By Karen Christensen

The press has done a fairly good job with Chinese names in all the recent reporting, though I did see a few references to “Bo Bo Guagua.” But this interesting Bloomberg report goofed at one point:

Through Hitoro, Wangjiang and Wangning, who retained her Chinese citizenship, owned Beijing Jiahua Investment Consulting Co. via China Murder Suspect’s Sisters Ran $126 Million Empire – Bloomberg.

Their names should be Gu Wangjiang and Gu Wangning (or in Berkshire styling, on first use, as GU Wangjiang and GU Wangning). Unless one is trying for a tabloid effect (“Brad and Angelina”), the long form is the right one, even with sisters. Let’s be thankful that the Chinese family names are so short.

I like this Taiwanese website’s inclusion of the Chinese characters for the names used in the article. (See end for the names.)

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By Karen Christensen

Berkshire still uses uppercase for the word Internet. Our Manual of Style, reflecting Chicago and standard US usage, says, “Internet (not ‘the Net’).” I would add to that, actually, a plea: not the ‘net or the ‘Net either. But that use of uppercase is a matter we should consider, it seems, according to this article in the Christian Science Monitor (a reliable newspaper that is, oddly, published by a US church).

Opinion: Four reasons why American media should lowercase ‘Internet’

It hasn’t happened yet in the lower 48, Alaska, or Hawaii, but it’s bound to happen soon: major style guides lowercasing the word “Internet.” And on that day when the style desks of The New York Times and the Associated Press finally issue a press release about the need to start lowercasing Internet in all news articles, headlines, and blogs, we will know that America has finally woken up to web-based reality.We don’t capitalize words like Radio or Television or Motion Pictures anymore, do we? Once, of course, we did. Now, we know better. However, regarding the Internet, we are still behind the curve, behind the British, lost in capitalization land. The Guardian and the BBC websites got it right, long ago. We need to play catch up. Now.

Here are four reasons to lowercase “Internet” Read more at Four reasons American media should lowercase ‘Internet’ – Usage should reflect how we think about the online world – CSMonitor.com.

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Our lead editor, Mary Bagg, recently blogged in this blog:

“The moral of the story is not a new or terribly exciting one—if you want a letter (or an email) to be taken seriously you had better make a serious attempt to ensure that it is error free.”

Today I got this Skype typo (which I hereby coin a “skypo”) from her:

“lots of tings we Englsish majors never learned are.”

Sorry Mary, I couldn’t pass that one up.

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Lots of amusing notes about punctation and capitalization, illustrated with photos, on a blog called The Joy of English.

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By Karen Christensen

A terrific essay in the Wall Street Journal that will be useful to our Berkshire Publishing authors and to anyone struggling late at night or in the hours before dawn to finish some piece of writing they’ve promised but not found time to work on during our increasingly crowded days. The idea of an imaginary editor really intrigues me. I urge non-first-language writers in English to read their work aloud and to cultivate both imagined and real-life editors (you should always have a native English speaker read through your work before submitting it). Here’s a bit from the essay:

. . . what has made me try to be my own editor is more laziness than generosity. When I turn in a story, I want to be done with it.

Therefore I strive to start with a decent lead and achieve a justified and logical conclusion. I try to stick as close to the word count as possible without violence. I make sure that everything is spelled correctly—without assistance from a spelling-check program, which will accept “peak,” for example, when what you mean is “peek.” I stay on guard against grammatical errors, inconsistencies, unfulfilled promises, lopsided or superfluous imagery and logical tie-ups. I attempt to keep my paragraphs more or less the same length; a paragraph shorter than the rest is usually missing something important.

“Imagine someone you know—a mean teacher, a bar-stool wit, a smart but uneducated acquaintance—reading your work critically.”

One of the means to assure such things is constant rereading. I reread from the top—or some similar landmark if the work is long—whenever I take a significant break from writing, and that doesn’t just mean overnight but includes eating lunch, going to the bathroom, answering the phone and searching for elusive facts.

Rereading not only ferrets out problems, but it also ensures continuity of voice, as well as that elusive quality dear to both writers and rappers: flow. Constant rereading, which can be done out loud if you don’t trust your inner ear, is especially important now that progress has eliminated the tiresome but useful drudgery of retyping. Sometimes a glaring error that you motored blithely past a dozen times will become apparent only on the 13th read.

Some people like to hand their work over to another pair of eyes for an objective view. This is not always possible, however, and even the most loving partner will have limits, so I prefer to slip another set of eyes over my own.

It’s a bit like method acting. You choose someone from your life who is reliably opinionated but very different from you (preferably a number of people: a mean teacher, a bar-stool wit, a highly intelligent but uneducated acquaintance) and then read your work imagining what they would see. One of them will call you out on the overwriting here, another on your groundless assertions there, a third on the fact that you never make good on your claim at the top. With only a small bit of imaginative exertion you can hire phantoms! They won’t expect anything in return.

via Luc Sante, Author of Low Life, on the Benefits of Self-Editing | Word Craft – WSJ.com.

