Where Are the Copy Editors?

By Far the Best Typo of 2011

2011-12-17T22:26:00.001-05:00

I have been reading Craig Shirley's new book, December 1941: 31 Days That Changed America and Saved the World (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011), which is a fascinating account of the days before and after the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese on December 7, 1941.

The book is fascinating (and informative) in spite of numerous errors that are the result of inadequate editing -- errors of fact, anachronisms, and simple typos riddle the text.

Yet, of all the mistakes I have noted while reading the book, the best typographical error by far has to be one that occurs on page 169, in the chapter on "The Eighth of December." This has to be, perhaps, one of the most ironic typos of all time.

In describing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's preparations for his historic speech before Congress asking for a formal declaration of war against Japan, Shirley writes:

Reading the president's original manuscript of his address revealed the sheer power of words. He initially wrote December 7, 1941, would be a day that would live in "history," but he later crossed out that word, inserted a proofreader's carrot, and scribbled "infamy."

Yes, you read that right: "proofreader's carrot."

Shirley meant to say "caret."

Just to be clear, this is a proofreader's caret:

And this is a carrot:

To add to the mix, a few pages later (p. 173), Shirley ends a paragraph about new rules and regulations in reaction to the new state of war with this sentence:

It was unclear how the new edits from Washington would affect second generation Japanese Americans, known as "Nisei."

If that was unclear, one thing is definitely clear: Craig Shirley, or Thomas Nelson Publishers, needs a new copy "edictor."

Look soon for a full review of December 1941 on my companion blog, Book Reviews by Rick Sincere, where there already is a review of a similar new book by Stanley Weintraub called Pearl Harbor Christmas.

Getting Immigration Backwards

2010-11-28T19:37:00.000-05:00

The weekly "Free for All" letters column in The Washington Post accommodates readers who want to vent about something they had read in the Post during the previous several days, often taking issue with grammar, spelling, or punctuation usage.

In yesterday's Post, letter-writer Gib Durfee objects to the way the Post had used "immigrate" in a sentence from an AP story on November 19, in which WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was said to be considering "immigrating to Switzerland."

Durfee goes on to say:

Even if readers didn't take Latin in school, they should know that a person emigrates to a new country and immigrates from the old.

It's just a matter of to and fro.

Durfee has it exactly backwards.

This would be clear especially to someone who had taken Latin in school, because they would know that "e-" at the beginning of a word suggests "outside of" or "from," as in "exit" or "exoskeleton." By contrast, the prefix "im-" suggests "in," "to," or "inside" -- compare "implode" and "explode," for instance.

In a Raleigh News & Observer column on language usage from August 2008, journalist Pam Nelson addresses precisely this issue and cites the AP Stylebook, which says:

emigrate, immigrate: One who leaves a country emigrates from it. One who comes into a country immigrates. The same principle holds for emigrant and immigrant.

Nelson goes on to explain that

[Usage expert Bryan] Garner points out that "immigrate" means to migrate into or enter (a country) and "emigrate" means to migrate away from or exit (a country). That distinction is at the heart of a mnemonic I have heard: emigrate means exit; immigrate means enter. [Theodore] Bernstein wrote that "emigrate" needs "from." [Diana] Hacker makes the same distinction.

I really can't fault the letter writer for missing this distinction; perhaps he learned it backwards from a Latin teacher in high school.

I can, however, fault the Post's editors -- especially the "Free for All" page's copy editors -- for failing to note that the Post's (or the AP's) usage was correct from the outset, and for choosing to run a letter that took them to task for actually being correct.

What's puzzling to me, as well, is that as of 7:32 p.m. on Sunday -- more than a full day after the letter appeared in print -- not a single Post reader has commented on the newspaper's web site about the confusion exhibited (from the Latin, "to hold out") by this letter. Are there neither emigrants nor immigrants in the Washington Post's circulation area?

Numeracy

2010-08-30T18:50:00.000-04:00

Where did Charlottesville Daily Progress reporter Brian McNeill learn how to count?

In his August 21 piece on the move-in of first-year students at the University of Virginia this year, McNeill has this lede:

The University of Virginia was abuzz with activity Saturday as roughly 3,246 students and their families descended upon Grounds for move-in weekend.

Roughly 3,246?

That is a precise number. It is not a "rough estimate" or approximation.

He could have said "roughly 3,200" or even "roughly 3,250." But there is nothing "rough" or indeterminate about "3,246."

Where was McNeill's copy editor?

