Category: Editing

What the heck’s happening in book publishing? (EAC-BC meeting)

Freelance writer, editor, indexer, and teacher Lana Okerlund moderated a lively panel discussion at the November EAC-BC meeting that featured Nancy Flight, associate publisher at Greystone Books; Barbara Pulling, freelance editor; and Laraine Coates, marketing manager at UBC Press. “There are lots of pronouncements about book publishing,” Okerlund began, “with some saying, ‘Oh, it’s doomed,’ and others saying that it’s undergoing a renaissance. What’s the state of publishing now, and what’s the role of the editor?”

Flight named some of the challenges in trade publishing today: publishers have had to scramble to get resources to publish ebooks, even though sales of ebooks are flattening out and in some cases even declining. Print books are also declining: unit sales are up slightly, but because of the pressure to keep list prices low, revenues are down. Independent bookstores are gone, so there are fewer places to sell books, and Chapters-Indigo is devoting much less space to books. Review pages in the newspaper are being cut as well, leaving fewer options for places to publicize books. The environment is hugely challenging for publishers, explained Flight, and it led to the bankruptcy just over a year ago of D&M Publishers, of which Greystone was a part. “We’ve all risen from the ashes, miraculously,” she said, “but in scattered form.” Greystone joined the Heritage Group while Douglas & McIntyre was purchased by Harbour Publishing, and many of the D&M staff started their own publishing ventures based on different publishing models.

The landscape “is so fluid right now,” said Pulling. “It changes from week to week.” There are a lot of prognosticators talking about the end of the traditional model of publishing, said Pulling. The rise of self-publishing—from its accessibility to its cachet—has led to a lot of hype and empty promises, she warned. “Everybody’s a publisher, everybody’s a consultant. It raises a lot of ethical issues.”

The scholarly environment faces some different challenges, said Coates. It can be quick to accept new things but sometimes moves very slowly. Because the main market of scholarly presses has been research libraries, the ebook issue is just now emerging, and the push is coming from the authors, who want to present their research in new ways that a book can’t really accommodate. She gave as examples researchers who want to release large amounts of their data or authors of Aboriginal studies titles who want to make dozens of audio files available. “Is confining ourselves to the book our mandate?” she asked. “And who has editorial control?”

Okerlund asked the panel if, given the rise in ebooks and related media, editors are now expected to be more like TV producers. Beyond a core of editorial skills, what other skills are editors expected to have?

“I’m still pretty old-fashioned,” answered Flight. “The same old skills are still going to be important in this new landscape.” She noted an interesting statistic that ebook sales are generally down, but ebooks for kids in particular have fallen 45% in the first half of 2013. As for other ebook bells and whistles, Greystone has done precisely one enhanced ebook, and that was years ago. They didn’t find the effort of that project worth their while. Coates agreed, saying “Can’t we just call it [the enhanced ebook] a website at this point? Because that’s what it really is.” Where editorial skills are going to be vital, she said, was in the realm of discoverability. Publishers need editors to help with metadata tagging and identifying important themes and information. Scholarly presses are now being called upon to provide abstracts not just for a book but also for each chapter, and editors have the skills to help with these kinds of tasks.

Pulling mentioned a growing interest in digital narratives, such as Kate Pullinger’s Inanimate Alice and Flight Paths, interactive online novels that have readers contribute threads to the stories. Inanimate Alice was picked up by schools as a teaching tool and is considered one of the early examples of transmedia storytelling. “Who is playing an editors’ role in the digital narrative?” asked Pulling. “Well, nobody. That role will emerge.”

Okerlund asked if authors are expected to bring more to the table. Flight replied, “Authors have to have a profile. If they don’t, they are really at a huge disadvantage. We’re not as willing to take a chance on a first-time author or someone without a profile.” Pulling expressed concern for the authors, particularly in the “Wild West” of self-publishing. “What happens to the writers?” she asked. In the traditional publishing model, if you put together a successful proposal, the publisher will edit your book. But now “Writers are paying for editing. Writers are being asked to write for free. They need to be able to market; they need to know social media. It’s very difficult for writers right now. Everybody’s trying to get something for nothing.” She also said that although self-publishing offers opportunity in some ways, “there’s so much propaganda out there about self-publishing.” Outfits like Smashwords and Amazon, she explained, have “done so much damage. It’s like throwing stuff to the wall and seeing what sticks, and they’re just making money on volume.”