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But if you have to (and that should be so rare as almost not to need a rule), the Modern Language Association advises:

Begin the entry in the works-cited list with the author’s real name and, in parentheses, user name, if both are known and they differ. If only the user name is known, give it alone.

Next provide the entire text of the tweet in quotation marks, without changing the capitalization. Conclude the entry with the date and time of the message and the medium of publication (Tweet). For example:

Athar, Sohaib (ReallyVirtual). “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).” 1 May 2011, 3:58 p.m. Tweet.

The date and time of a message on Twitter reflect the reader’s time zone. Readers in different time zones see different times and, possibly, dates on the same tweet. The date and time that were in effect for the writer of the tweet when it was transmitted are normally not known. Thus, the date and time displayed on Twitter are only approximate guides to the timing of a tweet. However, they allow a researcher to precisely compare the timing of tweets as long as the tweets are all read in a single time zone.

In the main text of the paper, a tweet is cited in its entirety (6.4.1):

Sohaib Athar noted that the presence of a helicopter at that hour was “a rare event.”

or

The presence of a helicopter at that hour was “a rare event” (Athar).

How do I cite a tweet?.

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By Mary Bagg

My husband Bob, who is a poet and a translator of ancient Greek drama, got an email out of the blue yesterday inviting him to speak for an hour on 30 April 2012 at King’s College in London (Strand Campus) about a rather daunting topic, the “Mystery of Life and Death.” The person who wrote the letter, one “Prof. Christopher Orton,” said (among other things) that because Bob’s profile on the Poets & Writers website “was up to standard,” the college would take care of his plane fare, hotel accommodations, and a speaker’s fee.  Orton urged Bob to reply quickly, and state the amount he wished to be paid. All for one hour’s work! This deal, of course, sounded somewhat suspicious, if not in the least because rarely are guest lecturers at an academic symposium chosen on the merits of their web profiles, no matter how spectacular, and, in any case, a symposium such as this one would likely have been booked months and months in advance. But the dead giveaway, at least for the editor in me, was the following: “We will be very glad to have such an outstanding person in our mist.”

London fog notwithstanding, this was a howler, and there were more typos to be found. In one paragraph the “Prof” wrote that arrangements would be discussed as soon as “you honour our invitation.” In the next paragraph he stated: “A formal Letter of invitation and Contract agreement would be sent to you as soon as you honor our Invitation.” Let’s ignore the odd locution and inconsistent capitalization. The difference between British and American spelling (honour and honor) suggests that someone on one side of the Atlantic might have been trying to impersonate someone on the other. The more obvious clue to the scam was that despite an accurate address and postal code for the Strand campus, the Prof sent this official announcement through a gmail account.

So what did the scammer hope to achieve by promising this all-expenses-paid invitation? Evidently a “processing fee” to facilitate the “Contract,” as Bob found out later from another poet friend who found notice of the “prank” on Facebook.

The moral of the story is not a new or terribly exciting one—if you want a letter (or an email) to be taken seriously you had better make a serious attempt to ensure that it is error free.

Which reminds me—and since I am “allowed” to digress in a blog, I will—of the recent fuss about Downton Abbey and some of the language-based gaffs the scriptwriters have let by, things that a person in England during World War I would never have said (for instance, the maid who shrugs her shoulders and says, “I’m just sayin’”). And that reminds me of reading what the British playwright Tom Stoppard said in an interview about Arcadia, a play in which the dialogue of Byron scholars from the nineteenth and twentieth century is juxtaposed: “It’s a great advantage and a bonus to have, really, two different languages—both of them English—in the same play.” That phenomenon, as this and On Point’s recent postings prove, happens in prose all the time, and in the same century, when the two English languages are British and American.

Another line from Arcadia stands out in my memory, and is especially relevant to our mission at Berkshire and to everyone in pursuit of knowledge: “It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter.”

I wonder what the guest speakers at King’s College will have to say about the mysteries of life and death?

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I received an email today from an author named Norman Moss, who had read my letter in the UK Society of Authors magazine, The Author. He has kindly given me permission to post his email here. Yes, we are now on first-name terms.

Dear Ms. Christensen,

I have only just come across your letter in The Author. I don’t know how I can contribute anything, but I am British with an American background, I have written several non-fiction books all of which have been published in both Britain and America, and I recognize what you say about the different styles of writing.

Some years ago I wrote a British-American dictionary, which went through several editions and which I revised several times. It was a light-hearted affair, not a serious scholarly work, but nonetheless intended to be useful. It included many words that are known only on one side of the Atlantic, and some that have different meanings in the two countries that can cause confusion and sometimes have, like cot, dumb, football and pants. (I was present once when an American at Cambridge described how he found himself locked in a laboratory building at night and had to climb over the railing to get out and tore his pants. Someone asked, “But how could you tear your pants without tearing your trousers?”) I still slip up sometimes. In my last book I sent that freak cold weather paralysed the railways because the points were frozen, and an American pointed out that he did not know the word points. (The copy editor missed that).

