Fun Language Stuff on the Net

Finding 1: Merrill Perlman, who manages copy desks across the New York Times newsroom, answered reader questions a few weeks ago, with one being, "What Do Copy Desks Do?" (Also found at this link.) The answer is more or less what I often do at work, even though I don't work for a newspaper. However, I believe in the serial comma.

Q. Does your job and that of the other desk copy editors entail substantive editing and rewrite or is it mostly a matter of cleaning up style, grammar, etc.? — Bill Fischer, Annandale, Va.

A. Thanks for walking into our trap, Bill, and allowing me to explain what our copy editors do.

Copy editors are the final gatekeepers before an article reaches you, the reader. To start with, they want to be sure that the spelling and grammar are correct, following our stylebook, of course. But they also want to be sure that they, and thus you the reader, aren't left with a sense that they've come into the middle of a movie, or that they don't understand how something works, or that they're wondering what comes next or what this development means for them, er, you. They have great instincts for sniffing out suspicious or incorrect facts or things that just don't make sense in context. They are also our final line of protection against libel, unfairness and imbalance in an article. If they stumble over anything, they're going to work with the writer or the assigning editor (we call them backfield editors) to make adjustments so you don't stumble. That often involves intensive substantive work on an article. In addition, copy editors write the headlines, captions and other display elements for the articles, edit the article for the space available to it (that usually means trims, for the printed paper) and read the proofs of the printed pages in case something slipped by.

Finding 2: The Wall Street Journal has an interesting blog called Style and Substance. Read it here.

Finding 3:If you're bored, there's always this page.

Finding 4:The Chicago Manual of Style is now online. If you've been dying to get a copy, I'd recommend the online version. It costs half as much as the book does. However, there's just something about having the book... My boss paid for my subscription, so I'm happy to have both.

(The Duchess Manual of Style is not currently available for viewing and probably won't be completed until future time allows.)