The Final Touch

You may have seen this piece some­where before — I don’t know the orig­i­nal sto­ry­teller — but it’s a good reminder to all of us about the impor­tance of (#1) being care­ful with our use of punc­tu­a­tion and (#2) hav­ing our impor­tant writ­ings proof­read by the prover­bial “sec­ond set of eyes” before they are released to the public.

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An Eng­lish pro­fes­sor wrote the words “A woman with­out her man is noth­ing” on the chalk­board and then asked his stu­dents to punc­tu­ate it correctly.

All of the males in the class wrote: “A woman, with­out her man, is nothing.”

How­ever, all the females in the class wrote: “A woman: with­out her, man is nothing.”

Punc­tu­a­tion is powerful!!!

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Thanks to my friend and col­league, Jay Sport of Jay Sport Man­age­ment Con­sult­ing Inc. (http://​www​.JaySportMC​.com) for pass­ing along this fun illustration.

The image of grace under pres­sure, per­se­ver­ance and hard work, and the courage to fol­low one’s dreams.

A dear friend sent me these quotes/quips (and more) some time ago. Thought I’d pass them on to you for a bit of Mon­day inspi­ra­tion! Enjoy!

• If you want your dreams to come true, you mustn’t oversleep.
• If you lack the courage to start, you have already finished.
• One thing you can’t recy­cle is wasted time.
• Ideas won’t work unless YOU do.
• The pur­suit of hap­pi­ness is the chase of a life­time!  It is never too late to become what you might have been.

Kim Staflund has writ­ten an arti­cle for Suite 101 which may be of inter­est to some of you. It is titled “Work­ing with a Copy Edi­tor to Pol­ish a Book.”

Ms. Staflund makes sev­eral points I greatly appre­ci­ate. One con­cerns the very nor­mal emo­tions a writer is bound to expe­ri­ence upon receiv­ing his or her work back from a copy­ed­i­tor. You’ve sent your “baby” off to a stranger (unless, by chance, you are for­tu­nate to know your copy­ed­i­tor per­son­ally or to have reached the point in your rela­tion­ship where you are more than acquain­tances), and that “baby” has been returned to you with a “hair­cut,” as it were! It’s nat­ural to feel a bit of resis­tance to sug­ges­tions made. Ms. Staflund offers help­ful advice for work­ing through such feel­ings to con­tinue to improve your manuscript.

Another point I am so grate­ful Ms. Staflund made is that, ulti­mately, in the self-publishing world, the final results — text, graph­ics, every­thing — are the respon­si­bil­ity of the author. I live in some dread (fairly slight, but present nonethe­less) that if an author’s book doesn’t sell well, he or she will try to sue me. I don’t know whether that’s ever hap­pened, but I’m relieved to see, in another writer/editor’s words, the same point I always try to express clearly to clients: that I will do the very best I know how for you, but in the end, you have the final call of whether to accept or reject my sug­ges­tions for change — and the final respon­si­bil­ity for the results. I, after all, am just one writer/editor — a good one, if I say so myself! — but just one human being with one opin­ion, no mat­ter how valid I may believe it to be. I’m trained in what I do, but I’m not per­fect. I do pledge, how­ever, to do my best as one part of the author’s “vil­lage” that, together, will raise the “child” — the pre­cious piece of writ­ing — to maturity.

I’ve known Dr. Stan­ton L. Andrist, OD, of Moor­head Vision Asso­ciates (Moor­head, Minn.) since he became my optometrist when I was a teenager. After I moved away from home, and then moved back years later, I started see­ing him again. I also brought my fam­ily along as new patients. I’ve always liked him – he is soft-spoken, ever-courteous, expertly knowl­edge­able about eye health, as well as respect­ful of the patient’s (or parent’s) right to make a final deci­sion in health-care matters.

But what really “wows” me is how he treats my chil­dren. (The quick­est way to win a mother’s heart is not through her stom­ach; it’s through her kids!) Wit­ness (in your mind’s eye) my 5-year-old son’s eye-doctor appoint­ment yesterday:

Gabriel perched calmly in the big, eye-doctor’s-office chair, eagerly await­ing Dr. Andrist’s entrance (a tech­ni­cian had escorted us to the exam room). To be sure, Gabe was look­ing for­ward to this appoint­ment: he knows eye doc­tor vis­its don’t hurt, and he des­per­ately wants glasses! (The rest of us in the fam­ily have them, after all.)