Turning Japanese

2010-08-30T18:40:00.000-04:00

In an otherwise unobjectionable article about the decline of a business providing English-to-Japanese translations in last Saturday's Washington Post, we find this paragraph:

One morning last week, Karol Zipple, the company's only American employee, made a small pile of clips: news stories on increased Japanese demand for American wine, food-borne illnesses and the women's golf tour. Compared with coverage in previous years, it was a depressingly slim product. "We used to be buried in newsprint" before U.S. newspapers began cutting back coverage as a result of the recession and the decline of print journalism, Zipple said.

I did a double-take when I read that first sentence. Why, I wondered, was there "increased Japanese demand for ... food-borne illnesses and the women's golf tour"?

Then I realized that this was a series of separate items defined by "news stories on" rather than "increased Japanese demand for."

The ambiguity could have been avoided by rearranging the objects, like this: "news stories on food-borne illnesses, the women's golf tour, and increased Japanese demand for American wine."

Simple, isn't it?

This might also be a good time to urge the Washington Post to reinstate the serial comma in its style book. It never should have been removed in the first place.

Homophones

2010-03-23T15:53:00.001-04:00

The New York Daily News today has an article on its web site about Vice President Joe Biden using "colorful" language in introducing President Obama at a public ceremony. (I do not know if this article appears, or will appear, in the paper's print edition.)

Reporter Michael Sheridan writes:

Health care reform isn't just a big deal, it's a "big f---ing deal."

At least, that's what Vice President Joe Biden thinks.

The 67-year-old former senator introduced President Obama prior to his signing of the historic health care reform bill into law on Tuesday, and let the colorful word slip while shaking the commander-in-chief's hand.

"You did it," Biden told his boss. "It's a big f---ing deal."

What caught my eye -- and what makes this article fodder for this blog -- is the penultimate paragraph, which says:

Fowl language may be a favorite for vice presidents. Ex-Veep Dick Cheney famously used the infamous phrase on several occasions during his two terms.

Something tells me that Sheridan did not want to suggest that Biden and Cheney talk like our avian friends. He meant to say "foul language," not "fowl language."

A good copy editor would have caught that.

Of course, it might be that the Daily News is trying to suggest that Biden (and, by extension, Cheney) are "chicken s--t."

Muslim Redundancy

2010-02-28T21:44:00.000-05:00

Redundancy

Even the Old Gray Lady, the New York Times itself, is not immune to the lack of sharp-eyed copy editors.

In its opinion section today, we find an article by Efraim Karsh headlined "Muslims Won't Play Together," about the Arab boycott of the Islamic Solidarity Games scheduled to take place in April in Iran.

About a third of the way through the article, we find these two sentences:

It took a mere 24 years after the Prophet’s death for the head of the universal Islamic community, the caliph Uthman, to be murdered by political rivals. This opened the floodgates to incessant infighting within the House of Islam, which has never ceased.

Doesn't it go without saying that "incessant infighting" will be something that has "never ceased"?

How Not to Help Our Childrens Learn

2010-02-03T17:11:00.001-05:00

Educators who purport to know how best to teach children the fundamentals should first learn to write in complete sentences.

From an article in yesterday's New York Times by Susan Engel, identified as "a senior lecturer in psychology and director of the teaching program at Williams College" (emphasis added):

In order to design a curriculum that teaches what truly matters, educators should remember a basic precept of modern developmental science: developmental precursors don’t always resemble the skill to which they are leading. For example, saying the alphabet does not particularly help children learn to read. But having extended and complex conversations during toddlerhood does.

The OpEd piece is entitled "Playing to Learn." There's no indication whether Dr. Engel passed sixth-grade grammar -- or whether her copy editor missed the class completely.

Even Letters Deserve Editors

2009-07-27T03:36:00.001-04:00

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.

One of the jobs of the editor of the letters page in a newspaper is to check the facts of the letters from readers that the paper chooses to publish and correct errors, if necessary.

The letters editor of the Washington Post fell down on the job the other day. In a letter from Wes Pedersen of Chevy Chase (Maryland) about the origins of John F. Kennedy's enthusiasm for space exploration, we learn this:

In truth, Mr. Kennedy's lunar zeal was pressed upon him by his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, who explained the political and public relations importance of a dramatic move that would raise Americans' morale in the wake of the surprise orbiting of the Earth by Russia's unmanned Sputnik. Earlier, as House speaker, Johnson had been the foremost advocate of funding for NASA.

Vice President Johnson may have whispered something in JFK's ear about lunar voyages, but he did not do so as Speaker of the House -- or even as former Speaker of the House.

Washington Post editors should know that LBJ served as Majority Leader of the United States Senate. He had a short term in the House of Representatives but never rose to the post of Speaker.

Brainchild Is Father to the Man?