As for over-intrusive copy editors, I came across an example just yesterday. I was reading a biography of Joseph Rotblat. In talking about the run-up to the Iraq war, the author referred to a book, The Greatest Story Ever Told. Now, I know the book. It is an account of the lies told by the Bush Administration to support the Iraq war, and is called The Greatest Story Ever Sold. I am sure the author wrote it correctly and the copy editor helpfully changed it.

Yours
Norman Moss

And here’s a bit from his second email, also relevant to our efforts:

Oddly enough, I disagree with Mary Bagg’s answer to the question about the second comma. This seems to me to break up the thought at just the wrong point.

Maybe I have been lucky, but I have not had the experience others seem to have had with American editors. No one had ever changed my copy without consulting me. I would have been outraged if they had. I have been a journalist all my life, writing for newspapers, magazines and radio. There one is at the mercy of others and a system. Often, I felt like saying, I really would have liked to have told this story in three thousand words or two thousand, or fifteen minutes instead of five minutes, or not started with that or put in something else that the editor cut out. Often a story is cut brutally in the process of rapid editing, inevitably. But when I write a book I feel I can say, “This is what I wrote and meant to write, for better or worse. No apologies, no excuses.” One can’t do that if someone else has stuck their spoon in the pot.

I am going to add a category for Authorship, because I can see that some authors have a thing or two to say about those who have edited their work.

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By Mary Bagg

Conversations about Mormonism during these early months leading up to the US presidential campaign have been notable, notes Berkshire’s CEO Karen Christensen, for a lack of knowledge of the basics tenets of the faith, except for the avoidance of coffee and Coke. Berkshire has decided to combine some of the articles we’ve published on the subject by leading scholars, each focused on a different and interesting aspect of the religion and its history. In the interest of a better-informed citizenry (both national and global) and in the hope of better-informed conversations with our friends and neighbors, Berkshire is creating The Little Book of Mormon: 11 Experts Explain the History, Beliefs, and Rituals of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

We plan first, for expediency, to publish in ebook format. The following Sykpe chat with Berkshire’s designer Anna Meyers, who is in the midst of typesetting the files for their entrance into the e-world, transpired about an hour ago.

[2/9/12 9:41:22 AM] Mary Bagg: Here’s a question, what about the em dashes?????????  are they OK for an ebook, I ask at the last minute.

[2/9/12 9:41:41 AM] Anna Myers: Oh, let me check -

[2/9/12 9:53:02 AM] Anna Myers: It looks like to display properly, you can find and replace the em-dashes with a bit of code:

‌—‌

I can do this at the code-editing stage.

[2/9/12 9:53:24 AM] Anna Myers: This article explains the issues with regular em-dashes:

http://jwmanus.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/update-about-that-pesky-em-dash-in-ebooks-problem/

[2/9/12 9:55:53 AM] Anna Myers: If you want to see it in action (switching from goobledy-gook to a proper em-dash) – you can open up this page http://www.draac.com/htmltester.html and paste in this bit of text and code in the box:

I want my em-dash to go here‌—‌isn’t that lovely!

[2/9/12 9:56:50 AM] Anna Myers: Oh, and hit “test the code”!

[2/9/12 9:56:59 AM] Mary Bagg: OK, I trust you, I read over the article quickly. But I tried the exercise anyway, and it works!  I suppose one of the simplest things would be to encourage copyeditors and authors to rely less on em dashes and make their sentences short.

[2/9/12 9:57:09 AM] Mary Bagg: shorter

[2/9/12 9:58:11 AM] Anna Myers: Yeah, ebooks are a brave new world!

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Bill Siever’s first ever blog post.

In the coming weeks I will (finally!) get started blogging in earnest. For material for this blog, I plan to mine my daily interactions with authors, editors, and others in the course of working on our 10-volume Encyclopedia of Sustainability. I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to interact with so many smart people, and to give them feedback on their writing. We have a ton of authors for whom English is not their first language, and so as an English major who has spent my fair share of time slaving away in kitchens, coffee shops, a ship chandlery (please don’t ask about that one), etc., etc., I finally feel that I can help.

To quote Garrison Keiller, host of A Prairie Home Companion (a popular radio program here in the US), “Being an English major prepares you for impersonating authority.” I couldn’t agree more.

More from me soon!

Best wishes,

Bill

Bill SIEVER

Project Coordinator, Berkshire Publishing

+1 413 528 0206 | Skype: billsiever

E-mail: bill@berkshirepublishing.com

Website: www.berkshirepublishing.com

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