Why prude eating is impotent

Check out the following video that outlines the importance of proofreading. It’s illuminating and hilarious. (Warning: there is some adult content in this video.) I know you’ll check it out now.

-30-

Serial commas are not mass murderers

But they certainly anger copy editors and grammarians enough to want to shoot one another. A New York Times’ deputy editor takes on this topic along with editing issues related to pesky apostrophes, whether to include racial slurs and how online editing differs from print. Check it out.

Active voice rules (sometimes)

Andy Bechtel, who writes about copy editing issues, discusses the age-old debate that pits active voice against passive voice. As always, he offers great examples and clear explanations.

Passive voice is scorned by those who say it removes the action from a sentence. Some even see bias in its use, and it can be a way to obscure who’s doing what. “Mistakes were made,” someone once said. But who made them?

I’ve added his blog to the roll on the right under Editor’s Desk. Check it out from time to time.

-30-

There’s no such place as Plano, TX

For that matter, there’s no such place as Scranton, Pa., or Fort Myers, Fl. At least according to the Associated Press Stylebook (and that is our bible for jurnalistic style.) The U.S. Postal Service accepts FL, PA and TX (when all caps are used), but nobody else should. Pennsylvania is ‘Penn.’, Florida is ‘Fla.,’ and Texas is one of eight states that are never abbreviated. Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Main, Ohio and Utah are the others that are cited on page 231 of the 42nd edition of the book just published this year. We used ‘Pa.’ on a headline on page 6: “Pa.: Give Illinois Future Gen,” a headline that is even more confusing given the jumbled punctuation. On Tuesday, we put ‘Wis.’ in a headline. While it is abbreviated properly, we need to avoid abbreviating states (and most anything else) in headlines.