As it turns out, I scraped myself off.

The other night I worked my last shift as a copy editor, cleaned out my desk and said goodbye to a terrific group of colleagues.

I walked out of the newsroom and away from a profession I’ve been a part of since I was a college freshman writing youth features for 10 cents a word. Thirty-two years in all, 27 years full time, and 24 of those at The Free Lance-Star.

I’ve been a reporter, a line editor and a copy editor. I’ve tried to be subversive—a good thing for a journalist—but I can’t say I’ve succeeded, considering how I’ve badgered co-workers to follow rules of grammar, spelling, punctuation and style.

Next week I’ll start work as a writer and editor in the publications department of the University of Mary Washington. It’s a great opportunity, and I’m excited.

I won’t write the Red Pen anymore. That role may pass to another copy editor in time. Meanwhile, the local news desk (localnews@freelancestar.com) will accept the emails you Red Pen readers have sent me—questions, objections, potshots and compliments. A hint: Thoughtful criticism is more effective than snark. Journalists are human, too.

To those of you who’ve enjoyed this blog and told me so, thank you. Your correspondence has brightened these past two years. It’s a delight to know that our area has so many careful readers and compulsive copy editors.

I’ll still be one.

Like many of you, I’ll subscribe to the paper, read it over coffee, smile when I like something and grumble when I don’t. I may even write a letter to the editor.

And I’ll feel lucky to live in a city that still has a scrappy independent newspaper—a watchdog, a record and a daily miracle.

-30-

But others are slavishly devoted to it.

Or as they might write:

But, others are slavishly devoted to it.

Why? What earthly good does that but-comma do? No good, that’s what. It slows readers down unnecessarily. And while most readers can jump the low hurdle, why make them?

When a conjunction is used to begin a sentence, it rarely needs to be followed by a comma.

But some people like the but-comma. (But, some people like the but-comma.)

And some people use it. (And, some people use it.)

So there. (So, there.)

No. Not so there. When I’m the copy editor, I delete that pesky but-comma and its puny conjunctive cousins, the and-comma and the so-comma. You should do the same.

The exception—There’s always an exception, isn’t there?—is when the comma is grammatically necessary because of what follows. Here’s an example:

But, as Evans learned by reading old court records, only a few of the arrests led to convictions.

***

“But wait!” I hear some of you thinking. “Isn’t it wrong to start a sentence with ‘but,’ ‘and’ or ‘so’ anyway? That’s what I was taught.”

Yeah, me too. I remember wrestling with that prohibition as I sweated out my high school term papers.

Journalism school smacked it out of me in the first month. I’ve happily started sentences with “and” and “but” ever since.

It’s just not wrong. Don’t believe me? Believe Garner’s Modern American Usage, the Chicago Manual of Style and the Associated Press Stylebook, which agree that starting a sentence with “and,” “but” or another conjunction is fine.

I’ll let Garner have the last word:

“It is a gross canard that beginning a sentence with but is stylistically slipshod. In fact, doing so is highly desirable in any number of contexts, as countless stylebooks have said.”

The answer is yes, we do. And no, we don’t.

If you read a bylined obituary in The Free Lance-Star, it is a news article prepared by a staff member. The family doesn’t pay for it but also doesn’t govern its content.

News obituaries are rare, assigned only after careful consideration by the editors. We edit them as we would any other staff-written article on our pages.

The obituaries that appear daily in our Region section are generally not bylined, though they are prepared in-house by our top-notch obituary clerks, based on information from a family member or funeral home. These are paid advertisements.

While we do edit paid obituaries to conform with basic newspaper style, families can say pretty much what they want. That’s why you’ll frequently read the names not just of human survivors but of beloved pets.

If a family member prefers to avoid saying “died” or “passed away” but instead writes “left the confines of this Earth to dance in heaven with the Lord,” that’s fine.

Or if, as sometimes happens, a family wants the world to know that the obituary subject loved to eat chocolate or drink whiskey, we’ll run that too. Families see paid obituaries as a chance to express their loved ones’ personalities, beliefs and lovable foibles.

But sometimes a family member’s preferred wording doesn’t appear in the paper exactly as submitted.

Our obituary clerks and copy editors do edit for accuracy, checking spellings of proper nouns, for example. We have guidelines for where commas and semicolons go in lists of survivors. We fix obvious errors in spelling and grammar.

Some mistakes tend to crop up more from out-of-town funeral homes than local ones. The word “formerly” may come in as “formally”—as in the phrase “formally of Stafford County”—and we’ll change that. Or the word “interment,” meaning burial, may be mistyped as “internment,” which is the confinement of a prisoner for political or military reasons. We’ll change that, too.