2009-03-18T02:25:00.001-04:00

In an otherwise informative obituary of Reese Cleghorn, longtime dean at the University of Maryland's school of journalism, Lauren Wiseman wrote in Tuesday's Washington Post:

Mr. Cleghorn was the brainchild behind the school's successful student-operated wire service, Capital News Service, which launched in 1990 with bureaus in Washington and Annapolis. The news service stories appear in Maryland newspapers and on the McClatchy news service, which has national distribution.

No, no, no!

Capital News Service was Mr. Cleghorn's brainchild. Mr. Cleghorn was the brain behind the Capital News Service.

Does the Washington Post library lack a dictionary? Do editors look at the obituaries before they go to press?

Not Exactly Relevant, But ...

2008-12-05T02:18:00.005-05:00

I know it's not germane to the topic claimed by this blog, but I thought it might be noteworthy to announce that I have taken the plunge and opened up a shop on CafePress, hoping to tap into the bottomless wealth of the Internet. The shop is designed to meet the gift-buying preferences of readers of my more active blog, Rick Sincere News & Thoughts.

The main page of the shop can be found here.

There is also a section devoted to Christmas products (called "Christmas Cheer"). Another section, called "Politics & Travel," will eventually be populated with products for the libertarian-minded shopper; for now, it has magnets and notecards decorated with various views of the Washington Monument and other notable buildings.

A third section, "Saints & Sinners," fulfills a more impish function. Check it out and see what I mean.

More items are sure to be added, and reminders will be posted here and at www.RickSincere.com.

Reports of His Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

2008-09-16T16:12:00.001-04:00

Bad Punctuation, Major Factual Error

From Sunday's Washington Times comes this egregious paragraph in a review of Michael Dobbs' recent book on the Cuban Missile Crisis. UPI editor Martin Sieff writes:

But Mr. Dobbs also challenges. And demolishes many hoary myths that have obscured the true history of the crisis on the U.S. side over the decades as well. Most of all, he destroys the image of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, President John F. Kennedy's brother, as a wise, consistent force of moderation throughout the crisis. On the contrary in its early stages, RFK was one of the most unstable, shoot-from-the-hip advisers surrounding the president. "On the first day of the crisis, he was one of the leading advocates for invading Cuba and even ruminated aloud about staging a 'Sink the Maine'-type incident as a pretext for getting rid of Castro," Mr. Dobbs writes. Bobby Kennedy also played a much smaller role in the resolution of the crisis than Theodore Sorensen, the recently deceased lifelong hagiographer of the Kennedy clan, claimed, Mr. Dobbs proves.

A competent copy editor would have caught those sentence fragments at the beginning of the paragraph.

Theodore Sorensen himself must be amused by the last sentence, which describes him as "recently deceased." His admirers might be dismayed, however, to learn that the former White House advisor, who made a public appearance in Charlottesville last week, is reportedly dead.

While in Charlottesville, Sorensen talked about his experiences during the Cuban Missile Crisis. According to The Hook, a local weekly newspaper:

Sorensen, speaking to invited guests of the UVA center named for his late benefactor brother, alternated between defending "his president like a Rottweiler refusing to let go of a pant leg," as the Washington Post recently put it, and prompting guffaws (as did his sister, Institute board member Ruth Sorensen Singer, in her introduction).

For instance, the televised address Sorensen wrote for Kennedy did much more than explain the American naval blockade of Cuba. In recent years, Sorensen said, myriad men have approached him "to thank me for making that speech so scary that they could convince their girlfriends it was their last night on earth."

I am surprised that the Washington Times web site has not yet posted a correction to Sieff's, um, fatal error.

Even the English Are Not Immune

2008-08-11T16:13:00.004-04:00

My eye was drawn to a Daily Telegraph article about "embarrassing questions" asked by tourists to the stately homes of England.

However embarrassing the tourists' questions might have been, the Telegraph itself should be embarrassed by a repeated typographical/spelling error in the article.

After first spelling "Isle of Wight" correctly not once, but twice, the article later misspells it as "Isle of White" -- not once, but twice.

See for yourself:

A young visitor to Queen Victoria's summer palace Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight, was told that she had nine children and asked: "Did they all have the same dad?"....

"Is this where Sharon and Ozzie actually live?" - a visitor to Osborne House, Isle of Wight....

"Did they all have the same dad?" – a visitor to Osborne House, Isle of White, who learned of Queen Victoria's nine children....

"How long does life membership last?" - a visitor to Osborne House, Isle of White

Newspaper Writers Know

2008-08-07T21:15:00.003-04:00

Writers for major newspapers are as aware as anyone of the absence of sufficient numbers of (or sufficiently talented) copy editors.

