Blogging A-Z: E Is for Editing

            I’ve been a copy editor for decades. When Jack was laid off from his reporter’s job after Rupert Murdoch bought the New York Post, one of his drinking buddies was a production editor at McGraw-Hill. She offered him copy editing work on textbooks, so I taught him how to be a copy editor.

            I taught him the way I learned, through the Chicago Manual of Style. Jack was an excellent writer and knew how to turn poor writing into good, but he needed guidance in explaining why he made grammar changes, and he needed to learn to pay attention to formatting (marking

heads, subheads, or sub-subheads, for example), as well as keeping track of proper names and their spellings, among many other details.

            He became good enough at this work that after a few years he was able to get a job on the copy desk at Business Week magazine. And he ended up working there much longer than he worked as a reporter. Not only that, we had frequent discussions verging on arguments on copy editing issues at the dinner table, which our school-age daughter found weird—but she was listening. As a grownup librarian today, she often e-mails me to ask whether a sentence she’s read in a book or a newspaper is grammatically correct.

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April’s writing challenge is to blog every day, with each post beginning with a letter of the alphabet from beginning to end. We skip Sundays, except for April 1, so as to have 26 days in the month.

Pronouns and Their Antecedents

Time for grammar. Pronouns refer to nouns, and for them to make sense, they have to follow the noun (the antecedent) they refer to. If a pronoun precedes its antecedent, it can make the sentence more or less confusing. Here's an example:

"In 1976, the radical left was about as powerful as it would ever be in postwar Britain, and, much like their counterparts in the United States, British New Left intellectuals were increasingly focused on cultural questions, including questions about representation and language." (The Nation magazine, June 2015)

The problematic pronoun here is their, in the transition from first to second clause. In the first clause, the pronoun it refers to the radical left (collective nouns in American English are generally considered singular). But when readesr come to that their, they are left to wonder, what's its antecedent? The radical left? That noun phrase has already been replaced by it, so why switch to a plural pronoun here? In the second clause, however, we see that their really refers to British New Left intellectuals -- but with the pronoun preceding its antecedent, readers have to stop and do some mental untangling, distracting them from following the writer's argument. A little shifting around of phrases can solve the problem easily.

"In 1976, the radical left was about as powerful as it would ever be in postwar Britain, and British New Left intellectuals, much like their counterparts in the United States, were increasingly focused on cultural questions, including questions about representation and language."

Any questions?