Because every line of an obituary adds to its cost, we try to keep brevity in mind as long as we’re following our standard style guidelines. Where we can shorten a phrase, we do.

But that can backfire, as happened one recent night when I was copy editing. The family member who submitted an obituary made it clear to that day’s obituary clerk that she preferred the phrase “was graduated from” to “graduated from.”

I didn’t get the message. I saw the phrase “was graduated from” on the page proof and changed it according to Associated Press style, which says:

“Graduate is correctly used in the active voice: She graduated from the university. It is correct, but unnecessary, to use the passive voice: He was graduated from the university.”

Well, it may be unnecessary to the editors of the AP stylebook, but it was necessary to this family member. I learned later that she was disappointed her wishes hadn’t been followed.

Sometimes our flexibility in editing obituaries comes across as inconsistency, and that, I suspect, is what prompts the occasional complaint.

Just know that we do edit the obituaries—while keeping in mind the wishes of the grieving.

I’m ready for this political season to be over, but I will miss some of its goofs and glitches.

Each of the major presidential campaigns has made a prominent flub that went viral on social media.

America spelled “Amercia” comes to mind. So does the decision to punctuate the slogan “Forward” with a period. Forward, stop!

News stories, letters to the editor, blog postings and tweets about the election are full of word misuses.

One that comes up often is “canvas,” like the cloth, for “canvass,” to solicit votes.

Another is “infer” for “imply”: “The ad infers that [Candidate X] will be bad for small businesses.” No, the ad implies that. The voter is supposed to infer it.

And what’s with “reticent”? A candidate is described as “reticent to release details of his plan.”

“Reticent” means uncommunicative or “having a restrained, quiet or understated quality.” That doesn’t describe any political candidate, ever. Make it “reluctant.”

I edited a story that explained the rules of a debate: “After each candidate speaks, opponents will be given 90 seconds to rebuke.” Oh, how I was tempted to leave it that way. But I changed it to “rebut.”

Online, where passionate conviction abounds but copy editing is scarce, a writer explained her objection to a social issue: “It is in opposition to what is abhorrent to God.”

Huh?

I understand the confusion, though. After months of political blather, whose mind isn’t boggled?

Got to this paragraph and stopped to blog it.

What’s wrong here? (I’ll update with the answer later this morning.) UPDATE: OK, I’ll update now, at 2:30 p.m. The problem is a homonym, hoard vs. horde. A hoard is a collection or stash: The squirrel has a hoard of acorns. A horde is a large group of people. The writer wrote of “the hoards of shoppers” but should have written “the horde of shoppers.”

The best day of the year to buy clothing

Dec. 26. The day after Christmas is the first day of the best sales week of the year for clothes. If you’re willing to fight through the hoards of shoppers who are returning unwanted gifts, you can find the best deals and the best selection. Wait until Dec. 27 or Dec. 28, and the clothes will have been picked through.

Read more: http://business.time.com/2012/10/26/the-best-times-to-buy-clothing/#ixzz2AmelnywC

My colleague George Newman had one of those copy editing moments when he was reading “Pictures of Perfection,” an English village mystery by Reginald Hill.

He came across a description of a marble statue wearing a policeman’s helmet. The statue was of a faun.

George of course knows that a faun is one of these mythical creatures, half-man, half-goat:

Instead of happily reading on, however, George had to give in to that little tingle of the brain that tells a copy editor something is not right. He flipped back to the front cover.

Here’s a picture of the cover:

A little bit closer …

Yeah.

It’s a statue of a fawn.

Looks like they got the helmet right, though.

She came across the designation “Rt. Rev.” as a title before the name of a clergyman. She’d never seen that before, and it was as clear as day to her that “Rt.” in this case was an abbreviation for “retired.” And that’s how she wrote it out.

The newspaper came to be published. The phone calls came soon after. Don’t you people know that Rt. Rev. stands for “right reverend”?

Well, some people do know that. But this particular copy editor did not know it, and in the rush of deadline and distractions, she didn’t go back and check.

The next day she felt … indescribable.

I know. I’ve been there. Words cannot express the horror.

As a college sophomore in the 1980s—having grown up on a musical diet that included the Beatles, Tchaikovsky, Abba, a few hundred show tunes, a song about Don Gato the pussycat who loved a lady nice and fat, Copland, the Eagles and some early punk, but not much Motown—I wrote a story that referred to a group called Martha Reed & The Bandellos.

It did occur to me to check that, but then who knows what happened? The phone rang, or a bee flew in the window, or I drifted off to get a bag of Cheetos from the vending machine in my dorm, and I never troubled myself to look it up before turning the story in.

An editor saved me. It didn’t get published. I did get roundly teased, for a long time, as I deserved. And I discovered Martha Reeves & The Vandellas.

