Editor Mark's Blog

Without grammar, your
haiku would fall to pieces.
I think I’ll tweet that.

The National Grammar Day Tweeted Haiku Contest is back. Nearly 180 poem were entered into last year’s contest. They were brilliant. Even picking the best 10 was very difficult. But, National Grammar Day falls on a Sunday this year, so the organizers decided they could handle having another go at it.

We’re flexible with what we mean by “grammar.” The haiku can be about grammar, usage, style or, like last year’s winner, spelling. We’re also flexible with our definition of “haiku.” The haiku form allows for flexibility. Strictly speaking, it should focus on nature or the seasons, but it often strays from convention. And it doesn’t always follow the familiar five syllable, seven syllable, five syllable pattern. Pedants might carefully count syllables, but the point is not conformity but a sense of rhythm that produces a desired effect.

The National Grammar Day Tweeted Haiku Contest has as its prize the admiration of your peers. The winner also will take home a signed copy of “Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing,” by National Grammar Day host Mignon Fogarty, “Things That Make Us (Sic),” by National Grammar Day founder Martha Brockenbrough, and your choice of a T-shirt, mug or tote bag with my favorite piece of writing advice: Be explicit. (www.cafepress.com/EditorMark.)

Here is how it works

Post your grammar-themed haiku on Twitter and include the hashtag #grammarday. Separate lines with commas or slashes. Your haiku must fit in a tweet with the hashtag.

Deadline is 10 p.m. EST Saturday, March 3. The winners will be announced the afternoon of March 4, National Grammar Day.

The initial screening team consists of a freelance copy editor and an Ohio State University English major. They will collect all haiku tweeted with the hashtag and cull the list down to the top 10 entries. Entries will be judged according to how well they fit the theme and how much they look like a haiku.

A five-judge panel of word experts will determine the winner and runners up. They are:

• Gordon Roberts, winner of last year’s contest, writer of technical documentation and short poems (though rarely at the same time), and language enthusiast
• Martha Brockenbrough, founder of National Grammar Day and the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, and author of “Things That Make Us (Sic).”
• Dawn McIlvain Stahl, editorial professional with 15 years’ experience and online editor and daily contributor for Copyediting.com
• Peter Sokolowski,  a leader of ESL workshops, a pronouncer for spelling bees around the world, and editor at large at Merriam-Webster
• Grant Barrett, host of the nationally syndicated public radio program “A Way with Words,” and a lexicographer specializing in slang and new words

Here is last year’s winning haiku:

Spell-checkers won’t catch
you’re mistaken homophones.
scattered hear and their

Here is the complete list of entries from the 2011 contest: http://markallenediting.com/2011/03/04/haiku-submittedone-hundred-seventy-six-what-a-treasure-trove/

Newspapers have been quick to tell us about the latest trends and help us prepare for a changing world. But they’ve been amazingly slow to recognize the changes that are necessary to remain relevant. And now, as newspapers finally enter the 21st century, “online-first” operations risk losing what made them great in the first place: the trust of the communities they serve.

I hope that the successor to Booth Newspapers in Michigan can combine an online focus with a newspaper’s commitment to truth and accuracy. I’m watching with interest as my former colleagues transition to new roles with MLive Media Group, the statewide news operation that has veteran journalists focusing on delivering the latest news online.

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I’d like to say goodbye to “good-bye.”

The unhyphenated “goodbye” gets nearly five times as many Google hits. ”Goodbye” is the preferred spelling in the Associated Press Stylebook. The American Heritage and Webster’s New World dictionaries list goodbye as the first spelling. Bryan Garner in “Garner’s Modern American Usage,” compares the hyphenated form to the archaic “to-day.”

Merriam-Webster, though, includes only “good-bye” and “good-by.” Many style guides, including the Chicago Manual of Style, prefer a Merriam-Webster dictionary, so “good-bye” is with us for now.

The word in any form is only a few hundred years old, stemming from the earlier “good morning” and “good day,” etc., and a shortening of the phrase “God be with you.”

Everyone said it’s easy. I was up late trying to figure out how to include all my website information in one place, and I failed. Or at least fell asleep. All I succeeded in doing was transferring the URL to my blog, so my site exists only on a hidden server somewhere and on my hard drive.

If you are looking for www.markallenediting.com, I hope to have my information back up here soon. If you need anything in the meantime, I’m at markallen@copydesk.org, 614-961-9666, @EditorMark on Twitter and (sometimes) copyeditor1 on Skype.

If you are looking for editormark.wordpress.com, my blog postings are all below.