Here's an item from Al Kamen's "In the Loop" column in The Washington Post, published on August 6:

This deplorable error in an Associated Press wire dispatch Monday is surely the result of the demise of copy editors in the news business. The wire carried news of conservative political commentator Robert D. Novak -- who, by the way, was always gracious and helpful to us, despite his cranky public persona -- and his retirement from the biz after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

And then a terrible gaffe: "Novak has been a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times for decades. He announced late last month he has a brain."

It's Madison, Not Monroe

2008-07-08T22:36:00.001-04:00

Factual Error:

In a tribute to the late Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) in Tuesday's Washington Times, Ed Feulner of the Heritage Foundation writes:

On the Fourth of July in 1826, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson - Founding Fathers and presidents - both died. On the Fourth of July in 1831 James Monroe - primary author of the Constitution - died.

He's correct about the dates and the men who died on Independence Day in 1826 and 1831. He's wrong about James Monroe's claim to fame.

The primary author of the Constitution was James Madison, who went on to become the fourth President of the United States. Monroe, who succeeded Madison to the presidency in 1817, was not even present as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. (Monroe did, however, serve in Virginia's convention to vote on ratification of the Constitution.)

Where are the copy editors at the Washington Times?

Senator Douglas Must Be Miffed

2008-07-07T02:57:00.002-04:00

Factual Error:

In a Washington Post Book World review of Daniel Mark Epstein's The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage, Catherine Allgor writes (on page BW05):

For Mary Todd Lincoln, as for many First Ladies, the most active politicking took place in the years before her husband won the highest seat in the land. While Abraham was a senator, Mary sought patronage posts for him, wrote his letters and used her own correspondence to outline his position on slavery to Southerners.

Allgor is identified as a professor of history at the University of California at Riverside, so surely she must know that Abraham Lincoln never served as a senator.

Lincoln was a member of the Illinois House of Representatives and of the U.S. House of Representatives early in his political career, and in 1858 he engaged in that famous series of debates with Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas in an attempt to win election to the United States Senate -- but Lincoln lost that time, only to defeat Douglas two years later in the presidential election of 1860.

Perhaps the error is found in the book under review, and Allgor's repetition of it is an oversight. Perhaps she wrote "senator" when she meant to write "candidate."

However it found its way into Book World, however, it was up to the copy editing team at the Washington Post to check this new fact and delete it before publication.

Constitutional Fact Check

2008-07-03T15:39:00.001-04:00

(This is cross-posted from my other blog.)

Perhaps it is understandable, if not entirely excusable, when a historian makes a factual mistake in something he writes, when the mistake deals with more recent events than those he is describing.

But one would think that a prestigious newspaper like the Washington Post would have fact-checkers on staff to make sure that errors do not end up in print, especially on the heavily-visited op-ed page.

In a piece published Wednesday, "Three Cheers for July Second,"Andrew Trees -- who used to teach at a tony New York private academy, Horace Mann School, until a racy roman à clef called Academy X got him in hot water -- talks about the how John Adams predicted that our big national holiday would be celebrated on July 2, the day the Continental Congress voted for independence (two days before the Declaration of Independence was subsequently approved). Trees makes this suggestion:

I propose we make July 2 a national holiday to celebrate the Founders for some of their greatest but least appreciated attributes -- their mistakes.

Irony alert: Later in his article, Trees writes about the originally proposed amendments that led to the Bill of Rights:

The Bill of Rights as we know it also is not what was initially proposed. The original first two amendments, one of which concerned the number of constituents each member of Congress had and one regarding congressmen's salaries, were never ratified by the states. What we think of today as our First Amendment freedoms were actually third on the list.

"Never ratified by the states"? Um, perhaps the first one, but not the second.

What could have been the First (or Second) Amendment eventually became the Twenty-Seventh Amendment, ratified on May 7, 1992. It is the most recent amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the one that took the longest path from proposal to ratification. It reads, according to the National Archives:

AMENDMENT XXVII

Originally proposed Sept. 25, 1789. Ratified May 7, 1992.

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of representatives shall have intervened.

Trees may have missed this development, focused as he was the "delicious, malicious stuff" (in Jonathan Yardley's words) recounted in Academy X. If he didn't learn about the 27th Amendment while writing his book, The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character (could that require another irony alert?), then at least the Post's opinion pages staff should have caught the error.

Or maybe it's just one more mistake for us to celebrate on July 2.

