The Final Touch

Heidi: proud copy edi­tor of ‘FRED WHO?’

Last fall I had the amaz­ing oppor­tu­nity to inter­view a real live pres­i­den­tial can­di­date for my work with the e-magazine, 10,000 Cou­ples. I was soooooo ner­vous as the time drew near for our con­ver­sa­tion over the inter­net! But Mr. Fred Karger, a lesser-known mod­er­ate Repub­li­can can­di­date for the U.S. pres­i­dency, was absolutely won­der­ful! He was such fun to talk to, easy-going, gen­er­ous with his time, very down-to-earth, and had no “agenda” what­so­ever — which is to say, he did not seem com­pelled to twist any ques­tion I asked so he could say what­ever he wanted to say, even if it had noth­ing to do with the ques­tion. So, you see… not at all like the typ­i­cal can­di­date for pub­lic office.

In prepa­ra­tion for our inter­view, I had pur­chased and read Read the rest of this entry »

photo © 2008 Paul Swansen | more info (via: Wylio)
A line from a news arti­cle I read today at the New York Times blog for Kin­dle (and, yes, I know I said I wouldn’t reveal sources when I turn writ­ing errors into teach­ing moments, but some­how I think the Times is big enough to take it from li’l ol’ me; I won’t name the author, though):

“Mr. Blago­je­vich, a Demo­c­rat whose for­mer aides say once saw him­self as a pres­i­den­tial con­tender some day, was found guilty…”

To be fair to the writer, this is a really tricky con­struc­tion. I had to reread it a few times to even sort out whether it was incor­rect or not. But, alas, Read the rest of this entry »

photo © 2005 JP Esper­ança | more info (via: Wylio)

This morn­ing, I took the time to fol­low a few Face­book links posted by peo­ple I know. Each took me to a piece of fine writ­ing recently posted in cyber­space. The arti­cles are quite dif­fer­ent from one another, but what they all have in com­mon is the high cal­iber with which they are writ­ten. I’ll pro­vide links to the arti­cles — as well as to two other exam­ples of fine writ­ing I came across recently — at the end of this post.

Some peo­ple are not con­vinced that the qual­ity of their writ­ing — cor­rect­ness of punc­tu­a­tion, accu­racy of spelling, smooth­ness of sen­tence flow, and so on — really mat­ters. “Peo­ple know what I mean!” groused one writer for whom I used to proof­read. “And if they don’t get it, they’re not the kind of read­ers I want read­ing my stuff any­way.” Well! Read the rest of this entry »

photo © 2010 Allan Chatto | more info (via: Wylio)
Writ­ing to wish every­one a joy­ous cel­e­bra­tion of the turn from 2010 to 2011!

The occa­sion does present the oppor­tu­nity for a brief spelling/punctuation les­son, how­ever! This fes­tive night is not spelled “New Years Eve,” nor do we cel­e­brate “the New Years.” GAH!! I’ve heard and seen both of those too many times already! Here are our options:

• New Year’s Eve (the eve of the new year, thus the need for an apostrophe);
• Happy New Year! (we only cel­e­brate one at a time, so there is no “s” on the end);
• New Year’s, as in “We’re cel­e­brat­ing New Year’s at…” (I’ll give you this one, reluc­tantly, but only with the apos­tro­phe included to show that “Eve” is implied).

Just a tip to take with you into Jan­u­ary! For oth­ers like it, along with a wide range of pon­der­ings, I invite you to stop by this blog through­out 2011. I look for­ward to shar­ing new ven­tures with you!

–Heidi

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.

This, from a prod­uct descrip­tion cur­rently posted online by Writer’s Digest — you read that right: Writer’s Digest:

“Write Short to Break Out! Build a bio that will get you noticed: Write and seel arti­cles, essays, short sto­ries and more.” My first thought was, “Shouldn’t that be ‘seal’?” My sec­ond thought was, “What does it mean to write and seal arti­cles, essays, etc.? Seal them in an enve­lope? [A bit old-fashioned.] Seal the deal??” Finally, it dawned on me that it was sup­posed to say “Write and sell arti­cles, essays, etc.” Easy enough to type two e’s instead of two l’s.

Then, this from the Feb. 8, 2010, issue of Time mag­a­zine:

“Writ­ing about Pres­i­dent Obama’s recent strug­gles in the Lon­don Times.” Um, did the Pres­i­dent actu­ally strug­gle inwrit­ing, not the strug­gle, that was in the Lon­don Times. So, this head­line should read: “Writ­ing in the Lon­don Times about Pres­i­dent Obama’s recent strug­gles.” the Lon­don Times some­how? In their build­ing? In writ­ten form in an opin­ion piece? Well, no. We prob­a­bly all “get” that it was the

I won’t point the above links pre­cisely to the pages with the errors because it’s not my way to air other people’s “dirty laun­dry” (no mat­ter how minor) in pub­lic. Also, please under­stand, I’m nei­ther pass­ing judg­ment nor pok­ing fun. I’m con­fi­dent these pieces were writ­ten by highly skilled writ­ers and proofed by highly skilled edi­tors. My point is sim­ply this: Even the best writ­ers and edi­tors miss things — I do, too. We espe­cially tend to miss errors in some­thing we’ve writ­ten our­selves. There is just some rea­son why errors we would eas­ily spot in some­one else’s work don’t pop out at us from our own. But if even Writer’s Digest and Time mag­a­zine go to press with errors like these, think how much more you and I, who don’t have a multi-level staff of edi­tors, copy­ed­i­tors, and proof­read­ers, need at least a sec­ond, if not a third or fourth, set of eyes perus­ing our work before it goes public!

(By the way, if as you read my blog, you spy an error, please email me [see the “Con­tact Final Touch Proof­read­ing & Edit­ing” page of this blog] and draw it to my atten­tion; I’d be grate­ful. Please put “Blog Typo” in the sub­ject line. Thanks in advance.)