The Final Touch

This is amaz­ing!! A reminder that when we fall down, we need to try and try and try again until we find the strength to get back up. God will give us that strength. Do not lose hope! If Nick Vuji­cic can live in hope, so can you!

Thanks to my friend and social net­work­ing coach Sab­rina Gib­son for pass­ing along a sim­i­lar video about this inspir­ing gentleman!

What a moti­va­tion he is for us all!

Nick Vuji­cic on YouTube

There are two mis­takes I see so com­monly in writ­ing — even in the writ­ing of very good writ­ers! — so I’d like to try to help sort them out. They have to do with mak­ing “peo­ple” and “each other” possessive.

The ten­dency is to write “peo­ples’ ” and “each oth­ers’.” For example:

1. Many peo­ples’ tal­ents are kept hid­den due to mod­esty. (wrong)

2. We glanced at each oth­ers’ out­fits and laughed to dis­cover we looked like twins. (wrong)

The think­ing (I think) in a writer’s mind is that we’re deal­ing with plu­rals so we need the typ­i­cal way of mak­ing a plural pos­ses­sive — which is, most often, adding an apos­tro­phe after an already-present “s.” The mis­take, how­ever, comes in treat­ing “peo­ple” and “each other” as sin­gu­lar, adding the “s” for the plural, and then adding the apos­tro­phe for the possessive.

Since “peo­ple” is already plural (just like “men,” “women,” and “chil­dren”), you need to add an “apostrophe-s,” NOT an “s-apostrophe.” The cor­rect form for sen­tence #1 is “people’s.” (Don’t be fooled by the other, though less com­mon, use of “peo­ples” as the plural form, indi­cat­ing sev­eral dis­tinct group­ings, nation­al­i­ties, or cul­tures of peo­ple, in which case the “s-apostrophe” (adding just an apos­tro­phe where the “s” is already present) would indeed be cor­rect: The Native Amer­i­can peo­ples’ cul­tures are so fascinating.

Now, as for mak­ing “each other” pos­ses­sive: The think­ing (I think) is that “each” is sin­gu­lar — and indeed it is. That’s why we say Each of the bats has a crack in it, NOT Each of the bats have a crack in it (nor, as is some­times seen, “in them”); since “each” is a sin­gu­lar sub­ject, the verb must match and be sin­gu­lar as well. But when “each other” is used, we are actu­ally talk­ing about two indi­vid­u­als, so it’s already a plural. No addi­tional “s” is needed to make it plural before adding the apos­tro­phe to make it pos­ses­sive. Instead, we add “apostrophe-s” as we would to any plural word not end­ing in “s” (like, again, “men,” “women,” “chil­dren,” which are made pos­ses­sive as “men’s,” “women’s,” “children’s” — never mind the fact that signs in most depart­ment stores leave off the apostrophes).

The cor­rected sen­tences then read as fol­lows:
3. Many people’s tal­ents are kept hid­den due to mod­esty. (right)

4. We glanced at each other’s out­fits and laughed to dis­cover we looked like twins. (right)

(I’m sure it only adds to the con­fu­sion when pro­grams like MS Word show “other’s” as a spelling error. Pay no atten­tion! — the soft­ware is wrong!! — doubt­less designed by peo­ple very tal­ented in mat­ters tech­ni­cal and tech­no­log­i­cal but not in mat­ters gram­mat­i­cal!)

I hope this expla­na­tion helps. Let me know if the usage is still not clear or if you have other spe­cific gram­mar ques­tions I can assist with.

One of the news-magazines for which I do copy­edit­ing fea­tured “yours truly” last week in their inter­view col­umn called “Behind the Scenes.” Since my answers will help you to know me and my busi­ness bet­ter, I thought I’d share it with you. Click on the link below, and at the web­page where you land, click the blue “Down­load Now” icon: The FM Extra’s “Behind the Scenes with Heidi Mann, Final Touch Proof­read­ing & Edit­ing,” April 9, 2010.

