Possessive forms of Harris and Walz

Harris’ and Walz’s? Or Harris’s and Walz’s? “Grammar geeks are in overdrive,” says a New York Times article, which presents the choice as “apostrophe hell.” Not really. The best solution is to add ’s to make each name possessive.

Bryan Garner looks at Harris and Walz in today’s LawProse Lesson, “Possessive Anomalies.” The AP Stylebook, he points out, would have the possessive forms as Harris’ and Walz’s. But:

The better policy, followed by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, is to reject the AP rule on this point and to follow instead the rule specified by The Chicago Manual of Style (followed by most book publishers). Just add ’s to any singular noun to make the possessive.

I’ll add that Chicago recommends ’s even for names from antiquity, which are often treated as exceptions: Euripides’s, Jesus’s.

Garner adds another reason to follow the Chicago rule. Both Harris’ and Harris’s are pronounced with an additional s, and with the Chicago rule, “what you see is what you get.” Though that wouldn’t be the case with Euripides’s.

The Chicago Manual of Style is a reference conspiciously missing from the Times survey of apostrophizing. As is Garner’s Modern English Usage.

[This latest LawProse Lesson is not yet online. I trust that it will soon be available here. You can subscribe to the (free) e-mails here. For the unusual exceptions to ’s, see Chicago 7.20–22. The plural possessives of Harrises and Walzes: Harrises’ and Walzes’. ]

A review: Anne Curzan, Says Who?

Anne Curzan, Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares about Words (New York: Crown, 2024). $29.

“Everyone who cares about words”: that would include me, and the first thing I had to think about when I sat down to type this review was how to punctuate that title: should a colon follow the question mark? I’ll look it up later.

In thirty-three short chapters, Anne Curzan, a linguist and University of Michigan professor, presents assorted matters of grammar, punctuation, usage, and style, with recommendations, what she calls a “bottom line,” for thinking about each. Again and again I found myself at odds with her perspective. Part of what put me off, wrongly or rightly, is the book's relentless cheeriness: the “kinder, funner ” of the title, the too-frequent use of exclamation points. An example chosen at random: “The apostrophe’s territory is said not to include marking plurals — except for the few cases where it does!”

A larger problem is Curzan’s division of the individual psyche into “grammando” and “wordie.” She borrows “grammando” (such a violent name) from a 2012 New York Times column: “One who constantly corrects others’ linguistic mistakes.” Notice that the grammando is cast only as a listener or reader, a cranky, “judgy” listener or reader who reacts to others’ misuses of language, wanting to shout “Wrong!” or pull out a red pen when a speaker or writer makes a mistake. She seems to forget that someone with a keen attention to language is first of all attentive to getting things right in their own speech and writing and to recognizing the standards appropriate to different forms of discourse.

In contrast to the “grammando,” a “wordie” is “someone who delights in language’s shifting landscape.” The “wordie” too is, at least primarily, a listener and reader, a generous and joyous one willing to accept what the “grammando” would regard as wrong. “Enjoy the humor of a well-placed figurative literal,” Curzan urges. But is the speaker or writer trying to be funny? “Be generous when you see a dangling or misplaced modifier in writing,” Curzan suggests. But if I see one in my own prose, dammit, I’m going to fix it. If someone says they “could care less,” Curzan reminds us that semantic change is “often interesting and fun to learn about.” And we might think of “the reason is because” not as redundancy but as “mirroring,” something “aesthetically pleasing.” As for bumbled apostrophes, “we all mess them up.” Yes, and some of us read our writing carefully and try to catch them, as of course Curzan herself does.

The “inner grammando” this book imagines in its reader must be, like Rick in Casablanca, misformed: advice in Says Who? often takes up questions and prohibitions that no one knowledgeable about language would recognize as genuine: whether ain’t is a word; whether and can begin a sentence; whether none must always be singular; whether a preposition can end a sentence. Advice about these matters at times proceeds from contradictory premises. With the Oxford comma, for instance, Curzan suggests that we might use it when it‘s useful and omit it when it isn’t. But to make singular nouns ending in -s possessive, she suggests always using -’s, because doing so means “fewer decisions to make.” Curzan here and there falls into the tricky “Jane Austen” fallacy, the idea that past usage legitimizes present usage. That Shakespeare wrote “between you and I” doesn’t mean it’s appropriate to do so today. As Curzan herself is always reminding the reader, language changes, so why invoke Shakespeare’s usage as legitimizing ours?

