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Common Copyediting Error #7:  Hyphens vs En Dashes with Spans

6/27/2015

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I see this error all the time, and no wonder--it's not something your eye would naturally catch.
Unless, of course, you have doomed yourself to a lifetime of noticing punctuation faults, because you are an editor. (In which case, 화이팅!)

Here's the thing: sometimes we write out a span or range with words, like this:
"She was president of Punctuationland from 1987 to 1989."
But sometimes we write it out with just the numbers, like this: 
"She was president of Punctuationland 1987–89."  
or
"See the detailed topographical maps of Punctuationland, pp. 193–205."

The punctuation between those numbers looks a bit like a hyphen, but it's something else. Hyphens work to connect ideas that are very close together into one idea. But connecting and indicating a whole range of things? For that, we need to call in the big guns: the en dash.  

An en dash is just a bit bigger than a hyphen. In fact, depending on the font you use, it's usually about the width of the letter n. 

(An em dash is a bit bigger than that—here's one of them. In many fonts, an em dash is about the width of the letter m.)

You can find an en dash in MS Word under "symbols", but it's easy to assign it a shortcut. On my computer, I hold down Cntrl + hyphen to make an en dash, and Cntrl + Shft + hyphen to make an em dash.  Once you get used to it, you can let that poor beleaguered little hyphen off the hook.
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Common Copyediting Error #6: Commas with Dates

6/26/2015

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Editing a proposal today, I spotted two instances of this one. 

When you write out a full date, you separate the elements with a comma like so:
On June 26, 2015, I wrote this blog post.
or
Tomorrow is Saturday, 27 June, 2015. 
(US style is usually written in month-day-year format; UK style is often day-month-year, but the comma rules are the same.)

When you cite just the month and year, you don't need a comma.

President Obama was born in August 1961.
In January 2009, he took the presidential oath of office.

People get this wrong all the time. I see a lot of errors like this:
*I visited her in September, 2012. 

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Where to Look for Answers (When You Don't Know the Question)

6/23/2015

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This piece from the Chicago Manual of Style on finding solutions to grammar and style issues is a great article--or at least, it's an article that asks an important question.

When I started teaching English as a foreign language to gifted Korean high school students, I sometimes struggled to explain the why behind a correction. It was easy enough to explain some rules, even ones that challenged native speakers, such as using "less" with mass nouns and "fewer" with count nouns. 
But why were verb forms like "going to" and "will" (as in "he's going to call them" and "he will call them") often interchangeable, but sometimes not?  And why did it sound so wrong to say "the yellow big bus" instead of "the big yellow bus"?

My students were curious, and I wanted to give them concrete explanations.  The problem was, not only did I not know the rules, I often didn't even know what to look up.  What do you call words like "thankfully" and "hopefully" when they apply to the whole sentence instead of just the grammatical subject? If you don't know the term "disjunct adverb," it's tough to look up the rules governing their use.

Every day, I learned more. And after two years of teaching, I could explain a whole lot without looking it up. Even better, I'd found the resources to check anything I hadn't yet learned.

Now, when I need to check on a particular rule, I almost always know what I'm looking for. I can google "exceptions to rules on hyphenating phrasal adjectives" or look up "disjunct adverbs" in the Chicago Manual of Style's index. 

It's a lot easier to find a needle in a haystack if you have a magnet.
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Five Common Copyediting Errors of Professional Authors

6/19/2015

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I work at a top nonfiction literary agency and have the privilege of working with some supremely talented writers, including PEN/Faulkner and Pulitzer Prize winners. Part of my job is to give their proposals a final once-over copyedit before sending them out to publishing houses.  

I have been here for three years, and have never seen an error-free manuscript.

For the last year or so, I've been keeping a running list of the most frequent errors I see these talented writers make. It's proof that even the most successful authors miss things in their own writing.

I always say that trying to copyedit your own writing is like trying to lick your own elbow--you can get close, but in the end, it's a lot more efficient to have someone else do it.  


Keep an eye out for these bugaboos in your own writing, and if you spy them, know you're in good company.

1.   Confusing Restrictive and Nonrestrictive Clauses.
Example Problem Sentence: "I took my wife Sandy to the park."
Explanation of problem: Does the author have more than one wife?  If so, then this sentence is fine. But if he's not a bigamist, then he owes Sandy an apology--and some commas around her name to prove she's his one and only. (Still confused? Check out Grammar Girl's in-depth explanation.)

2.   Hyphens with -ly Adverbs
Example: "The rapidly-expanding company had finally hit a wall."
Explanation: You don't need a hyphen between an -ly adverb and an adjective. It's unnecessary because the adverb ("rapidly") can only be modifying the adjective ("expanding"), so there's no need to use a hyphen to show what the adverb is modifying.
Use a hyphen with adverbs that can sometimes be used as adjectives, like "well," to avoid confusion: the well-dressed man is a man who is dressed well, rather than a man who is neither ill nor nude.

3.   Rogue Hyphens with Ages
Example:  "When she was sixteen-years old, Rita graduated as the valedictorian of her high school class."
Explanation: Even authors who usually understand how to use hyphens get tripped up by ages. Just like other adjectives, ages need a hyphen only when they come before the noun they're modifying, e.g., "Rita was a sixteen-year-old girl."  (The sort-of exception: you still need hyphens when the noun is implied but not explicitly written, as in "Rita was a sixteen-year-old.")  

Similarly, even authors who use hyphens correctly most of the time often trip over "[X]-year-old [noun]." 
For example: "He shipped out of Camp Lejeune with the other 18 year-old Marines."
 "Marines" is the noun being modified. Here, it's being modified by "year-old" --not "18-year-old". Unless the Marines are now recruiting toddlers, that was not the author's intended meaning.

4.   At Wits End
Example: "Isolated and scared, Pat was at his wits end."
If you are at the end of your wits, you are at your wits' end (or wit's end--both are acceptable). 

5.   Hyphens with compound adjectives
Example: "In 1980, the Supreme Court would overturn this by allowing a crude oil-eating bacterium to be patented."

If this author meant to write about an oil-eating bacteria with a penchant for lewd jokes, this is just fine. But if she meant to signify that the bacterium eats crude oil, we're in trouble.
That's because in the example sentence, there's just one hyphen, and it's connecting "oil" with "eating," not connecting the compound noun "crude oil" with "eating". It needs another hyphen to link everything up: "a crude-oil-eating bacterium".
For adjectives that include an unhyphenated/open compound noun, like "Pulitzer Prize–winning play", call in the big guns: the en dash.

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Stressed? Try some Sauerkraut.

6/19/2015

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Are you tearing your hair out trying to figure out how to make your book work?

Grab a yogurt.

A new study out of the University of Maryland has found reason to believe there's a connection between social anxiety and fermented foods containing probiotics, like sauerkraut, yogurt, and kimchi. 
The researchers found that young adults who eat more fermented foods had reduced social anxiety, especially those adults who tended toward neuroticism. 

"It is likely that the probiotics in the fermented foods are favorably changing the environment in the gut, and changes in the gut in turn influence social anxiety," said William & Mary psychology professor Matthew Hilimire. "I think that it is absolutely fascinating that the microorganisms in your gut can influence your mind."

Presumably, the effect was so strong that it overcame even the added social anxiety of sauerkraut breath.

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