A college classmate posted something on Facebook about somebody using two spaces after a period, and that being the start of an intractable argument. This is a pretty common thing brought up in vaguely writer-ly circles, and I always find it amusing because I have a hard time imaging anything I might care less about. Except maybe a handful of other debates from the same general region of topical parameter space: Oxford commas, singular “they,” styles of text justification, uncool but readable fonts, etc. These are all sources of passionate arguments that I find utterly baffling.
This is on my mind because, as I sit down to write this, I’m halfway through reviewing the copyedits for my forthcoming book (A Brief History of Timekeeping, on the last five thousand years of the science, technology, politics, and philosophy of keeping track of what time it is. It’s available to pre-order now, hint, hint…). This is my fifth book, so I’ve been through this process a bunch of times, and it’s always been relatively easy precisely because I don’t have passionate opinions about grammar. There are occasionally stylistic changes that I fight back on— I will go to bat for capital letters on “Standard Model of particle physics” and “Big Bang,” Chicago style be damned— but for the most part, if the copyeditor feels something I wrote needs a grammar tweak, I’m happy to defer to them, because they’re almost certainly right.
This is because I write largely on feel, and have always been a little hazy on some of the fiddlier bits of English grammar. This is particularly true when it comes to commas, as demonstrated by this masterpiece of diplomatic writing from the copyeditor’s notes on the book-in-production:
I started off allowing lots of commas for pacing, phrasing, and readability, even if they don’t conform to Chicago’s comma rules for dependent vs. independent clauses. But as I progressed through the book, that use—to my copyeditor sensibility—became frequent, especially the comma separation of compound predicates that don’t include a noun after the comma. I grew concerned it would undermine the credibility of the book. So I did remove a number of commas or add nouns or pronouns after the commas.
Translation: Good God, man, what are you doing to these poor innocent punctuation marks?
That said, I greatly appreciate the efforts of the copyeditors I’ve worked with, because they do amazing work making me look better by smoothing out some of my writing tics, cleaning up my more noticeable idiosyncracies of grammar, and most importantly ensuring that I’m reasonably consistent in how I talk about people, places, and things. And there are a lot of these in the book-in-production, as you can see from this screenshot of a couple of pages from the list of names in the copyeditor notes I was sent:
(I’m not certain what I’m supposed to do with this list, but I get sent them every time, and it’s always sort of amusing. I no longer recall why or where I brought John Cusack up, but when I finish this, I’m going to go look for it…)
Coincidentally, I’ve also been helping my two summer research students prepare for a poster session this afternoon, which has involved a bit of time as the editor for writing by students. As you might imagine, this is not a role I fall into all that easily, and not just because of my loose relationship with formal grammar.
My big issue with editing (and also grading) student writing is that while I don’t have strong opinions about grammar and typography, I have extremely strong feelings about issues of organization and word choice. It’s sometimes hard to hold back from saying “Gahhh!!! This is awful!” about things like awkward passive-voice construction, or the use of needlessly big words (“utilize” in place of “use” is a personal pet peeve). At the same time, though, my own writing career is highly reliant on the particular voice I use, so I don’t want to completely crush students’ own voices.
And the issue of voice brings in the third writing-related thing I have going on at the moment (well, the fourth, if you count this blog as a meta-Thing #NobodyExpectsTheSpanishInquisition…). I recently got line edits on scripts I wrote for a different project entirely, where the editor occasionally added new lines to fill gaps or whatever. Some of these made me physically recoil from the screen when I read them— it would be hard for them to be less like something I could imagine myself saying out loud. They’re so far off from my voice that it’s been really difficult to force myself to revise them. I just look at the added text and go “Ugggghhhhhhhh…” and it’s a struggle to see past the bad word choice to the actual issue they were trying to fix. That’s the thing I’m trying to avoid inflicting on my students.
(I spend a lot of time on voice even in work that’s not directly related to writing. For the last several years, I was in a position with administrative responsibilities that required sending a lot of all-campus emails, and I put way more effort into finding ways to work some sort of joke into them than I probably needed to. But that’s my Thing, and I used to get occasional replies saying “I don’t care about the thing you’re announcing in this, but I read the whole message just to see what the joke would be,” which was nice.)
To return to the question of copyediting, I’m very happy to say that I haven’t been having that problem with the copyedit— the changes being suggested have been pretty minimal, and the copyeditor has done a great job of not screwing up the tone of the book. This isn’t a surprise— the same guy did the copyedit for Breakfast with Einstein, which was also remarkably pleasant. It’s also extremely thorough— he’s catching some really subtle errors with names and dates and so on. The end result is to make my book— and thus me— look a whole lot better, and I greatly appreciate it.
I still don’t care about spaces after a period, though.
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