You might as well be a great copy editor | Hacker News Reader

You might as well be a great copy editor

blog.regehr.org

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NYT's "Copy Edit This" quizzes are quite good.

https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22copy%2Bedit%2Bthis%2...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/11/insider/copy-...

That was really fun. I got 1 of 15 lol.

This literally begs the question if people still can write correctly.

I'm not sure if you are being ironic, but this is actually a common misuse of the phrase "begging the question":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

Noting of course that it's probably more common in the "incorrect" form!

Those are fun. Just got through the first one with 17 total tries (most of which were on the 8th question).

Some of them are dubious, though, IMO. For example:

> The total amount available to |disperse| will be $150 million annually.

I guess in a journalism context more people are talking about disbursing than dispersing, but how am I supposed to know that? For all I know this sentence comes from an article about wanting to "scatter" that money.

EDIT: another example from the second quiz:

> Republicans will not like many of these proposals, but they have been |fulsome| in their praise of Mr. Trump since his election. Speaker Paul D. Ryan, for instance, has repeatedly said that he expects Mr. Trump to work with Republicans on their agenda of rolling back the Affordable Care Act and making large-scale changes to the tax code and entitlements.

The explanation for why "fulsome" is wrong here was that "this word means not just “full” or “abundant” but “offensively excessive.”". How am I supposed to know "offensively excessive" wasn't the intended meaning here? I ended up picking it simply because it came across as a bit too pretentious, but not before I picked "instance" for the same reason ("for instance" instead of "for example" bugs me a bit).

"For example" and "for instance" are often used interchangeably, but do have some nuance between them. "For example" is broader, indicating a description of a class or category being described. "For instance" is narrower in scope, referring to a specific instance in the large class described by the example. Additionally, "for example" would be appropriate to use when creating a hypothetical, but "for instance" should always refer to something real - a concrete member of a class or category or an exemplary event which has occurred.

>>fulsome

Agree. I was tripped by that too. Here is an example from Merriam-Webster[1]:

"the passengers were fulsome in praise of the plane's crew"

The usage here seems to be in a similar context.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fulsome

> How am I supposed to know "offensively excessive" wasn't the intended meaning here?

I'm guessing if it were the intended meaning, "but" would be incorrect in "Republicans will not like many of these proposals, but they have been fulsome in their praise of Mr. Trump since his election"

I mean, if it's "offensively excessive" from the writer's point of view, then I feel like it'd make sense even with the "but"; that's indeed how I took the sentence to mean.

That is a fun set of examples, and most of the answers are right on. But not this one:

> 12. Led Zeppelin did not steal the opening riff of its rock anthem “Stairway to Heaven,” a federal jury ruled here, giving the band a victory in a copyright case in which millions of dollars were at stake.

> O.K., this may be a fine point. But since what was at stake was the total amount, rather than the individual dollars or even the individual millions, I would make it “was at stake.”

Millions were at stake. Dollars were at stake.

Just putting the two together doesn't magically make it singular. No one would ever say "millions of dollars was at stake."

Copyediting should reflect how people actually speak and write.

But that’s exactly how I would say it: “millions of dollars was at stake.” To me, what you propose seems like a mistake someone just learning English would make.

Give it a specific sum: you wouldn’t say “two million dollars were at stake,” you would say “two million dollars was at stake”. I admit it’s pretty weird, but you also say “two million dollars is a lot of money,” not “two million dollars are a lot of money.”

Me, too, "[M]illions of dollars was at stake," is exactly how I would state that.

IIRC this may be a difference between British English and American English... Whereas a Briton might say “Led Zeppelin were on stage”, referring to the multiple band members, an American would say “Led Zeppelin was on stage”, referring to the band as the single entity. I can’t remember where I read about this though.

You’re correct! They take it pretty far: for instance companies are collective nouns, so they would say “Apple are releasing the new iPhone.” In not sure where it stops, but I’m vaguely suspicious that countries are singular nouns.

> Copyediting should reflect how people actually speak and write.

Why? Genuine question. Written language is always different than spoken language, and this is not unique to English. People make mistakes all the time when speaking, particularly native speakers. [0]

Upon initial reading, I would say one -could- say "was" or "were". But when I read it aloud, I found "was" was more natural.

In most situations this isn't that big of a deal, but we are talking about copy editors here...

> how people actually speak and write.

When I grew up religiously reading books, I wrote and spoke a lot more book-like than I do now. Which version of me is "how people actually speak and write"?

Is Standard American English "how people actually speak and write"? Or is it fine to use varieties of English like Appalachian English or African-American Vernacular English?

Who decides the above? English doesn't have a language council like Korean or French. There is no all-authoritative entity to ask.

[0]: /r/boneappletea is both humorous and infuriating for examples of this. https://www.reddit.com/r/BoneAppleTea/comments/doscha/starch...