Curzan's attitude toward what she calls standardized English (in other words, the prestige dialect of English, what many would call Standard Written English) is also contradictory. She calls standardized English

the password to jobs and connections with lots of social and economic power. We as speakers, writers, readers, and listeners have the responsibility to decide if and how we want to change that password, which is a key goal of this book.

But one page later Curzan refers to those who understand “the formal, standardized written variety [of English] in the context of all the varieties of English out there” — which would seem to suggest that standardized English is here to stay.

I’d like to see that password made available to all American students, with excellent instruction in reading and writing from the earliest grades, instruction that honors a student’s home language(s) while never discounting the importance of the prestige dialect. As Bryan Garner says of “Standard English,” “without it, you won’t be taken seriously.”

A passage that sums up my quarrel with this book:

I think it is worth asking whether these feelings we harbor about the importance of getting our commas “right” and of getting them “right” in the same way each time are the best use of our time and energies.

Heck, at least one of the best uses.

I do like the footnote that Curzan appends to formal writing to explain her use of singular they :

I am choosing to use singular gender-neutral they in this text. It is the most widely used singular generic pronoun in the spoken language and provides a useful, inclusive, concise solution to the issue in the written language as well.

You may have noticed a singular they of mine in this post.

A related post
Anne Curzan and Bryan Garner on “the reason is because”

[About the book’s title: The copyright page shows a colon after the question mark. But The Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed. at 14.96) says, “When a main title ends with a question mark or an exclamation point, no colon is added before any subtitle.” One observation about correcting other people’s language: notice that all OCA “How to improve writing” posts are about professional prose. And I don’t know anyone rude enough to correct speech in everyday life.]

John McWhorter on prepositions

John McWhorter in The New York Times, stating what ought to be obvious: “The ‘Rule’ Against Ending Sentences With Prepositions Has Always Been Silly.” From Garner’s Modern English Usage :

The spurious rule about not ending sentences with prepositions is a remnant of Latin grammar, in which a preposition was the one word that a writer could not end a sentence with. But Latin grammar should never straitjacket English grammar. If the superstition is a “rule” at all, it is a rule of rhetoric and not of grammar, the idea being to end sentences with strong words that drive a point home.... That principle is sound, of course, but not to the extent of meriting lockstep adherence or flouting established idiom.

And:

Good writers don’t hesitate to end their sentences with prepositions if doing so results in phrasing that seems natural.

Bryan Garner cites a dozen writers on language, from 1936 to 2003, all of whom approve of ending a sentence with a preposition. And he adds nine examples from writers who so ended sentences. Notice too the first sentence in the passage I’ve quoted.

Even stranger is a bogus rule, which Garner doesn’t mention, against ending a sentence with the word it. A student once asked me about that one, which I’d never heard of. I tracked down its origin: Ending a sentence with it.

[That post gets visits daily.]

Efforting, or effort as a verb

Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC’s The Eleventh Hour last night: “[They’re] not even efforting him.”

Elaine and I were hearing the word efforting for the first time, and it snapped us out of our eleventh-hour torpor. But the use of effort as a verb is not all that new.

Grammarphobia looked at effort as a verb in 2007 and found it in the Oxford English Dictionary as a transitive, marked obsolete, defined as “to strengthen, fortify,” with one 1661-ish citation: “He efforted his spirits with the remembrance ... of what formerly he had been.”

Speaking of Donald Trump’s Republican rivals (with the exception of Chris Christie), Ruhle meant something else: They’re not even trying hard; they’re not even making an effort to mount a challenge.

A quick look at Google Books shows that efforting is also used as a noun, a gerund, and that it can mean not trying hard but trying too hard: “Keeping things simple means being willing to let go of ‘efforting’ — or trying too hard.” So how to make it clear that someone is trying hard or that someone is trying too hard? By avoiding the use of effort as a verb.

