Author: Iva Cheung

Neil James—What’s in a name? The future for plain language in a converging communications profession (PLAIN 2013)

What’s in a name?

Neil James, executive director of the Plain English Foundation in Australia, asked us this question and did a bit of crystal-ball gazing at his plenary session at PLAIN 2013.

Plain language practitioners go by many titles—editor, technical communicator, business writer, and information designer, among others. Historically, we specialized in different types of documents—the plain language professionals worked on government and legal documents, the technical writers on engineering and technical documents, editors on books and magazines, etc.—and as a result, we found ourselves in institutional silos. For example, members of the Society for Technical Communication don’t often get a chance to exchange ideas with members of the International Institute for Information Design, and the Usability Professionals Association rarely talks to the International Association of Business Communicators. This fragmentation has hurt us, said James: “By being fragmented, we have allowed the organizations that we work for to downplay our importance. And what we do is damn important.”

Can we unite? Our differences are small, lying in the types of documents we work on and the extent of our intervention; we are on a spectrum of communication, not in silos. James offered this quote from Ginny Redish:

We really are all about the user experience. My definition of usability is identical to my definition of Plain Language, my definition of reader-focused writing, my definition of document design … We’re here to make the product work for people.

Plain language, as a profession, is pretty young, and it has evolved rapidly over the past few decades, expanding its focus from clear language to document structure and design and, more recently, to user testing. Because of communication convergence—the tendency for different communication fields over time to apply a common range of methods—it makes sense for us to consider converging as well. We face pressure from various fronts:

  • Technology: For example, desktop publishing has allowed us to collapse the roles of writer, editor, typesetter, designer, and proofreader into one
  • Information age: “Most of what’s on the Internet,” said James, “let’s face it, is crap.” Users will need us to mediate that vast ocean of information to get what they need.
  • State sanction: The U.S. Plain Writing Act of 2010 is an example, and many other governments have recognized the need for clear communication with citizens.
  • Self-interest: By banding together, we can share resources, raise our profile, and maybe even raise our income.

What lies ahead for us? James proposes this plan:

  • Step 1: Start a dialogue—within each field and between fields.
  • Step 2: Do some research to nail down what we each do and what skills we have.
  • Step 3: Put the pieces together and consider federation or mergers.
  • Step 4: Engage stakeholders, working with academics to unify research and theory, working with industry to map out the benefits of what we do, and working with government for legislative support.
  • Step 5: Pick a name.

James predicts that we will eventually settle on “clear communication,” which captures the breadth of our work more comprehensively than any term that refers specifically to language or design. By uniting under a common name, we’ll be better able to push for formal standards and professional recognition.

EAC gets a structural edit (EAC-BC meeting)

On October 17, 2011, the Canada Not-for-Profit Corporations Act came into force, and it requires all federally incorporated non-profits—such as the Editors’ Association of Canada—to comply with new regulations by October 2014. If it doesn’t comply, EAC will be dissolved and will no longer be federally incorporated.

EAC struck a Governance Task Force in August 2012 to address the issue, and Maureen Nicholson chaired the task force in its first year. She spoke to us at yesterday’s EAC-BC meeting to explain the governance changes and to get member feedback.

The changes, Nicholson explained, are being forced upon us, and we have to comply. (“It’s kind of like the Borg,” she said.) The task force is following the process that Corporations Canada recommended for the transition:

  1. review current letters patent and bylaws (we have only one)
  2. prepare “articles of continuance”—a two-page form that outlines the rules by which the organization is allowed to exist and that signals our intention to continue to be federally incorporated
  3. prepare new bylaws
  4. get members’ approval
  5. submit required documents to Corporations Canada

Right now EAC has a couple of drafts for the articles of continuance and is consulting its members, lawyers, and other organizations that have handled this challenge. Members will vote on the new governance documents at the AGM in 2014.

The net effect of this new law, Nicholson said, is to move non-profit organizations more toward a corporate model of accountability. For EAC, its major impacts will be on membership, directors and officers, and branches and twigs.

