When caption writers blindly follow the rules

Forest for the trees

I just edited an article by a writer who is unable to discriminate.

He followed the rule relating to spelling out numbers below 10 to a ridiculous and infuriating (for me) extreme. In his article on the nutritional value of the 3 Musketeers bar, he wrote Three Musketeers in every instance.

Today's Fantasy

Dear Stupid, Lazy Sonofabitch Author:

In your nearly 700 notes (which you submitted as footnotes rather than endnotes per our submission guidelines), you failed to enclose within quotation marks a single report title.

There must be close to a hundred of them. In addition, you failed to italicize perhaps twenty or so book titles.

Also, you evidently couldn't make up your addled brain regarding the military vs. civilian treatment of how to structure a specific date.

Finally, your clearly schizoid approach to hyphenation and capitalization would seem to indicate an immediate need for treatment.

In closing, I can only say that all of the above, and so much more, perfectly represents the focus of your book: the fight against terrorism. For this editorial effort, I am the good guy and you are the terrorist.

Forever disrespectfully yours,

Serial Killer

Some say that deep within each of us lies a potential killer who could be released given the right set of circumstances.

Upon waking this morning, I found tangible evidence of that on the writing pad I keep next to my bed. Evidently I had done some automatic writing during the night.

Persona non grata

Yesterday a proposal manager (in charge of a group of writers) sent a query to one of our two proposal coordinators (they shepherd proposals through the production process).

Unlike most PMs, he knows there is something called style and wants to consider it before his writers begin their work on the proposal.

He asked her the following style questions: (1) Ft. Monmouth or Fort Monmouth? (2) Service Desk or service desk? (3) information assurance or Information Assurance? (4) Periods at the end of bulleted items or not? (5) Army/DoD Group, or Army and DoD Group?

Not only did she not refer his questions to me, her response was that (1) the items weren't that important, (2) he and his writers could decide, and (3) “the Editor will also try and catch any inconsistency that was missed by the writers.”

Let's break down the three elements of her response. First, how we treat each of these items is what style is all about. Second, I’ve been charged with developing and enforcing house style. Third, I am a nameless editor who will “try” to catch errors.

Because she cc'd me on the e-mail thread, I responded to his questions with specific answers for each item. He thanked me. She didn’t even acknowledge my e-mail to him.

Again, editing is a thankless job, and it is made even more so (what is less than thankless?) when our role is ignored or, worse, undermined.

Confession I

The U.S. Air Force has been plagued by a multitude of problems in recent years—a drop in morale, security lapses, and ethics violations at the Academy, to name a few. Some observers claim this is attributable to many in the Air Force no longer believing in “the mission,” or more precisely the absence of a clear-cut mission for the Air Force post Cold War.

“What does this have to with editing?” you might ask. In a word, ennui.

There is a rule, somewhere, on how to treat every single element of a piece of writing. The editor, of course, is expected to ride shotgun to ensure that those rules aren’t broken. But like our flyboys and flygals—and every editor will admit this—sometimes we just couldn’t care less, particularly with regard to items that seem trivial at best.

Here are ten of my (least) favorites:

% or percent in text and in tables/charts

Bold, italics, or underlining for emphasis

Insert comma (or not) following city/state within a sentence (The voters of Denver, Colorado, have spoken.)

Em dash (—) or en dash ( – ) surrounded by a space to set off text

Hyphen or en dash to bridge numbers (1967-1970 or 1967–1970)

One or two spaces between sentences

One or two spaces following a colon

Possessive or not (GM shareholders or GM’s shareholders)

Punctuation of bulleted lists

The serial comma (red, white, and blue vs. red, white and blue)

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” It certainly feels that way sometimes.