I hereby pronounce the verb effort a skunked term. From the Garner’s Modern English Usage entry for skunked term: “any use of it is likely to distract some readers.” Or some viewers of The Eleventh Hour.

[“Eleventh-hour torpor”: we’re on Central Time, but we record the show. It really was eleventh-hour torpor. Fulsome, one of Bryan Garner’s examples of skunked terms, is a word we hear all the time on the news: “fulsome praise,” “a fulsome investigation.”]

Forecast, *forecasted

[From Apple’s Weather widget. Click for a larger view.]

I noticed the verb yesterday. Garner’s Modern English Usage:

forecast > forecast > forecast. So inflected. *Forecasted is a solecism that spread during the 20th century and continues to appear.

Bryan Garner puts *forecasted at Stage 2 on the GMEU Language-Change Index: “Widely shunned.” He has the ratio of forecast that to *forecasted that in print as 6:1.

But seeing *forecasted as wrong is likely to become to increasingly difficult if one sees it again and again on a screen. “Light rain expected” might solve the problem, as “Light rain forecast” looks, at least to me, like an odd use of the noun forecast.

[Yesterday was rain. Today it’s snow.]

What is an overt act?

The term overt act makes 126 appearances in the Georgia indictment. E.g., “The speech was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.”

Black’s Law Dictionary (9th ed.), ed. Bryan Garner, gives two meanings from criminal law: “1. An act that indicates an intent to kill or seriously harm another person and thus gives that person a justification to use self-defense,” and “2. An outward act, however innocent in itself, done in furtherance of a conspiracy, treason, or criminal attempt.” And N.B: “An overt act is usu. a required element of these crimes.”

[Black’s is now in its eleventh edition. But the ninth is what I could get my hands on.]

Editing

From Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (dir. Lizzie Gottlieb, 2022). Robert Gottlieb speaking:

“Editing is intelligent and sympathetic reaction to the text and to what the author is trying to accomplish.”

And:

“Making things better, saving things, is the editorial impulse.”

And I like what Bryan Garner says:

“Editing is an act of friendship. A good editor is making you look smarter than you actually are — smarter and better.”

Also from this movie
Taped to the lamp

From an interview with Bryan Garner

From Oxford University Press: Sarah Butcher interviews Bryan Garner, “the least stuffy grammarian around.” She asks how it happened that the teenaged Garner fell in love with books of English usage:

You’re asking me to psychoanalyze myself? Okay, it’s true. When I was four, in 1962, my grandfather used Webster’s Second New International Dictionary as my booster seat. I started wondering what was in that big book.

Then, in 1974, when I was 15, one of the most important events of my life took place. A pretty girl in my neighborhood, Eloise, said to me, with big eyes and a smile: “You know, you have a really big vocabulary.” I had used the word facetious, and that prompted her comment.

It was a life-changing moment. I would never be the same.

I will mention again something I’ve mentioned only twice in these pages: I was a member of the panel of critical readers for the recently published fifth edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage.

Related reading
All OCA Bryan Garner posts (Pinboard)

A reader wonders about books about writing

A reader mentions that I long ago recommended books about writing by Claire Cook, Michael Harvey, Verlyn Klinkenborg, and Virginia Tufte and wonders if I’ve since found other books as good or better. That reader must be thinking of this 2013 post, which recommends Cook’s Line by Line, Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing, Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences about Writing, and Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style.

Several others I’d recommend:

Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer

Sir Ernest Gowers, The Complete Plain Words, revised by Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut

David Lambuth et al., The Golden Book on Writing

Richard Lanham, Revising Prose

Bruce Ross-Larson, Edit Yourself: A Manual for Everyone Who Works with Words

Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose

And for authoritative and extensive guidance in usage: Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern English Usage

Four highly touted books I wouldn’t recommend:

Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One

Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz, Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less

Reader, I hope you find these suggestions useful.

Five review posts
Dreyer’s English : The Golden Book on Writing : How to Write a Sentence : The Sense of Style : Smart Brevity

From The Complete Plain Words
If and whether : Incongruity : Involve : Thinking and writing

From Edit Yourself
Managing items in a series : That and which

[Full disclosure: I was a member of the panel of critical readers for the new fifth edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage.]