If you are looking for my archive of tweeted tips, most of them also are on this site — I copied them to my blog when I reached about 500. Scroll down to find them.

Thanks for your patience.

Mark

Grammar was not my subject. In high school English class, we did a unit on grammar every semester. It always seemed to be the same thing to me. The work was either obvious (I could recite “Grammar Rock” with the best of them) or unnecessarily confusing (English is like that). The book we used seemed authoritative, but there just seemed to be more rules and guidelines in there than anyone could possibly know. There wasn’t, it turned out, but it seemed that way.

I might be decades behind the time in my perception of grammar textbooks, but the criteria I would use to judge are the level of detail (less is more), the level of intimidation, and the clarity of the rules listed.

My first impression of Mignon Fogarty’s new student grammar is that it’s very orange. It’s inescapably orange with a cover reminiscent of the old Chicago Manual of Style (now blue) and a matching orange inside for headings, examples and shading. Its title opts for bravado over brevity: “Grammar Girl Presents the Ultimate Writing Guide for Students.” It has cartoon drawings, most featuring the familiar Aardvark and Squiggly (a snail) of previous Grammar Girl books. We can give it points for lack of intimidation right away.

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I strolled away from Google Plus to visit Twitter a few moments ago, and I pointed out that “for free” is criticized because “free” often works better in half the space. Usage guru Bill Walsh of the Washington Post pointed out that the real criticism is that “free” is not a noun, a more challenging argument.

The idiom forces “free” into the position of a noun, as if it is the same as “zero dollars” or “no pay.” It’s hard to reconcile, so it might always be considered nonstandard, or as Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says, “not used in writing of high solemnity.”

But the phrase, apparently only decades old, is very widely used. Blind condemnation sometimes takes an understandable statement and exchanges it for something confusing.

“I worked for free” is more clear than “I worked free” or “I worked for nothing.” “It is impossible to live for free” is not the same as “it is impossible to live free.”

If the meaning doesn’t change, “free” is the better choice. But “for free” is too established and too useful to be disallowed.

You are free to parade, grill, engage in pyrotechnics, and otherwise celebrate Independence Day, but don’t feel it necessary to call it that.

The celebration of the nation’s birthday has the distinction of being the only official holiday named for a date rather than a person or event. There is a temptation to write it as the more descriptive and proper sounding “Independence Day,” but the holiday was originally known by the date on which it falls.

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The best written works contain clarity, consistency and elegance. These are the goals of style books.

My first AP Stylebook was a 1976 edition acquired in 1979 when I started high school. I read every entry. I didn’t memorize it, but I at least knew where to look up whatever question I had. Over time, my knowledge of the book diminished rather than increased, but nowadays my online subscription means searching is just as fast as it was when I was 15.

Jojo Malig, an editor in Manilla, Philippines, wrote a column for the Poynter Institute’s website in which he asked several editors about the necessity of multiple style books, such as the Chicago Manual of Style and house style guides. I suggested that local style guides are an important supplement to the AP Stylebook or whatever style book a publication uses as its main guide.

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This list of links was presented as a handout at the “Freelancers Forum” session at the American Copy Editors Society conference in Phoenix in March 2011. It was compiled by Mark Allen, Kate Karp and Liz Smith. It’s not intended to be exhaustive, but it represents some of our favorite places to find help when we are editing at home.

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The “ou” spelling (loud, gout, rough) is more common than “uo,” especially when the combination forms just one syllable. Where this combination does appear, we sometimes struggle with the spelling.

If you tend to consult your toothpaste tube every time you have to spell “fluoride,” it might help to know that most words that start “flu” are related to the concept of “flow.” “Fluoride” comes from the element “fluorine,” from the Latin “fluor,” meaning “flowing.” “Fluor” was first applied to minerals useful as fluxes, a term familiar to anyone who has soldered a copper pipe. Flux (related to “fluctuation”) comes from the past participle form of the Latin “fluere,” which means “to flow.” The look of fluor-type minerals when exposed to ultraviolet light gives us the word “fluorescent.”

So, if you can associate the thing you find in toothpaste with the word “flux” (things may be “in flux,” a “flux capacitor” powered the time machine in “Back to the Future”), that might help you remember the spelling of “fluoride.” And “fluorescent.”

“Flu,” by the way, also related to “flow.” “Flu” is a shortening of “influenza,” which comes from “influence,” which had to do with astrology, or the effects that flowed from the stars.

I’m tempted to keep exploring the pathways I keep uncovering on this etymological journey, but I think it’s time I got back to work.