Pulling sees ethical issues not only in those business practices but also in the whole idea of editing a work to be self-published, without context. “It’s very difficult to edit a book in a vacuum,” she said. “You have to find a way to create a context for each book,” which can be hard when “you have people come to you with things that aren’t really books.” She added, “Writers are getting the message that they need an editor, but some writers have gotten terrible advice from people who claim to be editors. Book editing is a specialized skill, and you have to know about certain book conventions. Whether it’s an ebook or a print book, if something is 300,000 words long, and it’s a novel, who’s going to read that?” A good, conscientious book editor can help an author see a larger context for their writing and tailor their book to that, with a strong overall narrative arc. “It’s incumbent upon you as a freelancer to educate clients about self-publishing,” said Pulling. Coates added, “We have a real PR problem now in publishing and editing. We’ve gotten behind in being out there publicly and talking about what we do. The people pushing self-publishing are way ahead of us. I think it’s sad that writers can’t just be writers. I can’t imagine how writing must suffer because of that.”

Both Flight and Pulling noted that a chief complaint of published authors was that their publishers didn’t do enough marketing. But, as Pulling explained, “unless it’s somebody who is set up to promote themselves all the time, it’s not as easy as it looks.” Coates said that when it comes to marketing, UBC Press tries everything. “Our audiences are all over the place,” she explained. “We have readers and authors who aren’t on email to people who DM on Twitter. It’s subject specific: some have huge online communities.” Books built around associations and societies are great, she explained, because they can get excerpts and other promotional content to their existing audiences. She’s also found Twitter to be a great tool: “It’s so immediate. Otherwise it’s hard to make that immediate connection with readers.”

Okerlund asked the panel about some of the new publishing models that have cropped up, from LifeTree Media to Figure 1 Publishing and Page Two Strategies. Figure 1 (started by D&M alums Chris Labonté, Peter Cocking, and Richard Nadeau), Pulling explained, does custom publishing—mostly business books, art books, cookbooks, and books commissioned by the client. Page Two, said Pulling, is “doing everything.” Former D&Mers Trena White and Jesse Finkelstein bring their clients a depth of experience in publishing. They have a partnership with a literary agency but also consult with authors about self-publishing. They will also help companies get set up with their own publishing programs. Another company with an interesting model is OR Books, which offers its socially and politically progressive titles directly through their website, either as ebooks or print-on-demand books.

The scholarly model, said Coates, has had to respond to calls from scholars and readers to make books available for free as open-access titles. The push does have its merits, she explained: “Our authors and we are funded by SSHRC [the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada]. So it makes sense for people to say, ‘If we’re giving all this money to researchers and publishers, why are they selling the books?'” The answer, she said, lies simply in the fact that the people issuing the call for open access don’t realize how many resources go into producing a book.

So where do we go from here? According to Pulling, “Small publishers will be okay, as long as the funding holds.” Flight elaborated: “There used to be a lot of mid-sized publishers in Canada, but one after another has been swallowed up or gone out of business.” About Greystone since its rebirth, Flight explained, “We’re smaller now. We’re just doing everything we’ve always done, but more so. We put a lot more energy into identifying our market.” She added, “It’s a good time to be a small publisher, if you know your niche. There’s not a lot of overhead, and there’s collegiality. At Greystone we’ve been very happy in our smaller configuration, and things are going very well.”

Pulling encouraged us to be more vocal and active politically. “One of the things we should do in Vancouver is write to the government and get them to do something about the rent in this city. We don’t have independent bookstores, beyond the specialty stores like Banyen or Kidsbooks. And at the same time Gregor Robertson is celebrating Amazon’s new warehouse here?” She also urged us to make it clear to our elected representatives how much we value arts funding. One opportunity to make our voices heard is coming up at the Canada Council’s National Forum on the Literary Arts, happening in February 2014.

Greg Adams and Matthew Kaul—When plain language isn’t enough: Plain language and Global English at a global healthcare company (PLAIN 2013)

As editors at Cook Medical, an international medical device company, Greg Adams and Matthew Kaul have worked on content destined for translation into over twenty languages. (Kaul recently left to launch his own writing and editing business.) To create content that can be easily translated, they apply principles of Global English, an evidence-based system of writing techniques based on linguistic research. Global English arose out of the need to translate software documentation into many languages and was designed to facilitate both human and machine translation.

Global English can support plain language efforts because it ensures clarity. A document deemed “plain” may have short sentences and use familiar words, but looking at it through the eyes of a translator can expose imprecise statements. Global English proponent John Kohl says, “the quality of the source text, not the skill or competence of the translator, is typically the biggest factor that affects translation quality,” and because translation quality is a reflection of the quality of your product or service in a lot of cultures, we should be putting more emphasis on creating high-quality source texts. Adams and Kohl showed how the following Global English principles can help:

Make sure your sentences are semantically complete

Plain language advocates suggest using short sentences, but shortness should not be an end in itself. Don’t omit syntactic cues such as articles. For example,

Block open port on catheter fitting.

might mean

Block [the] open port on [the] catheter fitting.

or

Block open [the port] on [a] catheter fitting.

These two interpretations have opposite meanings.

Avoid ambiguous punctuation

For example, in this sentence:

Advance the guide catheter/sheath.

should the user advance the catheter and sheath simultaneously? Should the user advance either the catheter or the sheath? Are the catheter and sheath the same thing?