Me, reading

The perspicacious Michael Leddy of Charleston, Illinois, was on my Panel of Critical Readers for this book. I’m told that he has been in this position for hours, with rapt (not *wrapt) attention. He brings relentless perspicacity to the reading. #GMEU5 pic.twitter.com/ywlPoDSrIB

— Bryan A. Garner (@BryanAGarner) December 15, 2022

Bryan Garner asked panel members to send photographs of themselves reading entries they commented on for the now-published fifth edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage. So here, or there, I am. The photograph is by Elaine Fine.

Related reading
All OCA Bryan Garner posts (Pinboard) : A critical reader

The reason is not because

In the latest episode of Michigan Radio’s That’s What They Say, Rebecca Kruth, host, and Anne Curzan, linguist, talk about “the reason is because.” Citing the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage as an authority, Curzan says that this construction is “fine.” The word because, she says, reminds the reader that an explanation is coming. I would think that the words the reason is are reminder enough, even if other words fall between reason and is.

A point that Curzan doesn’t mention: MWDEU argues against the charge that “the reason is because” is redundant by pointing out that because here need not mean “for the reason that.” No, MWDEU says, because here can mean “the fact that.” Which would make “the reason is because” the equivalent of “the reason is the fact that.” But if that’s the case, it’s simpler and more graceful to say “the reason is that.”

In Garner’s Modern English Usage, Bryan Garner offers a markedly different take on “the reason is because.” While MWDEU cites many well-known writers who have used this construction (Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, P.G. Wodehouse, Groucho Marx, and others), GMEU uses the Google Ngram Viewer get a sense of contemporary usage, with “reason is that” significantly outnumbering “reason is because” in print. In the GMEU Language-Change Index, “the reason is because” falls into Stage Four: “Ubiquitous but  . . . .” And Garner quotes a withering assessment:

This construction is loose because reason implies because and vice versa. Robert W. Burchfield, the distinguished OED lexicographer, put it well: “Though often defended by modern grammarians, the type ‘the reason . . . is because’ (instead of ‘the reason . . . is that’) aches with redundancy, and is still as inadmissible in Standard English as it was when H.W. Fowler objected to it in 1926.” Points of View 116 (1992).

Garner, as you can already guess, recommends replacing because with that.

Recommending that a writer stick with “the reason is because” if it feels “natural” and “sounds good,” as Curzan does, is decidely unhelpful. If “the reason is because” is far less common in writing, if it’s likely to stand out to many a reader as a known redundancy, it’s in a writer’s interest to change because to that. It doesn’t matter what Robert Frost did. Or Jane Austen.

That’s What They Say is fun when Kruth and Curzan investigate idioms and word meanings. But I’d check the feature’s advice about usage before going along.

A critical reader

I just cited Bryan Garner once again, so I’ll toot my horn — just once — in this post:

<toot>
I’m a member of the panel of critical readers for the forthcoming fifth edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage. What that means: I was given a chunk of the revised text to read and edit and comment on in whatever ways seemed appropriate. My chunk: from boyish to cigaret, which seems like a chapter from my life. I also read, edited, and commented on other entries that drew my interest. The work was an exhilarating, mind-stretching joy.
</toot>

The fifth edition of GMEU is available for pre-order from Amazon.

Related reading
All OCA Garner posts (Pinboard)

[Cigaret ? A “needless variant.” That chapter closed on October 8, 1989. And yes, “from boyish to cigaret ” makes me think of “from crayons to perfume.”]

SCOOP: Musk’s next move

Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz, Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less. New York: Workman, 2022. 224 pp. $27.

Smart Brevity is neither smart nor brief.

The book, by the founders of Axios, offers a dumbed-down writing template that assumes an easily distracted reader: a six-word-maximum title or subject line, a strong single sentence (the “lede”), some context about why what you’re saying matters (the “nut graf”), and an invitation to go deeper. It’s the model behind Axios — though even Axios doesn’t observe a six-word limit for titles.

And because the reader is easily distracted, it’s necessary to write with bold text, bullet points, emoji, and illustrations. And only two or three sentences per paragraph, please. It all begins to sound like a recipe for gaining the attention of a defeated former president. And for gaining customers: an AI service called Axios HQ can evaluate your writing for you — or, really, for your company. Pricing starts at $12,500 a year.

