The next meeting of the Society is on Wednesday, 25 February, and will be held, as usual, in the Friends Lounge in the National Library of Australia at 6.00 for 6.30 p.m.
Come along and catch up with your colleagues and friends for an interesting and informative evening.
CASE news
Training news
Book review 1
Book review 2
Dymocks discount dead
Copyright
The Council for Australian Societies of Editors (CASE) now has a website at <www.case-editors.org>. The site was created with the support of all the state and territory societies of editors, following discussions at the national conference of editors in July 2003. It will be updated from time to time with news of CASE activities in areas such as accreditation, standards and promotion of the editing profession.
The CASE Accreditation Working Group is currently compiling and reviewing the feedback received from individuals and state and territory workshops, reports convener Janet Mackenzie. The group may need to meet again within a few months in order to prepare a second draft of the proposed accreditation scheme.
CASE delegates are holding a teleconference on Sunday, 15 February, to discuss all current and proposed activities.
Australian Society of Indexers, ACT Region Branch.
Back-of-book indexing intermediate course conducted by Max McMaster. Venue to be advised. Practical book indexing training using a dedicated indexing software package on a pre-course publication. For those who wish to extend their basic indexing skills. Fees $240, or $190 for AusSI, Society of Editors and ASTC members. Contact Geraldine Triffitt 6231 4975 or <geraldine.triffitt@alianet.alia.org.au>.
Australian Society of Indexers, ACT Region Branch.
Back-of-book indexing introductory course conducted by Max McMaster. Australian Archives, Parkes, ACT. For librarians, editors, authors, technical writers and anyone else interested in becoming book indexers. Fees $220, or $170 for AusSI, Society of Editors and ASTC members. Contact Geraldine Triffitt 6231 4975 or <geraldine.triffitt@alianet.alia.org.au>.
By one of those strange quirks of fate that plague editors, this month we have TWO excellent reviews of the same book. Both adulatory, but sufficiently different to justify printing both.
Ms Lynne Truss was either brave or foolhardy - perhaps both - in taking on the business of teaching the business of proper punctuation, which is what she seeks to do in this little book.
Good on 'er though, because in great measure she succeeds, and at the same time delivers a book that editors of our ilk will love, because there's plenty in it to quibble about. All readers should appreciate her light, entertaining and, one might say, evangelical, approach to what could easily have been a dreary business. But it's important business. 'The reason to stand up for punctuation,' Ms Truss writes, 'is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.'
All the usual suspects are dealt with: the apostrophe; the comma; the semicolon and colon; the dash; the hyphen; and others. Not surprisingly, about a quarter of the book is devoted to the ongoing murder of the apostrophe, and a set of countervailing 'rules' about where and how it should be used. The expression of these rules will be familiar to all editors, even if they haven't really thought before this about the rules themselves.
The author makes big play about the omission of an apostrophe from the title of the film Two weeks notice, which most might agree would better be Two weeks' notice. But why, I ask? There seems no reason for the apostrophe here; nothing is being possessed or omitted. Its inclusion in this construction is more a matter of convention than logic, it seems. And keep in mind that the apostrophe and its various uses were born not of linguistics or grammar, but of the printer's type box. While it was around as a mark for a long time before the 17th century, it was not until then that 'printers started to intrude an apostrophe before the "s" in singular possessive cases ("the girl's dress"), and from then on quite frankly the whole thing has spiralled into madness', Ms Truss writes.
The author gives plenty of examples of apostrophic madness - many of them amusing, others bringing on dismay. How could the composers of a reader induction pamphlet at the British Library let through ' … to welcome you to the British Library, it's services and catalogues'? And how about 'Next week: nouns and apostrophe's' on a BBC website advertising a grammar course for children! (Is that exclamation mark kosher? Ms Truss's book deals with that issue later on.)
From the apostrophe (is it really a mark of 'punctuation'?) the author moves on to consider other species of pauses, and it is her discussion of the use of the semicolon and colon, particularly the former, that to me is one of the most interesting - and useful - parts of her book. She notes at the outset that the semicolon might be an endangered species; that this is so might be because, beginning in the 20th century, the trend has been towards writing in short, snappy sentences (that Hemingway has a lot to answer for!)
Just for fun, I searched for semicolons in a 19 000-word semi-technical report on my desktop. There were just 19 semis in the document, and in all cases they were being used to demarcate items in lists. There were no 'creative' uses, as in (from the work reviewed):
James Joyce preferred the colon, as more authentically classical; P G Wodehouse did an effortlessly marvellous job without it; George Orwell tried to avoid the semicolon completely in Coming Up for Air (1939), telling his editor in 1947, 'I had decided about this time that the semicolon is an unnecessary stop and that I would write my next book without one.'
Note that, in the uses above, the semicolons are separating complete sentences, but how much more effective they are in maintaining the flow of the idea and the rhythm of the words than would have been full stops.
Colons, on the other hand and among other things, ' … introduce the part of a sentence that exemplifies, restates, elaborates, undermines, explains or balances the preceding part'. A friend of mine put it more succinctly in a writing course he used to run; he had an overhead explaining 'The colon tells you that something important is coming' - too true.
So what about quibbles? As noted earlier, I wonder if the apostrophe really is a mark of punctuation. The same goes for hyphens and, would you believe, the use of italics, two other items that come within Ms Truss's purview of punctuation. And sometimes her preoccupation with punctuation hides the easy path. She writes:
As we discovered in the comma chapter, it is wrong to write, 'He woke up in his own bed, however, he felt fine.' Linking words such as 'however' … require a semicolon - and, I have to say, this seems pretty self-evident to me.
