Liane Davey offers business writing tips, many of which apply equally to journalists: "My personal pet peeve is 'methodology,' which like every other –ology in the English language, should refer to the study or system of something. If you’re just using a method, say method … Any time you are inclined to use a word that makes you feel smarter than the person you’re communicating with, choose again. Choose words that strengthen the connection between you and your readers."
Language
Merrill Perlman riffs on a recent question from an editing conference, where legendary copyeditor Mary Norris was asked about the "rules" for doubling consonants before suffixes: "Because the 'p' in 'ship' is doubled with a suffix to become 'shipper,' you’d think that someone engaged in 'worship' is a 'worshipper.' Yes, one is a 'worshipper' in the New Yorker and in the Associated Press, but one is a 'worshiper' in the New York Times and the Chicago Manual of Style."
William Germano defends the first-person object pronoun against grammar pedants: "There’s something about me that makes people uncomfortable, and something about I that reassures. Linguists, who have the technical knowledge I lack, can describe the problem more precisely. Yet the resistible rise of the first-person singular pronoun sounds like a social one: Many speakers, insecure about grammatical Rules, default to what sounds formal, and me ain’t sounding formal enough."
Keith Cronin makes a two-pronged argument on the passive voice. First, he writes, passive voice is better when it places emphasis on a more important element. And second, Cronin argues that many people can't even distinguish passive voice from active: "I’ve seen way too many writers proclaim that they’re on a warpath to eliminate all those 'to be' verbs, thinking that in doing so, they are purging their work of The Dreaded Passive Voice. That’s why 'rules' scare me."
Steve Buttry posts about a copyediting web site's list of alternatives to the overuse of "very" as an adverb: "I don’t know anything about the price or quality of the service of ProofreadingServices, but I applaud both clever marketing and helping people improve their writing. And very hardly ever improves writing, so I’m glad to share this advice and give Palder and his business a plug." Examples: Instead of "very fast," use "swift." For "very happy," use "ecstatic."
Diana Urban has a list of 43 words that can often be deleted from a piece of writing without doing any harm: "Removing them helps speed up the pacing of both action and dialogue, and makes your work more polished and professional." Also, Cory Doctorow on Steven Pinker's list of 58 commonly "misused" phrases: "There's no denying the smug satisfaction of reading through the list of 58 pitfalls and tallying up all the ones that you never get wrong!"
A neologism is a newly coined word or phrase, and Matthew Crowley writes that lexicographer Erin McKean, a former Oxford University Press editor-in-chief, has started a web site to keep track of them: ”People often come up to me and say, ‘I went to look up this word and it wasn’t in the dictionary,’” McKean says. ”And often that breaks my heart, because the word that they’re interested in is a perfectly good word, a perfectly cromulent word, a great word oftentimes.”
Are we now too busy to read more than a sentence at a time? It's beginning to look that way, at least to Andy Bodle, who mourns what he sees as the coming demise of the paragraph in favor of choppy sentences: "Paragraphs allow us to group gobbets of information together in (more or less) coherent units. A long paragraph can be a reasoned, nuanced discourse. Lots of short paragraphs create the impression of a series of unconnected slogans, with no obvious progression."
Matthew Crowley profiles New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris, whose just-published book Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen is a "memoir-cum-usage guide" that celebrates restrained editing: "The best copy editors, Norris said, possess a blend of high intelligence and low ego. They’re at peace in backgrounds, unnoticed and unsung. It would be nice if the writers we save were grateful, she said, but we shouldn’t come to expect it."
Subjects and verbs were meant to go together, Merrill Perlman writes, but sloppy writers sometimes separate them, and that way madness lies: "That delay between subject and verb can be short or long. The long ones are the most dangerous, allowing a reader to lose the train of thought the writer is trying to establish." Also, down with the double-space after a period, and while we're at it, let's fix those errant commas.