Membership

Big change: Our five classes of membership will become one class; every member will have a right to vote and access EAC member benefits and services. We can, however, retain several fee categories for emeritus members, honorary life members, etc. We would also establish affiliates, which can be individuals or organizations that are not considered members of the organization and don’t have the right to vote. Students would fall into this category.

What do members have to do? Nothing, unless you’re a student, in which case you’ll have to decide whether to be an affiliate or to join the organization as a full member.

The concept of affiliates could open doors to closer co-operation with editor training programs and schools, institutional participation in EAC with bulk discounts, and so on. At the moment, some of the branch executive positions can be occupied only by a voting member; under the new legislation, that restriction would disappear.

Directors and officers

Big change: We will elect a board of directors, not people to specific executive positions. So in 2015, for example, you would see a slate when you vote, and the top 12 candidates would form the National Executive Council. They’d then meet to figure out who takes what responsibility. This approach is more aligned with a corporate model: the board is collectively responsible for the good of the organization rather than having each individual be responsible for specific positions. One concern raised at the meeting was that, under this new structure, we will have no guarantee of regional representation.

Another change resulting from the legislation is that we now have to distinguish between directors and officers. Directors are all elected; officers are the signing authorities. The board’s job is to appoint the officers. Officers may also be directors, but they don’t have to be members of the organization. One advantage to this model is that you might want to hire your officers from outside of the organization to get a particular skill set.

Further, there can be no ex officio directors: right now our past president and executive director sit on the NEC but are not elected. In the new structure, they would no longer be directors.

Fortunately, we don’t have to worry about this restructuring at the branch level. The legislation is silent on the issue, and we don’t need to change our procedures as far as branch elections go.

What do members have to do? Nothing, except recognize that the transition AGM election may be a little tricky.

Branches and twigs

Big change: We have to formalize the accountability link between the national office and branches.

Our audited financial statements reflect only what goes on at the national level. The branches have been pretty autonomous financially—a fact that has been advantageous in some situations and problematic in others, where there has been a lack of accountability. EAC’s lawyers strongly advise that the national office be accountable for branches; the legislation forces us to formalize the financial reporting relationship.

What do members have to do? The branch will have to recommend one or two branch officers to the NEC, and they will have to ensure the flow of financial information to the national office.

Over the next year, EAC will have to go through these steps:

  • Fall 2013: prepare draft articles of continuance and bylaws and make them available to members for input
  • November 2013–March 2014: prepare final draft of articles of continuance and bylaws, along with needed revisions to EAC’s policies and procedures
  • April 2014: circulate revised governance documents to members
  • May/June 2014: vote on governance documents at the AGM
  • October 17, 2014 (latest): submit articles of continuance to Corporations Canada

What should members do? Read the interim report from the Governance Task Force; read the draft bylaw and FAQ, which will be available later this month; and contribute comments to the task force via LinkedIn, Facebook, Interactive Voice, or email ([email protected]). Nicholson noted that EAC has a long tradition of listening to and valuing member input in these kinds of issues.

Joe Kimble—Wild and crazy tales from a decade of drafting U.S. Federal Court Rules (PLAIN 2013)

Joe Kimble, a professor at the Thomas M. Cooley Law School and the editor-in-chief of the Scribes Journal of Legal Writing, is a stalwart of the plain legal language movement. His book Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please is an invaluable reference for any plain language practitioner.

Starting in 1999, he led a decade-long project to redraft the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Federal Rules of Evidence. At the PLAIN 2013 opening reception, Kimble shared some stories from that experience.

We all know that legalese is cumbersome to read, but its much more serious problem is that it leads to ambiguity. “Legalese is not precise,” said Kimble. “It’s pseudo-precise. It only seems precise.” Using before-and-after examples from the U.S. Federal Court Rules, Kimble showed how complex legal language results in

  • semantic ambiguity—when a word or phrase has more than one meaning
  • syntactic ambiguity—when the structure of the sentence gives rise to more than one meaning
  • contextual ambiguity—when inconsistencies or internal contradictions raise questions about which alternative should prevail

Ambiguity, Kimble was careful to point out, isn’t the same thing as vagueness, which presents uncertainty at the very margins of applying a term. Vagueness is unavoidable in legal drafting; the goal is to arrive at the right degree of vagueness.