Perhaps so, but why not get rid of that overused and unwieldy 'however' and substitute the underused and immaculately serviceable 'but'? He woke up in his own bed, but he felt fine. (One can but speculate on the deep, inner meaning of that sentence.)
Overall, however, Eats, Shoots & Leaves is an enjoyable and instructive read, and would, I believe, be useful as an introductory text in writing and editing courses. Since the book is already into a second printing, I suspect that it has been so adopted in the UK. Student interest might be punctuated, however, by the $29 price tag, which is pretty steep for a 200-page A5 book. Let's hope there's a paperback on the way.
Ed Highley
… does you good, so they say. So this year's series is 'a little of what I fancy'; it will be a mix of topics that just happen to catch my attention or tickle my funny bone. I hope you like them too.
This first offering hit me in the eye when I visited a bookshop in Oxford, UK, just before Christmas, to get indoors out of the freezing cold of the Oxford streets. They were advertising coffee with book browsing, and I couldn't resist.
There was this book, just published and already a bestseller in England, with a title that rang bells with me: Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Now, where had I heard that before? Ah, panda joke! But it wasn't quite that, was it? No, somewhere 'roots' came into it, I was sure! So I picked up a copy and turned it over, and sure enough, in the jacket blurb, there was a version of the old panda joke:
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. 'Why?' asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. 'I'm a panda,' he says, at the door. 'Look it up.' The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation. 'Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.'
Well, I guess publishers have to be careful how much they print in book titles and on jacket blurbs - the 'roots' bit got left out, presumably in order not to offend anyone.
I bought it, took it home to my relatives in Oxford and proudly waved it about. 'Oh!' they chorused. 'We were going to buy that for you for Christmas. Thought you'd like it as you're an editor.' So I allowed them to take it from me, wrap it up and give me the money for it, and I then had to wait until Christmas Day to start reading it.
And what a read! I continued to read it, bit by bit, through Christmas in Sheffield, a train trip to Worcester, and on the plane back to Australia - it's compact, fits neatly into aircraft seat pockets, and I don't think my giggling in the middle of the night between London and Bangkok disturbed too many people. It's huge fun, whether you agree with some of the author's more pedantic dictums on punctuation or not. Lynne Truss is a writer and broadcaster in England. She started out as a literary editor, but other people's horrible punctuation got the better of her, and she started writing about it, and about what she saw as acceptable punctuation. She is a stickler for the preservation of a punctuation system that she sees as wonderful and necessary. The subtitle of the book is The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by which she means that she doesn't tolerate any punctuation that doesn't do something meaningful. (I have to admit to worrying about that subtitle a bit; after all, couldn't it mean that she doesn't tolerate punctuation at all?)
The apostrophe, the comma, the dash, quotation marks and exclamation marks come in for special treatment, Ms Truss arguing that we misuse these marks at our peril. I'm not a prescriptive grammarian, so, while I really enjoyed her dissertations on the historical significance of punctuation marks, I found a lot of her stickling for pedantry in punctuation rather irritating. We all laugh at banana's and onion's on sale at the vegie shop, but we know what they mean. It gets more serious when sentences become confusing because of misplaced or missing apostrophes or commas, as in these examples: First, from the UK passport application form: ' … giving the full name and title of the person who's details are given in Section 02', and second, should the tenor sing, in Handel's Messiah, 'Comfort ye my people' ('please go out and comfort my people') or 'Comfort ye, my people' ('just cheer up, you lot; it might never happen'). The discussion of uses of punctuation marks such as the often-misused colon are well worth reading - she talks about 'Ah' type colons as well as 'Yes!' type colons. 'Yes!' type colons are those that announce an explanation as in 'This much is clear, Watson: it was the baying of an enormous hound'. The 'Ah' type colon tells us that there is 'probably more to the initial statement than has met the eye', as in 'I loved Opal Fruits as a child: no one else did'.
Ms Truss leads us through to email and emoticons, and even the txt mssgng that goes on now on mobile phones (CU L8R) where spelling, punctuation and grammar have just about gone to the dogs - but perhaps meaning hasn't. Who, twenty years ago, would have thought of using punctuation marks to form 'smileys' like :-), or more appropriately for this review, perhaps: ;-).
The book has a lot for the student of the history of punctuation, some good summaries of the 'correct' use of punctuation marks, some interesting ambivalence on the use of the 'Oxford' comma as in this sentence, and a useful bibliography. It is written in a very chatty, racy style. Read it like a novel and don't take it too seriously, unless, of course, like Lynne Truss, you want to cry out 'Sticklers unite!'
Elizabeth Murphy
(The heading is black out of respect for the dear departed.)
Members might remember that we negotiated a 10 per cent discount on purchases at the Dymocks bookshop in Civic. Well, for the moment at least, don't bring on embarrassment by asking for it; the management of the shop has changed, and has reneged on the agreement. We'll be trying to have the discount reinstated, or seek a similar arrangement with some other store, and will let you know of the outcome.
The deadline for the next regular issue is 5 March.
Mail contributions on a 3.5 inch disk, using Word for Windows (essential) or email (preferable), to:
Canberra Society of Editors,
PO Box 3222, Manuka ACT 2603
ara.nalbandian@defence.gov.au
If mailing, always provide a printout as well.
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