Dashes can also lead to ambiguity: are parenthetical constructions set off by dashes definitions, interjections, or clarifications?

Avoid -ing words

Words that end in -ing can function as many different parts of speech and can therefore lead to ambiguity. The example that Adams and Kaul gave the following example:

Get comfortable hearing protectors and get comfortable using them.

“Hearing” is an adjective, whereas “using” is a verb.

(This sentence is particularly insidious because it sets up a false parallelism: “get comfortable” is used in two different ways.)

Be consistent with your terminology

Avoid using the same word in multiple parts of speech. Otherwise, as we saw with the “get comfortable” example above, you might confuse the translator or reader. Also, use unambiguous words like “when” instead of “once” and “although” instead of “while.”

Avoid broad-reference and ambiguous pronouns

Some languages don’t have a pronoun that can stand for an entire phrase in the way some English writers use “which” and “that.” In this example

Our new monitor has virtually no background noise. That should substantially reduce the number of false positives.

“that” refers to the absence of noise, an antecedent that isn’t explicitly mentioned in the previous sentence. The translator would have to infer what the pronoun refers to and try to find a way to express the vague concept in the target language.

Make sure any pronouns you use have clear antecedents. Be wary of the following words when used as pronouns, because they can often be imprecise:

  • all
  • another
  • any
  • each
  • either
  • few
  • following
  • former
  • latter
  • many
  • neither
  • none
  • one
  • other
  • the rest
  • same
  • several
  • some
  • such
  • that
  • them
  • these
  • those

***

To learn more about Global English, visit Adams and Kaul’s blog, Global English for Everyone. They also suggest these resources:

  • Microsoft Style Guide, Fourth Edition.
  • John Kohl, The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market.
  • Sun Technical Publications, Read Me First! A Style Guide for the Computer Industry.

Upcoming posts: PLAIN 2013 and EAC-BC

I feel privileged to have been a part of the inspiring PLAIN 2013 conference over the weekend, which brought together clear communication representatives from nineteen countries and had us talking about everything from legalese to health literacy to usability testing, among many other fascinating topics. Huge congratulations to Cheryl Stephens and her team for putting on such a terrific event.

A major takeaway for me is that opportunities abound for editors and other communication specialists. After years of toiling in the book industry, whose traditional model has teetered on the brink for as long as I’ve been involved, I’ve found renewed optimism in my profession after attending this conference. Recognition by not only government but also the private and academic sectors that clear communication is essential in our age of information overload means there is so much work out there for plain language practitioners and trainers, and the fact that a lot of what we do is rooted in social justice and the belief that citizens, union members, and consumers have the right to understand our laws, regulations, and contracts is hugely affirming and provides an extra bit of motivation to keep doing what we do.

As usual, I’ll be summarizing the sessions I attended, but, as usual, the process will probably take me a few weeks. Interrupting the PLAIN entries will be one about tomorrow’s important EAC-BC meeting, where Maureen Nicholson will tell us about potential changes to the Editors’ Association of Canada’s governance structure and ask members for their input. A primer on what EAC’s governance task force has been up to is here.

Book review: Editor-Proof Your Writing

If you fireproof your home, you protect it from the ravages of flames and heat, right? I wondered if that was the connotation Don McNair had in mind when he titled his book Editor-Proof Your Writing: 21 Steps to the Clear Prose Publishers and Agents Crave. Was he implying that editors will muck up your text if you don’t take steps to protect it? Too often authors enter into a relationship with an editor thinking exactly that, and they expect the editing process to be adversarial.

Fortunately, McNair—an editor himself—is quick to emphasize the value of good editing to writers, including (perhaps especially) those thinking of self-publishing. McNair unapologetically writes, “That treasured manuscript of yours came back from publishers and agents several times, right? Well, maybe—just maybe—they knew what they were doing.” (p. xii) Far from claiming that his book is the only thing writers need to get themselves published, McNair acknowledges that his advice is just one piece of the puzzle and suggests writers “have that manuscript edited professionally before sending it out. Have experienced eyes look it over and tell you what the problems are, and perhaps help you solve them.” (p. xii)

Editor-Proof Your Writing focuses primarily on stylistic editing for fiction (a point I don’t think was as clear as it should have been in the book’s cover copy and marketing materials). Structural work—making sure the narrative has a strong arc and that there are no problems with continuity—is not covered, nor is the detailed nitpicking (a term I use affectionately here, of course) of copy editing. Further, McNair’s expertise lies in romance and mystery novels, so writers of less commercial genres, such as literary fiction, may not find his examples as helpful. Still, McNair offers some useful reminders of writing pitfalls that can prevent an otherwise good story from engaging the reader. In particular, his book looks at the sins of what he calls “information dumping,” “author intrusion,” and “foggy writing” (often in the form of verbosity that slows the reader down).

