crops up as a bugbear; it is often insisted upon by the newsroom pedants, and many reporters confessed to me that they were really confused by this rule. This points to a much wider problem. You know that ominous joke: the Past, the Present, and the Future walk into a bar. It was tense. One of your main jobs as an editor is to keep an eye on the tenses running through the writing, even when you’re reading very fast. One American intern managed to get past, present and future to collide in one sentence, and I almost literally felt the gears in my head jamming and the whole show going off the rails. She later became a good friend and I discovered that her mind really worked like this, making astonishing jumps in time. Your grammar is very revealing about your thought processes.
So let me give you a little guide as to reported speech. If a company CEO tells a news conference, “We are still positive about our prospects”, this statement is delivered in the present tense. The reporter in the room then goes and writes the story for the next day. A tabloid writer may use direct speech in a lively present-tense style and quote the statement exactly:
“We are still positive about our prospects,” says Elon Musk, despite widespread skepticism.
However, by tomorrow, this whole event is in the past, and should be reported consistently as being in the past, if you are a serious journal of record. Thus, the New York Times will report:
Elon Musk said the company was still positive about its prospects.
This is now reported speech. You simply put what the guy said into past tense, without using quote marks, and you’re done. Because he said it yesterday, it’s all history already. This being Elon Musk, the situation may well have reversed itself overnight: you don’t know and you don’t make any assumptions, ever.
There are many rules that you will know implicitly, but it is worth pinning them down and seeing just how they work. One example is when you say “has been” (not to be confused with “a has-been”, like Charlie Sheen). If in November 2018 you say “2018 has been a good year”, you really mean “… so far”, the year is not over yet, there’s still room for disaster. In other words, use of “has been” actually signifies that the situation is still continuing. However, in January 2019, you can look back and say: “2018 was a good year”: it’s now over (unless, of course, some cooked books emerge to change the picture). It’s all quite simple when you know how, and there are no excuses any more, you can find any number of “good grammar” sites online and check out the tiniest of points.
Long ago, I did a master’s degree on classroom discourse, and found myself plunged into the nightmare world of linguistic studies — everything from Chomsky through Foucault (God help me) to Wittgenstein. Some of the most useful insights came from Saussure, one of the pioneers of the study of language. He talked about langue and parole, the former being the formal codified language of a culture, and the latter being the lived language and slang of its streets; and he described the complex interactions between these two realms. This interplay has become even more important in the era of social media. Today’s hashtag may find itself engraved on a brass plate outside a mega-billion corporation faster than you can say FOMO. As an editor, you need to be alive to the changes that are happening. When a teenager says “totes” in a TV series, you need to know this means “totally”. This is now part of the parole and one day you’ll find it totes useful in a headline, which is when it formally joins the langue.
Here’s a tip from an old maths teacher. The distributive law applies: (A + B)Y = AY + BY. So if you and I run, then: (you and I) run, meaning you run and I run. Not “me run”. If ever you get confused about “you and I” or “you and me”, just multiply out the bracket.
In the same way: Musk’s and Trump’s problems with truthiness may be similar, but Musk and Trump are not an item, so each gets his own apostrophe. However, Bill and Hillary’s problems are very much those of a political power couple, so the woes of Bill get subsumed by Hillary’s possessive apostrophe, and you can make of that grammatical insight what you will. In the same way, Watson and Crick’s famous paper announcing the discovery of DNA made them forever a scientific power couple, sharing the single apostrophe.
Of course, future history of media studies textbooks will describe how the true utility of modern post-post-modern power couple apostrophe style was first properly established during Brangelina’s messy divorce.
One issue over which a last stand may well be worth fighting is that of “who” and “whom”. These constructions are actually extremely useful in newspaper reporting in complicated cases, where you are trying to clarify who did what to whom, as seen by who. This very formulation should help you keep it straight. The point is: some verbs in English are transitive, they have a subject and an object. The subject does something to the object: the man hits the ball. When people do things to other people, the subject becomes “who” and the object is “whom”; so, “To whom am I speaking?” is correct. A classic example of this rule, based on elections, can be found in Strunk and White’s famous little book of style (they’re a classic literary power couple). I was compiling a style guide for the main newspaper here in Eswatini, so I updated their example for an African setting.
There’s a serious demagogue of a politician in South Africa called Julius Malema. He is always shouting his mouth off about the racist whites, and famously threw a “bloody agent” from the BBC out of a press conference, accusing him of being a spy. Malema is always good for memes and jokes, he is a frequent theme in cartoons here. He is also very good for newspaper sales. So we can say (this is Strunk & White’s example, updated): “Julius Malema is the candidate who we wish to see elected”, because he’ll be good for our newspaper sales. Please note: we are not electing him. Here, we are people observing these elections from a neighbouring country, sometimes with fascinated horror.
Then I tried to think of a really unmistakably Swati name, here in the Kingdom of Eswatini. I ended up with Siyanqoba Ndzimandze — the first name being the national motto, the second being as purely a Swati name as I could think of, those dz’s are a dead giveaway. We have just had parliamentary elections here, they were very hard fought, and I prefer to stick with a fictitious candidate. But here, we would say: “Siyanqoba Ndzimandze is the candidate whom we wish to elect”, because now this is our election, we are the ones voting. So: who votes for whom, as observed by who (in another country).
To close off: I had a really vicious longstanding fight with one subeditor who always knew everything, and who maintained among other things that you never use apostrophes for anything other than word contractions (“it’s” for “it is”) or for possessives. Never for anything like CD’S, even in a capitalized headline. I asked her: what about dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s? How can you write: “Dotting the is”? She virtually never spoke to me again, which would have been a blessing if communication between subs was not so important.
And this is a very good place to end an endless essay. Communication is absolutely essential when you’re working in a news environment. You need to check with the reporters, the other subeditors, the revise — even the layout editors, if a tricky URL is breaking bad across a line and you can’t introduce a hyphen.
You end up harassing waiters about typos in menus and asking why the section marked Pizza’s (with a singular possessive) has so many items, and whether they are in fact all “possessions” of some mythical singular unit pizza, and can you perhaps order one of those, or perhaps there really is only one. The funny looks you get make you realise that you do live in a very different world to the Muggleses’.
My final piece of advice, therefore, is a way to concentrate on the communicative side of what you’re doing. The very best way to punctuate a story, I always tell newbie subs, is to imagine that a radio announcer picks up the newspaper and reads the article you’ve just edited, live on air, without time to prepare or scan ahead. Punctuate everything so that it is easiest to read aloud, is my best advice. And I tell them, you’ll often see my lips moving when I’m reading on the screen, this is standard practice for me. You need to articulate what you’re saying. And reading something aloud word by word is the very best way to make sure you’ve missed nothing on that page.
There’s always one more mistake, one more little tweak you should have made, to get that article perfect on the page. It’s battlefield triage every day, you have to save your time and energy for where you can do the most good, for where it’s most important at any given time. And to save some energy for tomorrow, because the sands of style will have shifted once more, today’s clever headline will now be totes passé, and a whole slew of fresh decisions and judgment calls will be required. It never ends. There’s always some idiot saying something or doing something to some other idiot, watched and commented on by further idiots. The question is, who did what to whom, as observed by who, and who, and you, the idiot paid to keep it straight for all the other idiots.