Heidi Mann, Final Touch Proof­read­ing & Editing

It’s been quite a while since I shared from this fun resource, so I thought I’d do so again. These par­tic­u­lar tips are by some of my favorites. Who didn’t grow up lov­ing Charlotte’s Web? And I remem­ber dis­tinctly my expe­ri­ences of read­ing Orwell and Brad­bury and Fitzger­ald in high school; Samuel John­son? — alas, not so much, but that’s OK — he still has a valu­able tip to share.

(To see Tips 1–4, click here. To see tips 11–101, sub­scribe to this blog using the icon to the right and watch for them every so often.)

5. EB White. Just write. The author of Charlotte’s Web, one of the most beloved of children’s books, said that “I admire any­body who has the guts to write any­thing at all.”

6. Samuel John­son. Keep your writ­ing inter­est­ing. “The two most engag­ing pow­ers of an author are to make new things famil­iar and famil­iar things new.”

7. Ray Brad­bury. Learn to take crit­i­cism well and dis­count empty praise, or as Brad­bury put it, “to accept rejec­tion and reject acceptance.”

8. Toni Mor­ri­son. Remem­ber that writ­ing is always about com­mu­ni­ca­tion. “Every­thing I’ve ever done, in the writ­ing world, has been to expand artic­u­la­tion, rather than to close it.”

9. George Orwell. Orwell offered twelve solid tips on cre­at­ing strong writ­ing, includ­ing an active voice rather than a pas­sive one and elim­i­nat­ing longer words when shorter ones will work just as well.

10. F. Scott Fitzger­ald. “Cut out all those excla­ma­tion marks. An excla­ma­tion mark is like laugh­ing at your own joke.”

…Or like what my hus­band and I call “doing a Jay Leno” — that is, repeat­ing the punch line of your own joke even though the audi­ence clearly already gets it because you think it’s so funny!!!!!!!!!

There really are no words to describe this. All I can come up with is, “Powerful!”

The cre­ators of this video made of words, how­ever, say this: “Faith is a per­spec­tive, a per­spec­tive that makes all the dif­fer­ence.” (To view the video in a larger pane, click on the “YouTube” icon in the lower right-hand cor­ner of the screen.)

“Easter Is Com­ing,” by Work­ing­Preacher (Luther Sem­i­nary, St. Paul, MN)

Here’s a good use for hav­ing a sound han­dle on basic spelling: sort­ing out the spam in your email inbox! While it’s obvi­ously not a per­fect solu­tion (some spam­mers know cor­rect Eng­lish bet­ter than oth­ers), it can surely be a tip-off. Example:

I was perus­ing my spam folder this morn­ing, just to be sure noth­ing had been dumped there that shouldn’t have been, and two sub­ject lines jumped out at me — one about “pou­plar” soft­ware for sale, and another that almost looked legit with its men­tion of Microsoft, except that it said “Macrod­meia” instead of “Macro­me­dia” (which is still not some­thing I know any­thing about, but at least it’s rec­og­niz­able as a word).

Remem­ber when it was pretty com­mon to receive those emails that claimed Dis­ney would pay you a bunch of money for every time you for­warded the email mes­sage? A lot of folks believed it and passed the junk along. But I was skep­ti­cal from the get-go. Why? Because the mes­sage was replete with gram­mat­i­cal and punc­tu­a­tion errors! No big cor­po­ra­tion as promi­nent as Dis­ney is going to put adver­tis­ing of any sort out there with­out run­ning it by a few copy­ed­i­tors and proof­read­ers first. It would look highly unpro­fes­sional and non-credible (“incred­i­ble,” too, if they were to let such errors slip by).

The accu­racy (or not) of your gram­mar, punc­tu­a­tion, and spelling says a great deal about how believ­able you are as a pro­fes­sional, a mer­chant, a busi­nessper­son, a teacher (oh, man, don’t get me started!), or even a cit­i­zen writ­ing, say, a let­ter to the edi­tor of a news­pa­per or a let­ter to a rep­re­sen­ta­tive in Con­gress. If gram­mar, punc­tu­a­tion, and spelling are not “your thing,” Final Touch Proof­read­ing & Edit­ing (which is to say, a real per­son — me! — who gen­uinely cares about the image you project through your writ­ing) is here to assist with per­fect­ing your cor­re­spon­dence — or what­ever! No job is too small, no mes­sage too triv­ial. Give me a holler.