I learned something about myself: I didn’t want to be a lazy reporter who let editors pick up my dirty socks. I would be responsible. I’d question things I thought I knew. I’d check facts. I’d look it up. I would be the kind of reporter, in fact, who would ultimately spend several years as a copy editor, which I am now.

And yet, for all my high-minded goals, I made and make mistakes.

Remember when this paper confused William Clark of Lewis & Clark fame with George Rogers Clark? That was mine. Remember when this paper called a ruffed grouse a “ruffled” grouse? That was mine. Remember when shriek was spelled “shrEIk” and it got in the paper that way? Mine.

And you know all those annoying little errors involving short words like “a,” “of,” “for,” “to,” “has,” “but” and “in” that are either omitted when they should be left in or left in when they should be omitted? I can’t claim them all, but many of those were mine. They’re like mosquitoes, invisible until they’ve drawn blood.

Copy editors do screw up. We miss things. Forget to check things. Flat don’t know things. And even when we introduce an error into someone else’s work, the very worst thing a copy editor can do, we must survive it and carry on.

We do, because we know that while such rare and public errors bring rightful condemnation, they are far outweighed by the infinite unsung ass-savings we pull off every single day.

The copy editor who changed “right” to “retired” learned from her mistake, and not just about the Episcopalian clergy and their titles. She also learned about assumptions, and how they can jump you from behind.



 Not only did that experience ensure that she would never again prematurely retire a right reverend, it made her a more careful copy editor. Sadder temporarily. But wiser forever.

The phrase “went missing” is an abomination, some say. It’s slangy. It’s sloppy. It’s just not right.


“Couldn’t you phrase it differently?” one caller pleaded earlier this year, after our paper published the phrase in stories about a boy lost in the woods. “You could say ‘was discovered to be missing.’ ”

I listened. I sympathized.

But no way.



“Went missing.” Two words. Unambiguous. Describes what happened.

“Was discovered to be missing.” Five words. Stilted. And impossible: The boy could be missing, or the boy could be discovered. He couldn’t be both. (He was, happily, discovered and returned to his parents.)

The prejudice against “went missing” isn’t new.

As a college student in a previous millennium, I was told the phrase was journalistic jargon. Over the next few decades as a reporter and editor, I tried to avoid it.

When a hunter didn’t come home, when a toddler wandered outside and fell asleep under a bush, when a Boy Scout got lost and spent a shivery night on a mountain, I used “vanished,” “disappeared” and “reported missing.”

But those alternatives never seemed quite right. “Vanished” or “disappeared”? Not really. The missing people didn’t dissolve into vapor, or slip into a parallel world. They weren’t props in a magic trick.

“Reported missing” wasn’t right, either. The moment someone is reported missing is not the moment that person went missing.

Eventually, I concluded that “went missing” fills a need, and I let go of my anxiety about it.

I was reminded of this over the weekend, when an extended noodling-on-the-Internet session led me to this recent article in Slate.

The author traces “to go missing” to the British, and he says its current popularity in American English spiked when congressional intern Chandra Levy went missing in 1996.

***

Regular readers may have noticed that the Red Pen went missing for a few weeks in August and September, and a few of you have written or called to ask me about it. For the record, I did not wander outside and fall asleep under a bush.

I ran into a scheduling problem, now resolved. Then I took a very nice vacation in the Adirondacks.

Even there, punctuation played a role. We hiked the steep and lovely Ampersand Mountain, named for the twisty creeks in the surrounding valley.

During the near-vertical boulder scramble to the summit, we might or might not have urged God to damn Ampersand and a few other punctuation marks for good measure.

God did not. And the view from the top was terrific.

Turns out he didn’t actually boil his computer, because he used it to write this Red Pen guest column, a response to my post.

A Linguist Responds

By Daniel Midgley

Some people get nervous when they find out I’m a linguist. They think I’m silently monitoring their grammar, ready to strike down every ‘like’ and every text abbreviation in an effort to maintain the purity of the language.

Eh, not a chance. We linguists are actually very relaxed about the way people use language. Say ‘nucular’ instead of ‘nuclear’, and you may drive some people crazy, but a linguist will probably grab a pen and start asking you questions about your hometown. Our job is to describe how people use language, not to prescribe how they should use it.

And yet this advice leaves copy editors (like the effervescent Laura Moyer) out in the cold. What are they supposed to do? Correcting people on their usage is their job. And a needed job, too — not to prevent language decay (whatever that means), but to make sure their publication adheres to the style they want.

As Laura has pointed out in a recent column, though, some editors have some pretty strange rules. She mentions one editor who alleged that states don’t have ‘borders’, but ‘lines’. And some insist that legal actions are ‘lawsuits’ and not ‘suits’. These rules have nothing to do with how people really use language, and seem to originate from the editors themselves. Laura rightly calls these rules ‘baloney’.