“Information dumping” is a technique that inexperienced writers often use to convey details they think readers will need; in essence, it’s telling rather than showing. McNair writes

Readers do need certain information so they can follow the story. Some fiction writers provide it, in part, by having two people discuss the information in an early scene. Often, this takes place in the heroine’s apartment (or its equivalent). Nothing else usually—or ever—happens in the scene.

This approach is deadly. Readers sometimes feel they’re forced to sit on a couch in this cramped apartment and listen as the heroine and her sidekick discuss these must-have acts, perhaps glancing at the readers occasionally to see if they are picking up what the author is trying to impart… A much better approach is to provide that information as part of some other action or event. (p. 33)

That “glancing at the readers” is an example of author intrusion, when authors, who “should stay invisible,… unwittingly leave clues to their presence,” says McNair. And when that happens, readers “are pulled out of fiction’s magic spell.” (p. 35)

Author intrusion can manifest in several ways—for example, when a writer uses ‑ly adverbs or dialogue tags other than “said” (such as “countered,” “mumbled,” “volunteered,” etc.). The action is interpreted via the author, which plucks the reader out of an immersive experience.

Eliminating these kinds of telltale traces of the author is only part of McNair’s twenty-one-step process to “lift the fog” on writing and make it more engaging. These steps include changing passive voice to active, taking out expletive constructions like “there are,” and eliminating clichés and superficials (his term for some types of metadiscourse, including phrases like, “It goes without saying that…”). He also gives specific suggestions for how to deal with dialogue, and I particularly like this point, which he repeats a couple of times in the book:

Some may say, “But that’s the way people talk!” Perhaps. But dialogue isn’t supposed to be an exact copy of conversations. We don’t include all the “uh’s,” belches, and repetitive chit-chat, do we? The writer’s job is to make conversations sound real in as few words as possible. Present the meaning without the mess. (p. 63)

The main problem with McNair’s steps, though, is that many of them overlap, which means that systematically applying them from beginning to end (as “steps” would imply) would lead to some duplicated work in some places and missed stylistic infelicities in others. For instance, some of his steps are “Eliminate double verbs” (like “sat and watched television”—step 7), “Eliminate double nouns, adjectives, and adverbs” (like “complete and utter”—step 8), “Watch for foggy phrases,” (changing “make a stop” to “stop,” for example—step 9), “Eliminate redundancies” (step 15), and “Get rid of throwaway words” (step 17).” To me, all of these are variations of “Edit for conciseness” (step 18), and some of them are variations of one another.

In contrast, McNair’s final step is to “Stop those wandering eyes,” meaning that writers should take out tired expressions like “her eyes were glued to the TV set.” That metaphor, says McNair, is laughable, and so it will break the reader’s concentration. A fair point, but why is that particular metaphor the focus of its own step—at the same level as “Edit for conciseness”? A better approach might have been to talk about metaphor use in general, explaining the pitfalls of  mixed metaphors and overused metaphors that have lost their meaning. As it stands, this step in McNair’s book comes off as one of his personal bugbears.

Despite its problems, Editor-Proof Your Writing is a quick, easy read, thanks to McNair’s casual and conversational writing style. His advice is sensible and digestible, although it is by no means comprehensive, even for stylistic issues alone, so consider this book a starting point rather than an authoritative reference. Editors who work primarily on non-fiction or literary fiction might not get as much out of this book as editors of commercial fiction.

What we can all appreciate, however, is that McNair, is a champion for the professional editor. Now that anyone can self-publish, he says, “we’ve killed off the gatekeepers, and now both our great and our garbled manuscripts go freely through those gates into the readers’ hands. If readers find garbage instead of a well-crafted story, they spread the word.” Not only can quality editors prevent this kind of bad publicity, says McNair, but they may also help an author “turn a stream of rejections into a writing career.” (p. 169)

Editors’ show and tell: time-saving tips and tricks

We kicked off the 2013–2014 EAC-BC meeting season last evening with a packed house and an editors’ show and tell of some of our favourite time-savers. Here’s a summary*:

Fact checking

  • Frances Peck showed us CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute database, which is handy if you need to work with a document that has legal citations or references to acts and regulations. The searchable database covers both federal and provincial case law and has up-to-date wording of legislation. The University of Victoria Libraries vouch for the database’s reliability.
  • I mentioned the Library of Congress Authorities as a reliable place to check names.
  • Lana Okerlund told us about GeoBC for fact checking B.C. place names.
  • Naomi Pauls and Jennifer Getsinger both mentioned the Canadian Geographical Names Data Base for place names within Canada.
  • I also told the crowd about SearchOpener, which I’d mentioned in a previous post. The tool lets you perform multiple Google searches at once—a boon for checking fact-heavy texts.