Even at age 1–1/2, Gabriel appar­ently liked the idea of hav­ing glasses!

When Dr. Andrist entered, as well as he knows me, he headed straight for Gabriel and offered his hand for a very adult-like greet­ing. Gabe responded as maturely as any grown-up would to the doctor’s inquiry of “How are you?”

Through­out the eye appoint­ment, as I sat mutely by, Dr. Andrist spoke directly to Gabe about what he could see, about what the doc needed him to do for the exam, and about Gabriel’s sin­cere wish for glasses. I was espe­cially struck by the respect­ful way the doc­tor spoke with Gabe at every turn, includ­ing say­ing “thank you” to him for every step of coöper­a­tion Gabriel gave. I bet almost a dozen “thank you’s” were offered to my son for fol­low­ing “sim­ple” requests.

What a great les­son for this mom — and pro­fes­sional ser­vice provider — to observe and learn! How much effort would it take to say “thank you” each and every time my preschooler (or my 5^th–grader, or my hus­band, or a client…) fol­lows a request I make and facil­i­tates my work with him/her? How much more will­ing would my preschooler (and the oth­ers) be to offer coöper­a­tion the next time? How pleas­ant our exchanges would be!

In sum, lots of pro­fes­sion­als – and fam­ily mem­bers – treat adults with respect, but it takes a very spe­cial per­son to treat a child with gen­uine respect. By respect­ing my preschooler, Dr. Andrist has earned my respect all over again.

It’s just what it says it is: “Your Essen­tial Syn­op­sis Check­list.” If you are to the stage in a writ­ing project where you want to start send­ing it off to prospec­tive pub­lish­ers, this will be a help­ful resource for you. It comes via “Writer’s Digest,” a highly respected name in the writing-and-publishing arena. Enjoy!

Since I ref­er­enced the Feb. 8, 2010, issue of Time mag­a­zine in my pre­vi­ous post, point­ing out a gram­mat­i­cal error — or, at the very least, a sub­head­ing that could have been writ­ten more accu­rately — I thought I’d use the same issue this time to point out an exam­ple of cor­rect, though awkward-sounding, sen­tence structure.

Mark Halperin writes (whether with a copyeditor’s assis­tance or with his or her tacit cor­rob­o­ra­tion): “But Obama (and for that mat­ter, the Clin­tons them­selves) has a long his­tory of…” (For the rest of the quote and the pol­i­tics of it, you’ll have to read the arti­cle; what I’m inter­ested in here is purely cel­e­brat­ing the mechan­ics of good writing.)

What is so delight­ful is that Mr. Halperin gets it right — as odd as it sounds! The sen­tence sounds wrong because we hear “Clin­tons them­selves” — a plural noun phrase — right next to “has” — a sin­gu­lar verb. It’s always good to watch out for such errors; they’re easy to make. But what we don’t “hear” in the sen­tence at hand is the paren­the­sis between the two parts of speech. “Has” actu­ally goes along with what comes before the entire par­en­thet­i­cal phrase, “and for that mat­ter, the Clin­tons them­selves”; “has” goes with “Obama”: sin­gu­lar noun, sin­gu­lar verb — per­fect! We see, and hear, this clearly if we skip over the part in paren­the­ses and read like so: “But Obama has a long his­tory of.…” But it’s so com­mon for a writer to trip over this kind of struc­ture because “have” would sound right.

Con­grat­u­la­tions, Mr. Halperin and your edi­to­r­ial staff!

The irony is that it’s entirely pos­si­ble that the same copy­ed­i­tor who approved this accu­rate struc­ture also slid over the less-than-accurate one I dis­cussed yes­ter­day. We’re all human, after all — even copy­ed­i­tors and proof­read­ers! We win some; we lose some! (If we’ve man­aged to accrue a few pos­i­tive client rec­om­men­da­tions, we likely win far more than we lose. But we will still miss on occa­sion.) Yet mis­takes are usu­ally what gar­ner atten­tion, so I wanted to lift up this delight­ful, if some­what unlikely, success.