Let's Start with These Examples

2008-07-03T15:01:00.002-04:00

Poor Word Choice:

In an article on how new media is being used in the presidential campaign, Washington Times correspondent Kara Rowland wrote in the print edition of July 1 (one day before Rowland's birthday, as it happens):

...despite some aesthetic differences, the functionality of the two campaigns' official Web sites are virtually identical. Visitors are greeted by pictures of each man looking confidentially out into the distance.

"Confidentially"? Doesn't she mean "confidently"? Or are Barack Obama and John McCain being somehow conspiratorial in they way they look "out into the distance"?

Factual Error:

I do not want to pick on the Washington Times in this first substantive post, but on the same page as Rowland's article (July 1, 2008; page B4) is the jump of an article about a Colorado congressional race, in which one of the candidates is openly gay.

Valerie Richardson reports:

If elected, Mr. [Jared] Polis would be the first openly gay man to win a House race without the benefit of incumbency. Both of the known homosexual men to win House seats - former Rep. Gerry Studds and Rep. Barney Frank, both Massachusetts Democrats - disclosed their sexuality after having first won election to Congress.
Rep. Tammy Baldwin, Wisconsin Democrat, was the first openly gay woman to be elected when she won in 1998.

This news will come as a surprise to former U.S. Representatives Steve Gunderson (R-Wisconsin) and Jim Kolbe (R-Arizona), both of whom were re-elected after they revealed their sexual orientation to their constituents. Gunderson was re-elected once after coming out in 1994 (he retired at the next cycle) and Kolbe was not only re-elected several times after coming out in 1996, he became chairman of the foreign operations subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. Kolbe retired after the 2006 election.

Where were the copy editors at the Washington Times?

Where Are the Copy Editors?

2008-07-03T14:37:00.000-04:00

The newspaper business is going through cataclysmic changes. Readership is down, advertising revenues are down, newsstand sales are down. More people are getting their news from television and the Internet.

As a consequence, newsroom staffs are shrinking. The Washington Post, for instance, recently made a major buy-out offer to its employees, which led to many veteran reporters and editors choosing early retirement. The Post's longtime, low-key executive editor, Leonard Downie, has announced his own retirement, and the newspaper has a new publisher, Katharine Weymouth.

Similar -- and sometimes more drastic -- changes are taking place at other major newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times.

As these seismic shifts are being felt, old-fashioned copy editing is falling through the cracks. I am finding more, and more frequent, errors in the daily newspaper than ever before -- errors that normally would be caught before publication by competent and sharp-eyed copy editors and proofreaders.

Don't get me wrong: There are few more admirable miracles than the production of a major daily newspaper. Even before -- or perhaps especially before -- the advent of the 24-hour news cycle, the idea that an event could occur at noon, be discovered at 1:00 p.m., a reporter dispatched at 1:30, and a story and analysis written, edited, typeset, and printed by midnight for the early editions the next day is practically unfathomable.

Instantaneous communication -- with any blogger (myself included) able to post audio, video, photographs, and text within minutes after an event and letting the whole world know about it -- has jaundiced our opinions on the press. Reporters and editors deserve a great deal more respect than they often get.

But ...

In my other blog, Rick Sincere News and Thoughts, an eclectic mix of political and cultural commentary that has been on the web since December 2004, I every once in a while pick up on a disjointed word choice or odd sentence that does not, to be kind, serve its author well.

Sometimes I have found factual errors that should never have seen print. (For example, see my blogpost on historian Andrew Trees, who seems unaware that the Twenty-Seventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified 16 years ago.)

As these items come more frequently to my attention, I want to point them out and ask, "Where are the copy editors?"

Sometimes these items are unintentionally (I hope) funny; sometimes they are embarrassing; sometimes they are just sad. But they need to be identified and corrected.

I have started this narrowly-focused blog to bring these errors, mistakes, and howlers to the surface. I don't intend to be picayunish. I won't, as a rule, wag my finger at simple typos (typographical errors). But wrong word choice, badly constructed sentences, and errors of fact are fair game.

I'm also interested in opening up a dialogue on the question of copy editing. Is it an art or a craft? Is it a lost art, or a lost craft? Is it still necessary in the Internet Age? (I obviously think it is.)

I learned to edit at the feet (metaphorically speaking) of Ernest W. Lefever and Carol Griffith at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in the early 1980s. They not only taught me the skills involved in working with a manuscript, but also instilled in me high standards for what constitutes acceptable grammar, punctuation, and syntax. Those standards animate what will follow in this blog.

I don't intend to have any particular targets here. I suspect that the Washington Post, Washington Times, and Charlottesville Daily Progress will be the most frequently cited, simply because those are the newspapers I read in their print editions. Other publications may meet my gaze, but only if I run across an item on their web sites. I may also bring to my readers' attention the comments of others in the same vein.