Notes and bibliography

  • Stef Alexandru told us about RefWorks and Zotero, which are bibliographic management programs. The former costs $100 (USD), whereas the latter is free. In both of these programs, you can enter all of your bibliographic information, and it produces a bibliography in the style (e.g., Chicago) that you want.
  • Microsoft Word’s bibliography tool does the same thing (under “Manage Sources”)

The trick to all of these programs, though, is that you would have had to work with your client or author early enough in the writing process for them to have used them from the outset. Nobody knew of any specific tricks for streamlining the editing of notes and bibliographies, although Margaret Shaw later mentioned a guest article on Louise Harnby’s blog by the developer of EditTools, Richard Adin, in which he writes:

The books I work on often have reference lists of several hundred entries. Using the Journals macro, I can check and correct most of the entries in the list automatically. I once timed it and found that I can check about 600 references in approximately 15 minutes; it used to take me hours, especially if I had to look up obscure and rarely cited journal names. Now I look them up once, enter them in the dataset, and move on.

  • For fact checking bibliographical information, one suggestion was to use WorldCat.

Document cleanup

  • Jack Lyon’s Editorium has a FileCleaner Word add-on that helps with a lot of common search-and-replace cleanup steps. NoteStripper may also help you prepare a file for design if the designer doesn’t want embedded footnotes or endnotes.
  • Grace Yaginuma told us how to strip all hyperlinks from your file by selecting all (Ctrl + A) and then using Ctrl + Shift + F9.
  • To remove formatting from text on the clipboard, suggested apps include Plain Clip and Format Match.

Ensuring consistency

  • Nobody in the room had tried PerfectIt, but there seemed to be positive views of it on EAC’s listserv. It catches consistency errors that Word’s spelling and grammar checkers miss, including hyphenation, capitalization, and treatment of numbers. You can also attach specific dictionaries or style sheets to it.

Author correspondence and queries

  • Theresa Best keeps a series of boilerplate emails in her Drafts folder; another suggestion was to have boilerplate email text as signature files.
  • For queries that you use again and again, consider adding it as an AutoCorrect entry, a trick I use all the time and saves me countless keystrokes. Store longer pieces of boilerplate text as AutoText.

Proofreading

  • Naomi Pauls and Theresa Best talked about the utility of checklists. I concur!

Structural editing

  • A few people in the audience mentioned that a surprising number of editors don’t know about using Outline View or Navigation Pane in Microsoft Word to do outlining and structural editing.
  • One person said Scrivener is a fantastic tool for easily moving large chunks of text around and other aspects of structural editing.

Business administration

  • Janet Love Morrison uses Billings for time tracking and invoicing, and she highly recommends it. Other options recommended include iBiz and FreshBooks. (Someone also mentioned Goggle as a time tracker, but I can’t find anything about it. Can anyone help?)
  • Theresa Best has just begun using Tom’s Planner, which she described as a free and intuitive project-management program.
  • Peter Moskos mentioned that years ago, his firm had invested in FastTrack Schedule, which cost a few hundred dollars but, he said, was worth every penny, especially for creating schedules for proposals.
  • One recommended scheduling app for arranging meetings is Doodle.com.

Editors’ wish list

  • Naomi Pauls said that she’d like to see a style sheet app that lets you choose style options easily rather than having to key them in. (Being able to have your word process0r reference it while checking the document would be a plus.)
  • Someone else proposed a resource that would be a kind of cheat sheet to summarize the main differences between the major style guides, to make it easier to jump from one to another when working on different projects.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the meeting and especially those who shared their tips and tricks!

*Although I knew some names at the meeting, I didn’t catch all of the names of the contributors (or I’d forgotten who’d said what). If you see an entry here and thought, “Hey—that’s me!” please send me a note, and I’ll be happy to add your name.

Use hyphens wisely: Discretion is advised

Having just educated two of my designer friends—both award-winning veterans of the book industry—about the discretionary/optional hyphen, I realized that maybe not everyone knows about it after all. Convincing designers to embrace the discretionary hyphen can mean saving a lot of proofing time (or, at the very least, eliminating a proofing worry), so I’ve found myself proselytizing, and I might as well do that here, too.

What they are

You’re familiar with the good ol’-fashioned regular hyphen (like the one in “ol’-fashioned”), also known as the hard hyphen. If a line breaks after a hard hyphen, it’s no big deal. In contrast, you wouldn’t want a line break after the hyphen in a phone number, say, or a numeral-unit adjective (e.g., 4-ton jack), and in those situations you’d want to use a nonbreaking hyphen.

But let’s say you’re reading a proof where a word has broken where you don’t want it to break—e.g., mi•crowave instead of micro•wave. What happens when you mark up the proof asking the designer to rebreak the word?

Well, the way many designers have been told to solve the problem is simply to add a (hard) hyphen where they want the break to happen. The approach seems to resolve the issue, but it’s not an elegant fix. What they should be using is a discretionary hyphen (Ctrl/Command + Shift + – in InDesign), which appears if the word breaks at the end of the line but remains invisible when it doesn’t.