So how can you tell a piece of baloney from good, solid writing practice?

Laura names some good resources (and I do like Grammar Girl). But we can do better than appealing to experts. We now have easy-to-use tech tools that allow us to look for real patterns in real publications.

A resource that you can use at your computer right now is Google’s Ngram Viewer. (Don’t let the name intimidate you; an n-gram is just a string of words. The phrase ‘box of chocolates’ is a 3-gram.) Google has digitized millions of books over hundreds of years, and we can search through them with just a few keystrokes.

So if we head to the Ngram Viewer and search for “state border, state line” (don’t forget the comma between them), it shows us a graph of how popular these two phrases have been throughout history. It seems that “state line” has been used more often, at least in books. If we want to play it safe in our writing, best keep away from the state border.

Remember our ‘lawsuit’ v ‘suit’ editors? We could search for “won the suit, won the lawsuit” (to help us distinguish between different kinds of ‘suits’). When we do, we find that authors have always used “won the suit” much more often than “won the lawsuit”, even in the days of Mark Twain.

What about that old bugbear “There is a number of…” versus “There are a number of…”? We could argue all day over which is more logical and correct, but why not see what real writers do? When we look up these two phrases, we find that the ‘are’ version is overwhelmingly more popular. Does that mean it’s right? Let’s just say that if you use it, you’ll be in very good company.

Every editor will still have to make her own choices. But now these choices can be informed by real data from real people. With today’s tech tools and a little cleverness, it’s never been easier to detect prescriptive baloney.

Daniel Midgley is a linguist in Perth, Australia, and the author of the blog “Good Reason.”

A linguist from Perth, Australia, scolded me via email. It was OK for me to be a prescriptivist if I couldn’t help myself, he wrote, but I shouldn’t contaminate others with my beliefs.

I apologized for contaminating him and offered to send a bar of soap.

No need, he replied. “I’ve already boiled my computer.”

Made me laugh. It also made me think more honestly about what good editing is and isn’t.

I do think copy editing requires a degree of prescriptivism, if prescriptivism is defined as adherence to rules of standard English.

Copy editors correct spellings according to a chosen dictionary. We follow Associated Press style, a set of rules for writing with clarity and consistency. We apply punctuation to enhance meaning. We try to keep racial slurs and the most blistering swear words out of the paper unless they’re vital to the reader’s understanding.

But the copy editor’s job isn’t merely to wrangle commas and make sure the words are spelled right. Good copy editing requires thought, nuance and a respect for how people actually use the language.

It’s prescriptivism, but it is a thoughtful prescriptivism, in which the copy editor questions and sometimes declines to enforce certain teachings of standard English.

That might not satisfy my anti-prescriptive critic from Perth. It also wouldn’t satisfy a different type of critic, one who insists that the rules of English are absolute and should be obeyed, period.

One such reader called me this summer in genuine distress over the loss of a rule she was taught by a beloved high school English teacher. She saw failure to follow that rule as a relaxation of standards and a symptom of a declining society.

The rule? That the word “done” should not be used to mean “completed” or “finished,” as in the sentences “My work here is done” or “I’m done eating.”

My response disappointed her. Not only do I not agree with the rule, I don’t even agree that it is a rule. I think it’s merely a preference of that long-ago English teacher who thought “done” sounded unrefined.

But I do know how hard it is to get past such rigid pronouncements, especially those delivered with humor by someone in authority.

For example:


* My favorite high school English teacher used to ding students for writing “a lot” when we meant “many.” A “lot,” he said, is a piece of land.


* A copy desk chief at the first paper I worked for insisted that that guardrails had to be called “guide rails” because they don’t actually guard anything.


* Another refused to accept that states could have “borders.” Only countries have borders, he said. States have lines.


* And many editors still insist that a legal action must always be called a “lawsuit” and never just a “suit,” because a “suit” is clothing.

As a student and young reporter I absorbed such rules. As a copy editor I’ve perpetuated many of them. I truly regret it, because these aren’t rules of good writing. They’re baloney.

So how does a careful 21st-century copy editor tell baloney rules from good practice?

One way is to consult no-B.S. resources that distinguish between useful writing guidelines and outdated or pedantic rules. I like Bryan Garner’s hefty “Garner’s Modern American Usage,” which tempers prescriptivism with practicality; Paul Brians’ website “Common Errors in English Usage”; and Mignon Fogarty’s “Grammar Girl” tips.

But ultimately, a copy editor must trust her ears and eyes. She has to respect the writer and the reader. And she should question whether applying a particular rule truly makes a sentence clearer.

If not, she should back off.