The Final Touch

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

The fol­low­ing video pretty much speaks for itself. There are vary­ing view­points about whether an edi­tor should post his/her rates on a blog/website, but some of you have a gen­uine need to know, and your ques­tions gave me a great oppor­tu­nity to try out using video as a way to answer ques­tions. It was fun to do, though the learn­ing curve (at least for me) was a bit steep! Par­don the imper­fec­tions! (I do like, and I hope you will as well, the “inten­tional imper­fec­tions” of the Ani­moto* back­ground I opted to use — I think they make the whole thing artsy and fun!)

Oh, by the way, for those of you who don’t know me very well yet, the fact that my eyes dart back and forth is NOT because I’m speed-reading cue cards! It’s because I have a con­gen­i­tal con­di­tion called nys­tag­mus that affects the mus­cles of my eyes. Sorry it doesn’t look like I’m mak­ing eye con­tact with you!

Please let me know if you have any fur­ther ques­tions about how I might assist you with your writ­ing. And remem­ber: not just books; I’ll be glad to help with ad copy, school papers, resumes, let­ters, and more.

I invite you to view this and other videos on my YouTube chan­nel, “Final­TouchEdit.” If you find some­thing you like there, please click “Like.” I’d also love to hear from you, so please leave a com­ment here and/or on YouTube. And if you know some­one else who might be inter­ested in learn­ing about my ser­vices (or in see­ing the dar­ling cat video on my chan­nel!), please pass the links/URLs along to them. Thanks!

* http://​cmp​.ly/5

‘I’m so con­fused!’ Photo by brain­loc on Stock​.Xchng​.com

For some rea­son, a lot of peo­ple are con­fused about when to use “it’s” (with the apos­tro­phe) and when to use “its” (with­out the apos­tro­phe). One of them is a con­trac­tion, the other a possessive.

If nuances of good writ­ing make you feel some­thing like the fel­low in the pic­ture above, you are not alone! But take heart! I’m about to lend a help­ing hand.

Some­one sug­gested to me that maybe the con­fu­sion comes about because it has been so ingrained in us that pos­ses­sives use apos­tro­phes, so we tend to assume “it’s” is the pos­ses­sive. Well, per­haps. But don’t for­get words like these, which are pos­ses­sives with­out apos­tro­phes: hers, his, yours, ours, mine, theirs. All these words are called pos­ses­sive pro­nouns. And guess what?! So is its! There is no apos­tro­phe in any of them! Look at the fol­low­ing examples:

“Did you take her books or ours?”

“Nei­ther. I took his books. You don’t have yours?”

“I only have one of mine. All I found of my math book was its jacket, so Jim and Lana let me bor­row theirs.”

“Its” is the pos­ses­sive pro­noun replac­ing “the book’s”: “the book’s jacket” = “its jacket.”

But notice the dif­fer­ence here:“It’s time to get to school.” In this sen­tence, “it’s” is called a con­trac­tion because it “con­tracts” or pulls together the two words “it” and “is.” The fol­low­ing con­trac­tions are also famil­iar to you — and note their apos­tro­phes: don’t, won’t, can’t, doesn’t, weren’t, aren’t, and more. Remem­ber­ing these con­trac­tions will, I hope, help you to remem­ber that “it is” also calls for an apos­tro­phe when con­tracted (or, as I like to say, smushed) into “it’s.”

One final point: NEVER EVER is it cor­rect to write its’. Never!!

Was this punc­tu­a­tion tip help­ful? I’d love to be your GPS (that is, gram­mar, punc­tu­a­tion, and spelling) nav­i­ga­tor for other quan­daries you’d like assis­tance with. The first five peo­ple to post ques­tions which are cho­sen as the topic of future posts will each be awarded 15 min­utes of proof­read­ing as a free gift from me (that’s a $5 — $10 value or more, depend­ing on the pro­fes­sional and the type of work needed) as my thanks!

Do you have an ad, a let­ter, a blog post, a resume you’d like proof­read? I look for­ward to your ques­tions and sharing!

“Punc­tu­a­tion is a means, and its end is: help­ing the reader to hear, to follow.”

–Thomas McCor­mack, as quoted in Eats, Shoots and Leaves* by Lynne Truss

McCor­mack says, fur­ther, that the pur­pose of punc­tu­a­tion is “to tango the reader into the pauses, inflec­tions, con­ti­nu­ities and con­nec­tions that the spo­ken line would convey.”

To tango the reader into…! Isn’t that lan­guage just gor­geous?!

(By the way, you’ll notice McCormack’s and Truss’s British style of punc­tu­a­tion. If you won­der why there’s a colon where I wouldn’t nor­mally place one, and why there is no “ser­ial comma” used, it’s because of the dif­fer­ences between Amer­i­can and British writ­ing styles. Inter­est­ingly, I just learned last week­end at the AWESOME “Copy­edit­ing Boot­camp” work­shop I attended that, more and more, for copy­edit­ing pur­poses, the pre­ferred style of spelling and punc­tu­a­tion — even among British pub­lish­ers — is the Amer­i­can style. You learn some­thing new every day!)

* http://​cmp​.ly/5

I was so proud of my sixth-grader-to-be the other day when he read a post­card giv­ing direc­tions to camp and noted a mis­spelling. “They mis­spelled ‘through,’” he said after barely a glance at the card. “What,” I inquired, “did they spell it t-h-r-u?” But as I was about to explain that infor­mal spelling to him, he said, “No, they used the wrong form: t-h-r-e-w.” Sure enough, there it was: some­thing to the effect of going “threw” some lit­tle town to get to the camp.

This is the sort of error busi­nesses and orga­ni­za­tions who com­mu­ni­cate with the pub­lic really want to avoid in order to retain cred­i­bil­ity and pro­fes­sion­al­ism in the eyes of their clients. It’s a mis­take that might come of sim­ply not know­ing the dif­fer­ence between “through” and “threw” or because, as can hap­pen to any of us, as you’re typ­ing the mes­sage, three other things are going on in the office at the same time — maybe one of which is your coworker telling how her son threw a great pitch at tee-ball, and your mind picked up on that use of the word and it got dropped into your mes­sage. It hap­pens to the best of us!

Look for a good proof­reader and pass every ounce of pub­lic com­mu­ni­ca­tion past him or her before it goes pub­lic. A brief post­card would take a proofer 15 min­utes or less — and you’d pay a small fee for a great return!

By the way, “threw” is the past tense of “throw”; “through” (infor­mally “thru”) is the prepo­si­tion for going into and then out of some­thing.