Let’s say the designer has added a hard hyphen to “microwave” to make it break as

micro-
wave

If you made text changes that pushed “micro” to the following line, for example, you’d end up with “micro-wave” on one line, and the proofreader would have to ask for that hyphen to be deleted.

Using a discretionary hyphen would mean that “microwave” would continue to break as

micro-
wave

if it flowed over two lines but appear as “microwave” otherwise.

(Apparently, if you add a discretionary hyphen before a word, InDesign prevents that word from being broken at all—handy for some proper nouns. More information about hyphens in InDesign can be found here.)

Why they help

Beyond the fact that the proofreader no longer has to worry about designer-introduced hard hyphens, discretionary hyphens are especially helpful for texts that are destined for more than one format or medium. Many publishers create their ebooks from their InDesign files, and because EPUB text can reflow, hard hyphens introduced to break a word in a desirable place for the print edition are bound to show up where they aren’t needed in the ebook. Either a proofreader has to go through the ebook text and remove them, or the publisher leaves them in and effectively sacrifices some of its editorial standards in its ebooks. Similarly, reprints (e.g., when a hardcover is reformatted as a mass-market paperback) would be a lot less work for the proofreader if designer-introduced hard hyphens were no longer a concern.

What they could mean to editors

We could nip the problem in the bud a bit earlier in the production process if copy editors also used discretionary hyphens (called optional hyphens in Microsoft Word—shortcut key: Ctrl/Command + -) after common prefixes in closed compounds. (As if copy editors needed any more responsibility!) It’s probably impossible to anticipate every possible bad word break, but a few global searches would be fairly easy to do at the copy-editing stage and would eliminate a lot of the distraction for the proofreader.

What to keep in mind

Ideally, all optional hyphens in Word would translate seamlessly into discretionary hyphens in InDesign. Apparently the two programs don’t always play nicely together, though, so if you’re a copy editor prepping a file for design, it might be worth sending a few test files to the designer you’re working with, to figure out if the special characters, including nonbreaking spaces, nonbreaking hyphens, and discretionary hyphens, among others, will come through.

Also, discretionary hyphens may cause problems for online text because different standards treat them differently, some translating discretionary hyphens into hard hyphens. Again, you may want to test some files, particularly in an ebook workflow, to see if inputting discretionary hyphens is worth the copy editor’s time or if they should be inserted by the designer and only as needed for the print publication. Luckily, designers can just as easily search an InDesign file for discretionary hyphens they’ve inserted and remove them for the ebook version.

How you can make the world a more discretionary place

Next time you’re proofreading and you notice one of those manually added hyphens that buggers up a word, just mention discretionary hyphens to the designer. The designers I spoke to were happy to learn about them and were excited about the prospect of saving proofreading time and, more importantly, not inadvertently introducing errors.

Condensing texts: Lessons from a recent project

At the Editors’ Association of Canada conference in June, Elizabeth Macfie gave a talk about shortening text. From the program:

All editors and writers need to be able to shorten texts. Brevity enhances readability; squeezes content into limited spaces; saves money on translation, proofreading and printing; and increases social-media quotability. This session provides principles, techniques and tools for efficiently trimming texts, as well as the justification for that trimming. We’ll practise on material such as correspondence, newspaper articles and headings, reports, instructions, interview and meeting transcripts, PowerPoint slides, abstracts and tweets.

I was disappointed to have missed Macfie’s talk, which was at the same time as Helena Aalto and Laurel Boone’s, but I got a chance to chat with her during breaks at the conference and have looked through the excellent notes that she’s made available on the EAC website. At the time I was working on a project to shorten several academic reports—average length 20,000 words—to no more than 6,000 words each, for an upcoming anthology. I’ve completed the first major phase of that project and wanted to jot down some quick thoughts about my approach in case I ever find myself doing a similar project again, and I figured I may as well share them here.

The project

Way back when I was a student journalist, I was taught to load the front of a news article with critical information so that an editor working on deadline could easily trim from the bottom if the text didn’t fit. Too bad other genres aren’t as straightforward to cut.

My project consisted of nine master’s-level, thesis-length academic reports, each of which included standard components such as an abstract, introductory chapter, main body chapters, concluding chapter, and back matter (notes, bibliography, and up to several appendices). My job was to cut them down to digestible papers that would be compiled into a collection and used as teaching tools in both undergraduate and graduate classes.

Initial read-through

Look—don’t touch. Well, that’s the idea, anyway. I have to admit to cutting the abstract and appendices right away, to eliminate those distractions and to get a better idea of my true starting word count. Beyond those cuts, though (which were especially cathartic because they didn’t require much thought and they made me feel as though I’d accomplished something early on), I did my best to read through all of the text without deleting anything.

Putting the machete down for the first read prevents you from premature cutting; content that seems unimportant in an early part of the text may grow in relevance later on. It also allows you to get a good sense of the author’s main ideas. Highlight if you want—but try not to delete.