Semantic ambiguity

A convenient example of semantic ambiguity in legalese is “shall”—does it mean “must,” “may,” “will,” or “should”? Kimble worked to eliminate all five hundred instances of “shall” from the Federal Court Rules and succeeded, until one “rose from the grave,” as he put it. Deciding the meaning of “shall” is a substantive call, and in Rule 56 of the Civil Rules, the “shall” had been changed to “should” during the restyling. Later, a debate flared up over whether it should have been changed to “must.” Rather than deciding the issue, the advisory committee resurrected the “shall,” while acknowledging in their report that it is “inherently ambiguous.”

Syntactic ambiguity

At the heart of many syntactically ambiguous sentences is the lack of a clear antecedent for a modifier or a pronoun. The committees working on the Court Rules often raised the concern that Kimble’s changes might alter the meaning, to which Kimble once responded, “It’s odd to worry about changing meaning when nobody seems to know what the meaning is.” In several of those cases, the committees decided to “keep it fuzzy” because the original language didn’t indicate which interpretation was the right one; that decision would be left to the courts.

Contextual ambiguity

Contextual ambiguity is particularly troublesome: are inconsistencies deliberate, or are they the result of sloppy drafting? Kimble’s examples show that “Most lawyers, no matter how skilled and experienced, are not good drafters.”

***

Of course, beyond untangling ambiguity, Kimble also worked on cutting wordiness. Why write, “the court may, in its discretion” when “may” implies “in its discretion”? For comparison, whereas the old Civil Rules had 45,500 words, the new rules have 39,280 (14% less). The new rules have 45 fewer cross-references and have more than twice as many headings as the old rules. The difference in the readability of the original and plain language versions is stark. An example (from the Evidence Rules):

Before

Evidence of the beliefs or opinions of a witness on matters of religion is not admissible for the purpose of showing that by reason of their nature the witness’ credibility is impaired or enhanced.

After

Evidence of a witness’s religious beliefs or opinions is not admissible to attack or support the witness’s credibility.

The process that worked well for Kimble and his team was to have a plain language expert write the first draft; that version persisted unless it created a substantive change. This approach was more effective and efficient than having a plain language expert edit a document after the fact.

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.

Book review: Quite Literally

Journalist Wynford Hicks first published Quite Literally: Problem Words and How to Use Them in 2004, but the paperback edition became available only in the last year. Focusing on British English, this book is part usage dictionary, part writing and grammar guide, and part vocabulary builder. Hicks begins by acknowledging the divide between prescriptivists and descriptivists when it comes to usage (or “conservatives” and “radicals” as he calls them) and says, “In their extreme form both these positions are ridiculous and unhelpful. They make the problem of problem words worse.” He adds, “Many of these contentious grammatical points are difficult – perhaps impossible – to resolve. My intention in this book is to provide practical advice, but nobody can claim to have written the last word on any of them.”

Hicks’s alphabetical list includes words that are often misspelled (e.g., “accidentally, not accidently”), words that are often confused (e.g., rack versus wrack), and words that are often misused (e.g. “anticipate is often misused as a pompous variant of expect (we don’t anticipate rain). It is also used by careful writers to mean forestall or act in advance or come before.”). Hicks also covers some points about punctuation—the serial comma, for example, and the correct use of square brackets)—as well as writing style, as in this excerpt:

variation

Fowler used the term ‘elegant variation’ for the habit of calling a spade a tool or a horticultural implement to avoid repeating the word spade. It was a fault, he said, committed by ‘second-rate writers, those intent rather on expanding themselves prettily than on conveying their meaning clearly’. What he called the fatal influence was the advice given to young writers never to use the same word twice in a sentence.