Thank you and the others who replied. Obviously I was wrong to say no one would ever use "was" here. Live and learn! :-)

Thanks for sharing those links, now I am addicted :-)

This from the second quiz bothers me:

>>On the witness stand, the defendants said they had been duped by Mr. Wildstein, a self-confessed liar and political trickster, into believing that the closings were part of a legitimate traffic study.

"self-confessed liar" is a phrase present even in dictionaries - as example usage, no less. I have not seen many instances where it is substituted with "confessed liar".

Although "self-confessed liar" is plainly redundant, IMO.

Something I've known for a while (but have really come to terms with more recently) is just how important writing skills are even for technical people (even coders). It's hard to get anything done if you can't convince people why they should listen to you.

Especially in this increasingly remote-connected world, writing skills are key.

>how important writing skills are even for technical people (even coders).

Especially coders. Writing clear programs is a lot like clear writing. A function is like a paragraph of a text. It should meaningfully abstract one concept of your higher level logic. It should be introduced by a clean input from the previous "paragraph", and produce an output that is the input for the next "paragraph".

If your higher level function becomes too large, you can create larger structures like sections in writing.

Having this ability to mercilessly copy edit, paring down your functions to their core concept and putting them into meaningful context is really useful if you want others to understand your code.

All this that you write about code is correct, but I think you are missing the parent's point. Coders also need to be good at writing non-code text for humans. There is documentation to be written, and bug reports, and proposals for new features, etc. I have colleagues who are brilliant developers, and when they propose something I'm sure their idea is technically sound, yet often I don't understand what they are trying to say because their writing is much poorer than their coding.

I wouldn't say I'm missing the point. I agree that coders need to know how to write text. My point was that for coders writing is not the thing you do on the side, coding itself IS writing.

That's why I said that "even" should be "especially".

Could not disagree more. Documents are props. They exist to help your stage production evoke feelings of gravitas and rigor, but this is driven more by form than substance. It’s a similar story for large officially scheduled meetings. Real communication happens in the hallway outside just after the official document review, and is pretty much independent of what was in the document.

Technical writing is absolutely a skill that developers need to know, among many other kinds of writing and it doesn’t have any gravitas.

I would like to add a third recommendation to the list of two, and recommend "Style: Towards Clarity and Grace". (Alternatively, use any similar book by Joseph M. Williams featuring the words Style, Clarity, and Grace in the title).

This book discusses the information architecture of clear and coherent phrases, sentences and paragraphs in the English language, and a few passes through its contents will leave you able to reason about the way you lay out ideas and information in your writing.

There is a fantastic section that shows why the passive has its uses, and that "avoid passive voice" can be harmful.

Oh, yes. The passive voice is not simply dismissed in this work as a tool to avoid responsibility. Rather, it takes its place as an important tool that can make paragraphs more coherent, by structuring the sentences to elevate the parts that really matter. The subjects of sentences in this paragraph, for instance, are all strongly related to writing concepts. This paragraph itself would be weakened if I were to begin, "Joseph M Williams promotes the passive voice." Our communication would only be hindered if we were to highlight the incidental matter of his authorship.

That's not a strong argument. The natural "translation" of your first sentence would be something like: "This work does not simply dismiss the passive voice as a tool to avoid responsibility."

The author's name doesn't come into it, and there is no reason to transform "does not dismiss" into the much stronger "promotes".

Well excuse me

I am sure the author polished his work over several years. I devoted mere minutes to chatting it up on Hacker News. There's a reason you pay the author for the book and you don't pay me.

Let's see you argue something better instead of just taking potshots at people who bother to try, jerk.

> "Style: Towards Clarity and Grace"

As I was typing in "Style: Towards Clarity and Grace" I was thinking Huh? Wouldn't "Toward" be much better?! And indeed that's what it is. Made me feel good about my copy-editing potential.

I keep running into that problem: "Toward" is the American style while "Towards" is the British style.

Back in high school I was the copy editor for the paper (and the minutiae of AP style are still seared into my brain), and it's definitely been a useful skill. My first job was doing developer marketing, and we had a lot of devs that were happy to contribute to our blog but didn't feel their writing was great - a lot of it was just little grammatical and style stuff, so my being able to clean it up really encouraged them to work with me on creating content.

That said, I think that reading a book on copy edit just to be able to edit your own stuff is a little bit of overkill. You don't need a deep, sophisticated knowledge of grammar - something like Strunk and White's Elements of Style will cover the grammar stuff you need while also helping to offer a little bit better sense of bigger-picture writing style.

Strunk and White's Elements of Style is trash; don't buy it, don't read it, don't follow its advice. Read this first:

http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/LandOfTheFree.html

My wife has been reading Charlotte's Web to our kids. I asked her if she was familiar with the Strunk and White Guide and she thought I was asking if she was familiar with the drunken white guy.