Structural cutting

“To retain the author’s voice, cut large chunks of text rather than individual words,” suggested Macfie when I spoke with her during the conference breaks. This phase of what I’ve called structural cutting—deleting whole sections, paragraphs, and sentences—is the analogue (or perhaps a subset?) of structural editing, and it’s a crucial step if you’re expecting to cut more than, say, 25% of your text. Working with changes tracked allows you to easily restore passages when you’ve decided you’ve cut too much.

Cut in several passes

What seems essential during one reading may reveal itself to be expendable during the next. If the schedule allows, let your brain and the text rest a bit before starting the next pass.

Cut introductions, conclusions, and back matter

Academic writing, particularly theses, can have a lot of repetition: “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them” is an approach academics often quote and follow. Redundancy may be the antidote to confusion, but when your goal is to cut a text down to 30% of its original length, redundancy is a luxury.

The abstract, introduction, and conclusion are typically just summaries of the main body, and in those cases they can be cut right off the bat. You may have to restore part of the conclusion to give the final text a satisfying ending, but the introduction, which is usually a lot of signposting and scene setting, often doesn’t communicate the essence of the text. (In all of the reports I condensed, I could cut the introduction without losing meaning.) Certainly all appendices and go, as can most of the notes that don’t cite sources. Presumably if these were critical, they would be integrated into the main text.

Background and historical information—and academic reports and theses can have a lot of it, particularly in introductory chapters—can usually be cut or heavily condensed. If you find yourself asking if a paragraph really needs to be there, more often than not it can go. I also took advantage of authors’ tendencies to structure each chapter with introductory and concluding sections; again, because these repeated information within the chapter, I could cut these with no loss in meaning.

Cut quotes—especially block quotes

Writers often make a statement and then buttress it with a quote from an authority, essentially repeating information. Evaluate which one—the statement or the quote—holds the most weight, and cut the other. (I found I hung on to authors’ statements more than quotes, since they were often more concise and worked better with the surrounding text.) You can attach the citation for the quote to the statement if you need to, and keen readers wanting to know more can follow up with the source.

Cut examples

Writers use examples, much as they do with quotes, to support their point. But if their statement is understandable or authoritative without them, those examples—or at least most of them—can go.

Cut cross-references

Cut every reference to appendices or sections that no longer exist. My target word count was so much smaller than the initial word count that I took out internal cross-references entirely. Clauses like “As we’ll see in Chapter 2” were obvious flags for sentences that I could delete: either the information was repeated (in which case one of the instances could go), or it would be so much closer to the reference to it that such way-finding and priming tools were unnecessary.

Stylistic cutting

When I had the reports down to about 9,000 words, I refocused my efforts on phrase- and word-level cuts, concurrent with a stylistic edit that naturally eliminated wordiness. Although I don’t agree with everything in Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, this phase is where “omit needless words” holds true.

If you’ve got a strict target word count (as I had), try to come a but under it so that you have some wiggle room if you need to adjust the text in the final phase.

Cut parentheticals

Parentheticals, whether they set are set off by commas, parentheses, or dashes, can usually be taken out without sacrificing the main point of the sentence. (Case in point: that last sentence.) Cutting them also preserves the author’s voice, because you’re not changing the way the author has expressed the main idea.

Cut metadiscourse

“It should be noted that” and similar phrases are self-conscious and unnecessary. Get rid of them.

Shorten lists

And I don’t mean cutting list items (unless they’re superfluous examples). Rather, because a list consists of a stem followed by list item A, list item B, list item C, and so on, see if you can find ways to integrate repeated information in the list items into the stem (e.g., “…followed by list items A, B, C, and so on”).

Apply usual stylistic editing principles

A cop-out? You bet. But eliminating redundancies, cutting wordiness (“a total of” is almost always unnecessary; “in an X manner” and “on a Y basis” can usually be shortened), changing voice from passive to active where appropriate, and using verbs and adjectives instead of nominalizations will not only shorten text but also make it a more engaging read.

Final read-through

Always—always!—read through the final text before submitting it to the author or client. Obvious advice, perhaps, but it’s especially important when cutting. If you can, let the text sit for a day or two and come back to it with fresh eyes and a (relatively) blank mind, so that you can easily spot where you’ve inadvertently cut out a definition or where you have to smooth the transitions between paragraphs and sections. Another option is to work with a partner who could do a cold read and identify confusing or choppy content.

Other thoughts

Terminology

As liberally as I’ve written “cut” in this post, I tried not to use the term when I corresponded with the authors; “condense” or “distill” did a better job of capturing the spirit of my task. When I asked authors to review my work, I did acknowledge that condensing a text down to less than a third of its length necessarily meant that not all of the content was there but that I hoped they found the final text stood well on its own.