It’s as easy now as it was in Fowler’s day (the 1920s) to find examples of this:

IPC took her [Sly Bailey] on in 1989 and by 1994, aged 31, she was appointed to the board of the publishing company, becoming its youngest ever member. The Spurs fan continued to work her way up through the ranks. (Guardian)

Part of Roseanne’s behaviour can be explained by the comic’s natural competitiveness. (John Lahr)

In this case too why not ‘her’ for ‘the comic’s’?…

This kind of variation (David Beckham… the footballer, Zadie Smith, the novelist, Brad Pitt… the actor) is always irritating and occasionally confusing. (pp. 236–37)

As this example shows, throughout the book Hicks draws from published works to show that even seasoned, professional writers misuse words in ways that can misrepresent information or confuse readers. Hicks’s focus on the audience is one of the reasons I like this book: although he teaches you the correct definitions of autarchy (absolute power) and autarky (self-sufficiency), he adds, “the two are confused and neither is necessary – why not use absolute power and self-sufficiency?” (p. 18) Similarly, after explaining why “beg the question” doesn’t mean “raise the question” or “avoid the question,” he advises, “Use beg the question in its traditional sense only if you are confident your readers will understand you.” (p. 186) Context is everything, Hicks aptly conveys. Words like obloquy (disgrace) and otiose  (superfluous) may have their place in literary works, even though they may sound pretentious and confuse readers in news reporting. (And if I were better at retaining information I read, I would have found Hicks’s book an entertaining way to learn new words.)

Throughout the book, Hicks continually acknowledges that usage changes and language evolves—something many grammar guides fail to do. I also like that Hicks points out important differences between American and British usage:

homely

in American refers to looks and means ugly; homely in British refers to character and means friendly, kindly…Use this word with care to avoid confusion and offence. (p. 104)

table

in Britain to table a proposal is to put it on the agenda (to bring it to the table) whereas in the US it’s to withdraw it from the agenda indefinitely (to take it away from the table).

Quite Literally is an interesting, engaging, often humorous read, but for the professional editor, that’s where its role should end. Because the book tries to cover so many aspects of writing in its 250 pages—style, usage, grammar, spelling—it does a thorough job of none of them, and it shouldn’t be considered an authoritative reference by any working editor, who’d be well advised to invest in an actual usage dictionary. I’ve also never understood why books such as Hicks’s attempt to cover spelling at all (unless it’s for padding); those problem words are either completely misspelled and would come up in a spell check or are just variants (“realise, not realize”) whose use depends on a publication’s house style more than anything else. Still, I would recommend Quite Literally as an easily digestible glimpse into British English usage. Hicks offers readers a good reminder of the value of clarity and succinctness, and even veteran editors will learn from the book.

And what does Hicks say about “literally”?

literally

features in all style and usage guides. Don’t use it when you don’t mean it, they say. ‘He literally exploded with anger’ is absurd. But do use it if you need to make clear that a stale metaphor is, for once, an accurate statement. ‘He literally died laughing’ could be true…

Others seem to think that by putting ‘almost’ in front of ‘literally’ they can make it work:

The people of the rebuilt Oradour lived, almost literally, within this history. (Adam Nossiter)

But how can something be ‘almost literally’ true? Either it is true or it isn’t…

Because literally is so generally misused, some people feel that they have to add an intensifier like ‘quite’ – to say ‘I really mean it’… In turn ‘quite literally’ becomes the standard phrase… And so for people who want to say ‘I really mean it’, a further intensifier is needed. Both examples come from the Guardian:

Lee Westwood has backed himself to win the Sun City Golf Challenge after an abysmal year by his standards. Quite literally, in fact. The Workshop player put a sizeable wager on himself.

In Sicily one Vittorio Greco has gone to his grave. Quite literally, in fact. Vittorio was checking progress on a family tomb when he slipped, struck and died on the spot.

Quite literally, in fact – or literally, literally, literally. Why not give this word a rest? (pp. 131–33)

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.