IGX

For any of you looking to sharpen your IGX game, to be invited to submit a guest rant at Moynihan's Institute, or to improve your professional writing, I recommend Woe is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English by Patricia O'Conner, a former editor of the New York Times Book Review. Easy to read, written well, delivered in bite-size pieces, it discusses modern grammar and the art of writing well. An excellent, helpful book.

I might have a look-see at it.

Strunk and White.

Elements of Style.

Shaf wrote:Strunk and White.

Elements of Style.

Yes.

Strunk and White is a classic, and is a pure joy to read. I'm reading the 4th edition now as I'm writing a book on writing. (Professor Strunk would demand a comma after "now.") I find it's not as user-friendly as it could be because Professor Strunk states his rules dogmatically. And it's not comprehensive. It's aimed at what the authors considered the essentials. I would put it on any reading list for someone interested in writing, but I like books like Woe is I better for easy-to-understand practical advice.

A cool thing about MS Word is you can arbitrarily designate words as misspelled. So utilize and methodology show up as misspellings on my computer. Drives my folks nuts.

Strunk and White advocate the Oxford comma. If you use it in a business letter, memo, or report some dumdass will jump on you. What up with that?

beefheart wrote:Strunk and White advocate the Oxford comma. If you use it in a business letter, memo, or report some dumdass will jump on you. What up with that?

Most of the major usage manuals advocate the Oxford comma. I don't like it, but it's preferred.

The best rule I ever knew was "Write like you would say it." And fuck all them faggots who "make the rules". They ain't real.

Andy74 wrote:The best rule I ever knew was "Write like you would say it." And fuck all them faggots who "make the rules". They ain't real.

"Hire a copy editor" is probably also in the 10 ten rules when you're writing something for publication.

Copy editors have saved me from embarrassing errors many times.

But they are, for the part, hideously literal people. I recall an article I wrote about a man who was shot to death in Peru. The dead man's companion did not see the shooter, only the "muzzle flash in the foliage." Copy editor changed it to "the gun's muzzle flash." I said, WTF? I mean, what has a muzzle? A gun. A dog. Did you clarify the sentence so that people wouldn't think there was a dog in the jungle spitting bullets at people?

Since I have been around long enough, I get to bully copy editors when they do dumb things. I ask, "why did you change that?"

I know what they are going to say: "People won't understand it."

"Did you understand it?"

"Yes."

Pause: "well, I refuse to work for anyone dumber than you."

After a few exchanges of this sort, copy editors are very careful about what they change in my work.

seeahill wrote:copy editors are very careful about what they change in my work.

To the detriment of both your readers

A friend once wrote of his copy editor, "She seems to think there is nothing wrong with the article that can't be fixed by changing each word to some other word."

The good thing about econ journals is that copy editors are optional and usually work directly for the author, if they're used at all. The bad news is that they're hired less often than they should be.

Poor forgotten Fowler.