Scheduling

I was lucky to have had a flexible schedule for this project, which let me set the reports aside for a bit before returning to them for another pass at cutting. Once the information got a chance to percolate in my brain, I had a better handle on what was important and what wasn’t. So often I’d feel as though I’d hit a wall and just couldn’t possibly cut anymore, but being able to leave the text and come back to it always highlighted further opportunities to trim.

If you ever have to do major condensing, try to schedule plenty of time for it. The time you actively spend cutting is a small fraction of the time you need to let the text simmer.

Importing other skill sets

You don’t have to be an indexer to cut texts, of course, but my experience indexing certainly helped me pinpoint the authors’ main arguments in each paragraph and identify what not to cut. (It’s no wonder many indexers also work as abstracters.) Twitter, oddly enough, has also honed my cutting skills: I found myself applying the same critical thought process to cutting words and paragraphs as when I’m trying to squeeze a tweet down to its 140-character limit.

***

These notes are just a case study of one editor’s experiences with one project. Certainly if you were working with different genres, audiences, and word limits, you’d have to adjust your tack accordingly. I’d strongly recommend Elizabeth Macfie’s notes from her EAC conference talk for a more general overview of techniques and strategies for condensing text.

Writing in plain language—an Information Mapping webinar

David Singer of Information Mapping hosted a free webinar about writing in plain language. Much of the second half of the session was devoted to the Information Mapping method, covered in the Introduction to Information Mapping webinar that I wrote about earlier, but the first half focused on plain language itself.

Plain language defined

What is plain language? The Center for Plain Language in Washington, DC, uses the following definition:

A communication is in plain language if the people who are the audience for that communication can quickly and easily

  • find what they need
  • understand what they find, and
  • act appropriately on that understanding.

Singer likes this definition, noting that there’s no mention of “dumbing down” the information, which is not what plain language is about.

Plain Writing Act

On October 13, 2010, President Obama signed the Plain Writing Act into law: “The purpose of this Act is to improve the effectiveness and accountability of Federal agencies to the public by promoting clear Government communication that the public can understand and use.” Interestingly, regulations were exempt from this requirement, although there’s since been a push to have regulations given in plain language as well.

Have the agencies made progress? Although some agencies have made an effort to implement plain language principles, the new law hasn’t made that much progress since it came into effect in 2011. The Center for Plain Language issued a report card in 2012 and found that out of the twelve agencies they looked at, only four scored a B or higher in complying with the basic requirements of the act. The Department of Homeland Security scored a D, and the Veterans Affairs Department scored an F.

Why were they having so much trouble?

  • The agencies were dealing with an unfunded mandate. Although the Plain Writing Act was signed into law, the agencies had no budget allowances to implement the training and changes to government documentation.
  • There was no specific yardstick to measure success. How do you define “clearer” or “easier to understand”?
  • There were no consequences for non-compliance.
  • There were no clear plans for implementation.

The effort to implement plain language faces a lot of barriers, including the fact that initial enthusiasm about the idea can fade and there is a lot of resistance to change. Technical folks may not believe that their communications can be made simpler or clearer, and attorneys and security people may not want their language to be easy to understand.

Telling people to use personal pronouns, active voice, and shorter sentences isn’t enough, argues Singer. You need a systematic method based on sound principles and a clear plan for implementation to work.

The Information Mapping method

Most of the challenges, says Singer, don’t involve grammar. Plain language’s chief concerns are about making complex information clear and accessible; writing for different audiences (how do you create a single document that meets the needs of many groups of people?); organizing large amounts of information; working with a team of writers (managing different styles, etc.); keeping up with changes; and finding a way to reuse content. Singer suggested the Information Mapping method as a way to achieve these objectives.

Some of the principles behind Information Mapping—chunking, relevance, and labelling—were covered in the Introduction to Information Mapping webinar. The method also has three other principles—consistency, integrated graphics, and accessible detail—which the Information Mapping crew covers only in the training sessions and not in these free webinars.

Singer presented case studies to show the benefits of applying the Information Mapping to business communication. In general, Information Mapping has found that its method leads to a

  • 32% increase in retrieval accuracy
  • 38% increase in usage of the documentation
  • 83% increase in initial learning during training
  • 90% decrease in questions to the supervisor
  • 83 % decrease in the time for a first draft
  • 75% decrease in the time to review the documentation
  • 54% decrease in error rates
  • 50% decrease in reading time
  • 30% decrease in the word count

By implementing a concrete plain language plan, such as the Information Mapping method, you may see the following benefits:

  • revenue growth—by reducing the time it takes to create content and shortening the time for products and their documentation to make it to market
  • cost reduction—by capturing employee knowledge, increasing operational efficiency, reducing support calls, and decreasing translation costs (owing to lower word counts and clearer content)
  • risk mitigation—by increasing safety and compliance

Resources on plain language

For more information about plain language, visit:

(or come to PLAIN 2013!)

An archive of this webinar, as well as more information about the Information Mapping system and training, can be found on the Information Mapping website.