A column on writing from Editor & Publisher June 13, 1981.
Shakspeare, Shakespere, Shakespeare
(Ed. note: In 2009, virtually all newswriting is done on computer with auto-spellcheck, so some of the specific advice given here may seem outdated. However, we have come full cirle: Text messages and Twitter feeds get posted, especially to blogs, and the 1981 column becomes prescient. Further 2009 comments in italics, with minor edits from the original. Book links current as of this web edition.)
Once-flawless spellers and nitpicking grammarians are now turning out sloppy copy. In the good old days, copy editors would spot most errors, then proofreaders and the backshop picked up nearly all the rest.
Today, few hot-metal back shops have a proofreading room, while offset newsrooms have no back shops. Editors don't catch on their video screens what they used to net easily working with a pencil. What to do?
1. Check out check-out. Whoever has the final look at the paper must a) be a skilled proofreader, and b) have the programming to correct errors quickly.
I once was check-out on a photo-offset system where I could make new heads or body type in less than five minutes. The paper usually went out perfect. I was proud of it.
Then the equipment was improved. Other components had great merit, but to add not to an erroneous guilty (thus preventing both a mistake and a libel suit) took 20 minutes. Against deadlines, only such gross blunders could be fixed. Comics went out with mixed-up titles, TV schedules were flubbed. The job became demoralizing. On dailies, only ware that makes fast corrections possible should be bought.
2. Get a spelling program on your word processor. The computer gnomes who helped put us into this fix are helping to bail us out. Push the SPELL key and every word not matched in their dictionaries is highlighted.
3. Devise new ways to check yourself.
4. Take special care when copying information from public records and forms.
Most Americans can't spell-- they never could. Police blotters, wedding notices, and death forms of 25 years ago were full of howlers (rabies for rabbis who officiated) and still are.5. Rest your eyes. Eye fatigue from video screens contributes to poor editing. Radiation dangers aside, you should not be staring continuously at a cathode ray tube. Try to make time to print your copy, then pencil edit it. Stories that must be letter perfect -- investigations, editorials, corrections -- are probably always best edited by hand.
6. Hang posters on the newsroom wall--lists of the mean ible/able and ance/ence words, 102 look-alikes, and all the other 8th grade charts. We have not regressed entirely to adolescence. We simply need all the help we can get.
Our readers don't care how we do it. They want a well-edited paper, and they doubt our intelligence when they don't get it. Before the 18th century, spelling was up to the individual writer, and variations were acceptable.
Shakespeare could see his own name spelled more than 20 different ways in print, all OK then. Today, only the three in the head are accepted by specialists, an unusual tolerance. Were Will alive, he'd probably complain to the publisher about two of them.
See also #11 Spelling: "If your Polish and your proud!".
Ethel Grodzins Romm is a writer and editor currently living in New York City. She is the author of The Open Conspiracy: What America's Angry Generation is Saying (review) (auction with cover), several of the Strategies in Reading workbook series and others. She appeared in the film Paranormal: Science or Pseudoscience? She has written columns on language for Editor & Publisher, The American Bar Association Journal and many others. She is currently working on a book on management.
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