At 224 pages, Smart Brevity is painfully repetitive: if you miss the first pronouncements that reading habits have changed but writing habits haven’t (uh, Twitter?) and that most people don’t read most of what’s put in front of them, fear not: you’ll find those pronouncements offered again and again. Indeed, you’ll find every idea repeated. Even anecdotes repeat. There are, to use the book’s language, “too many words.”

A far more helpful resource about writing for the world of work: Bryan Garner’s HBR Guide to Better Business Writing (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). Far broader in scope, far wiser about writing.

[This post’s title is a sample title from Smart Brevity, which recommends the use of “a hot name or brand” in a headline or subject line.]

Ulp

From Bryan Garner’s LawProse Lesson #382, “Law graduates who can write”:

No memo or brief or letter is better than what’s in it. No amount of style and form, attention to punctuation and phrasing, can make good writing out of unreliable information and bad judgments. A good piece of writing is much more than phrasing, commas, and semicolons.

On the other hand, no amount of solid research and brilliant analysis will be useful until it’s communicated effectively to others. If your work requires writing, then your work is no better than your writing.

That last sentence should be useful to anyone who teaches writing. I can imagine it instantly instilling greater seriousness in a student.

[If you want to subscribe to Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day and LawProse Lessons (both free): here. If you want to subscribe to LawProse Lessons only: here.]

Mary Miller, lying

Congresswoman Mary Miller (R, IL-15) questioned (context unknown) Dr. Miguel Cardona, Secretary of Education. I assume their conversation followed the massacre in Uvalde, Texas. Miller shared an excerpt from the conversation on Twitter, so she must think it went well. But all I see in it is a crazy quilt of lies and irrelevancies ending in a self-own: “Right.” I am willing to go into detail:

For 2 years, Democrats Defunded The Police and kicked police out of schools. Today, I pushed Biden's Education Secretary to support police in schools. School resource officers are critical to keeping schools safe, but the Defund The Police movement did lasting damage. pic.twitter.com/qNKHfr5t3p

— Rep. Mary Miller (@RepMaryMiller) May 26, 2022

My transcription of the exchange:

Miller: The Democrats definitely supported defunding the police for two years. They painted it on the sidewalks of burning cities. They shouted it while burning down police stations in Minneapolis. Vice President Harris herself raised money to bail out the rioters. And your favorite leftist TV stations have covered it all. All Americans saw it. And so now, what I want to know: You represent the Biden administration. Has the Biden administration changed their stance? Do they still support defunding the police, or do they now say school resource officers belong in the schools? We would like to know.

Cardona: I’m not sure if you were present at the State of the Union [she wasn’t ], but the president said we need to fund the police more, not defund the police. I recall that, sitting there, and it felt pretty strongly that there was a clear message there.

Miller: Right. I call that hypocrisy. I taught my children that, uhm, you know, what you do is more important than what you say.

A few observations:

~ It is simply untrue for two years Democrats as a group “definitely” supported defunding police and that they “kicked police out of schools.” Miller doesn’t acknowledge a police presence at the elementary school in Uvalde.

~ It is simply untrue that “they” — Democrats — painted slogans and burned down police stations.

~ The slogan Defund the Police did appear on streets in Milwaukee and Washington, D.C. — and in Hamilton, Ontario, and perhaps elsewhere. But the more memorable and visible slogan by far, painted on streets, not sidewalks: Black Lives Matter. The context for both slogans — the police murder of George Floyd — is interestingly absent from Miller’s narrative.

~ “Vice President Harris herself raised money to bail out the rioters”: Snopes rates the claim that Harris bailed out rioters as “mostly false.”

~ All cable news covered the protests, non-violent and otherwise, that followed George Floyd’s murder. If “leftist” TV stations alone (she must mean CNN and MSNBC) had covered protests, “all Americans” wouldn’t have seen them.

~ Miller’s response to Cardona — “Right” — is a self-own to remember. Faced with an assertion that she’s wrong about the facts, all she can do is say “Right” and keep going.