(For the record, she was familiar with neither.)

(And for those who don't know, Charlotte's Web was written by E. B. White who is the White of Strunk and White.)

Pro tip, from an actual pro: you can't copyedit your own copy.

Lots of reasons why, including, your inability to recognize problems you are unaware of; the inexorable fact of reading what you think you wrote, not what is on the page; inability to see logical problems, missing assumptions, etc. Ad infinitum.

There are line-level hacks which can help with some of this, e.g. reading backwards to find typographic and spelling error...

...but there is no general solution.

Suggested fix: find a professional peer and become their formal editing buddy. Define terms and scope, this is not peer review–it is simply copy editing.

I actually use the backwards hack for code review too.

I agree but have found that I'm better at copyediting my own copy the further I am from it. If I wrote something in the last week I might as well be a spellchecker. If I wrote something last month I will catch more things but not as much as if it were someone else's writing. A year or more and I start to ask "Who on earth wrote this like this?!" :) .

> reading backwards to find typographic and spelling error...

Ha, nice, I will try this out.

> find a professional peer and become their formal editing buddy

Yeah, teams should have a review system for documentation, like they certainly have one for code review.

In practice, with many non-native English speakers in the team (100% in my case), this is something of an issue. But we do what we can :)

What tends to help me with long-standing documents in particular is to reread them after some time passes. A couple months down the line, I have lost much of the context, which makes it easier to spot problematic bits. I am also not invested in the text as much, which makes it easier to rip out the parts that have not aged well.

I agree so much with this. You need "cold eyes". One important function of copy editing is to check your assumptions, and make sure everything is explained that needs explaining. That's almost impossible to perform on one's own writing and thought, because everything you know seems obvious, and everything you assume has become the natural and invisible given. Note how many people Paul Graham cites as reading his essays. Lots. Smart people. That's one reason why the essays are so good. It takes a village, or at least a smart friend, to write something good. It doesn't float out of your brain as a perfect work of art.

One copy-editing trick I employ is to use a text-to-speech system to read my work back to me. If I merely read it myself, my brain will autocorrect my mistakes into what I meant to write. When the computer reads my work, it pulls no punches.

Interesting. What software do you recommend? Do you know of something that can take a latex or pdf document?

You need to be the reader's advocate, to try to set aside your ego and read your work as if someone else wrote it. This is not substantially different from adjusting your code. One might argue that with code you have also a very demanding reader, the computer, which might fail to run it or wreck something. Still you are writing for a human audience.

Computers demand formal precision, which is different from conceptual clarity. Every obfuscator (including optimizers) relies on this fact.

Good code has both formal precision and conceptual clarity.

As the joke goes, "an author is someone who wasn't good enough at writing to become an editor."

I was lucky enough to have Prof. Regehr in my masters program. If he says these are good books to look into to improve your editing, trust this guy, he is as good as they get. Now edit this comment for practice!

Knowing how to tighten the screws on a text is essential for a lot of workplace communication, especially if you're trying to get something from your higher-ups. Don't think everyone is going to take their time to become a great copy editor, but it pays to learn the craft at least a little.

My team went through a major shift a number of years ago, moving most complex discussions to written documents (with commentary!) wherever possible. The outcomes were great and fwiw we had a minimal remote culture pre-pandemic, people would write things down even if they were sitting next to each other. In particular:

- It's much easier to track the provenance of complex decisions.

- Deciding in docs reduces meeting bloat.

- It's harder to get pissed at someone based upon a document.

- Anecdotally, points of view seem to be better thought-out.

This article made me think of how we should remember to try as hard as possible to adjust for variation in writing skill. I also wonder whether we're inherently biasing against people who are _slower_ writers.

A very useful trick for copyediting and proofreading is to use a text-to-speech tool. The default voice on Mac is quite good. I use it all the time to proofread intros, and explanation sections in my books. For math-heavy or code-blocks, it's not quite as good... but actually works OK for Python. See [1] for how to setup a keyboard shortcut.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem...

I'm speaking from the perspective of non-native academic English speakers. I find that my time and the time of my PhD students is better spent focusing on the high-level problems. Once those are fixed, we rely on professional copy-editing. Done!

A favorite of mine is the book BUGS in Writing, by Lyn Dupré (1998, Addison Wesley). It's a teach-by-example book with lots of examples she rates as ugly, bad, good, and even splendid.

Just wanted to add a book recommendation for copy editing: "Revising Prose" by Lanham. It was recommended by a respected philosopher when I was in undergrad. Excellent.

Modifying other people's code is kind of like a severe type of copyediting.

Is copy editing a viable career?

You have to be very good, because all the jobs are drying up.

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