~ About actions and words: What you do and what you say are both important, and as any student of speech-act theory knows, to say often is to do. What Miller says here is dishonest nonsense, painting all members of a political party with a broad brush, attributing to them actions they had no part in. (I recall Bob Dole’s characterization of World War II as a “Democrat war.”) What Miller has done during her time in Washington: nothing of substance for her district or her country. She pushes The Big Lie, engages in stunts (refusing to wear a mask, signing on to ludicrous legislation that goes nowhere), foments against trans kids in the “wrong” bathrooms, and votes consistently on the wrong side of every issue: against aid to Ukraine, against money for infant formula, against a bill to stop price-gouging for fuel, against the Congressional Gold Medal for police who defended the Capitol on January. I could go on, but I already have in a May 2021 post.

~ What Miller refuses to say anything about is the need for legislation to limit access to guns. She touts her support for the Second Amendment, which she regards as permitting unimpeded access to firearms for all. When I called her office today, I asked the fellow who answered the phone (who, I suspected, was getting many calls) what Miller would say about portable nuclear weapons (a hypothetical I’ve borrowed from Bryan Garner). Would they be permitted under the Second Amendment? The fellow on the phone said that he couldn’t speak for the congresswoman. Nor was it professional for him to give an opinion, he said. “I hope you get a shitload of calls today,” I said. “Please don’t say that,” said he.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

[Derek Chauvin’s attorney Eric Nelson had that same odd habit of saying “Right” after a witness contradicted him.]

SFW on the shelf

Take a look at this tweeted photograph of Bryan Garner’s bookshelves. Can you spot the book by Sally Foster Wallace, David’s mother?

This 2013 post, a review of Quack This Way, a transcribed conversation between Bryan Garner and David Foster Wallace, has links about the Garner–Wallace connection. This 2020 post has some sample sentences from SFW’s book.

Related reading
All OCA Garner posts : DFW posts (Pinboard)

[The book is Practically Painless English (Prentice-Hall, 1980), above the three blue volumes, lower right.]

Klarna’s a —

A multiple-choice question:

“Now you can pay for all of your joy-sparking moments with Klarna.” Klarna is

a. a goddess who provides joy-sparking moments

b. a goddess who punishes those who enjoy joy-sparking moments

c. “the smooothest and safest way to get what you want today, and pay over time”

The correct answer is c. But it’s strange: c. sounds like a combination of a. and b. Buy now, pay later. And you will pay. Because you know what they say about Klarna: Klarna’s a — no, that’s karma. Never mind.

I found the sentence about joy-sparking moments at Marie Kondo’s website, where I marveled, briefly, at the possibility that someone would spend $49.99 for a box. Fresca just made a painting of the box, complete with electricity.

[Unless it’s a Hobson’s choice, isn’t any matter of choice a “multiple choice”? “Multiple choice” reminds me of “compare and contrast,” which Bryan Garner calls “an English teacher’s redundancy.”]

Block that metaphor

Bryan Garner noticed this New York Times headline about Nikki Haley: “Haley Threads a Needle Between Trump’s Coattails and His Wrath.”

Block that metaphor!

But on second thought, it might be better to let that metaphor stand. Let Nikki Haley thread that needle, or try to, down between the coattails and wrath. It must be awful there. As the poet said,

Between the coattails
And the wrath
Falls the Needle.

(Hey, watch it!)

Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)

[That headline appears in print. Online, the headline is more sober: “With Trump in Her State, Haley Finds Some Political Distance (Gently).”]

Editing in Zits

[Zits, March 7, 2022.]

In today’s Zits, Jeremy has asked Connie (Mom) to read his work. “I made a few edits,” she says, looking apologetic. He’s not happy about it: “When I said I was open to feedback, I meant compliments!”

It’s always a good idea to point out what a writer has done well. But a writer does not live by compliments alone. I like what Bryan Garner says about good editing:

It’s an act of friendship, not an act of hostility. Professional-level edits — the kind that would occur on the copy desks of major newsmagazines — make the writer look smarter. So if a skillful editor revises your work, be grateful, never resentful.

Say “Thanks, Mom.”

Garner on Black and white

“We applaud the new policy of the AP Stylebook and the hundreds of publications that have followed suit”: Bryan Garner explains why it makes sense to capitalize Black but not white.