held in August 2004
By Mary Hazelton, September 2004
A: It was pointed out that the term "proofreading" is also used to mean (a) checking the version that comes from layout, as various errors do happen in the conversion between word-processing software and desktop publishing software, particularly in the area of special symbols (en dashes were mentioned in this connection), and because most desktop publishing packages do not work on a scroll system, so bits of text can easily fall off a page or column; and (b) general checking at a late stage in the process as a safety net.
If, however, the problem is one of the client underestimating the work involved in a job, that is a different issue. Attention was drawn to the useful freelance contract (www.editors.ca/pubs/contract.htm) made available by the Editors' Association of Canada, which details what the various tasks (copy-editing, proofreading and many others) do and do not entail. Members were also referred to the distinction in Judith Butcher's Copyediting.
The following example was given: This is the house that Jack built, This is the house which Jack built (formal but possible), and This is the house Jack built (no relative necessary when the noun referred to is the object of the following verb).
For the sceptics among you, here are examples of sentences with "which" introducing a defining relative clause. The first two are taken from a published guide to a classifications storage system. "If you are a member of a team which has its own library of classifications, you should move this library to the central system. … Systems with classifications which are not standard will also have to move these non-standard classifications into the central system." (This is personifying the systems, but that is another issue!)
The following example is from the Convention of the Rights of the Child, Unicef, 1990, Article 40, "Administration of juvenile justice". "A child in conflict with the law has the right to treatment which promotes the child's sense of dignity and worth …". Again this is a more formal context.
I might also use "which" in a sentence with too many other "thats" - after all "that" has at least two distinct meanings.
Please see the PEG website for a Word document entitled Defining and non-defining relative clauses: Why MSWord makes you put in a comma and the editor takes it out again.
In a related issue, it was pointed out that the following form: *"He is one of those people who sings loudly in the shower" is incorrect and illogical, and should be "He is one of those people who sing loudly in the shower". Some members present, your esteemed chairperson among them, admitted to making this error or, worse, to not having been aware of the error.
A: Most members present agreed that "provide someone with something" was indeed the standard form, but no one seemed very perturbed about the other usage.
2) Semicolon to replace the comma in lists. In a related issue, semicolons can be used instead of commas to separate long and complicated items, and members agreed that in such cases, a semicolon should precede "and" ("Oxford semicolon"?), to avoid punctuation stronger than a comma between items followed by no punctuation between the last two items. Example: "They pointed out, in support of their claim, that they had used the materials stipulated in the contract; that they had taken every reasonable precaution, including some not mentioned in the code; and that they had employed only qualified workers, all of whom were very experienced.
3) When the "and" is missing altogether. It was noted that there is a tendency for writers to omit the final "and" altogether, and members were not sure how this had crept in. It was suggested that it comes from lists of short items (on a real shopping list you would write "bread, jam, tea", like that, or one under the other with no punctuation; either way, you never write "and".
4) Punctuation with items in bulleted lists. It was agreed that bulleted lists of short items do not need a semicolon at the end of each item and a semicolon followed by and at the end of the second-last item, but opinion differed as to whether in such cases there should be a stop after the last item or not. Both methods are seen widely today. Some members argued that the stop was necessary to indicate the end of the list, while others felt that it was illogical to have a stop without any other punctuation.
5) Bold colon after a bold run-on heading or not? By run-on heading is meant a heading followed by text on the same line. There were two opposing views on this. (i) There is no logical reason for the colon to be bold. Punctuation after a word or words in bold or italics should not be bold or italics, only punctuation in the middle of a group of such words. (ii) It looks better and neater to make the colon bold as well as the heading, and this circumstance is rather different from a group of words in bold font in the middle of a sentence. Agreed: whichever method you choose, be consistent (duh!).
In most cases, lower case abbreviations need stops to avoid their looking like words, whereas upper case abbreviations are already distinguished by the fact that they are in upper case (USA).
It was noted that an acronym is a group of letters which make a word, or something sounding like a word, such as Unicef, Cosatu, whereas groups of letters which are spelt out, such as USA, HIV, are abbreviations.
More importantly, it was noted that one cannot get rid of every little distinction that appears fussy but serves a purpose - I remembered a sign I had seen apparently about a BED which turned out to be a Bachelor of Education. Stops, spaces and the distinction between lower and upper case cannot all be ditched together.
Practice varies on the last point. Some people find it very old-fashioned to write photo's, others think it is plain error, while others maintain it is necessary - the usage was originally deliberate to avoid "photos" looking like "ethos" for example (the e in tomatoes is another way round the problem). This arises because all English words ending in "a" or "o" are in fact imports - potato, tomato - or abbreviations (photo for photograph, and photo is a foreign word too for that matter). Of course once we all know what a photo is and are used to it, the apostrophe becomes unnecessary. (Out of interest, this is one usage that the author of Eats, shoots and leaves has no time for - but several books still teach it.)
I have an interesting problem at work. We constantly write about EAs, enumeration areas, which are the small areas into which the country is divided for census enumeration purposes. Many people write EA's, along with the 1980's, and other such expressions. One of the reasons is that Microsoft Word is defaulted to change a second capital to lower case, on the assumption that you kept your finger on the shift key for too long. So EAs becomes Eas. To avoid this problem, one must either (i) alter the default (which can become tedious when the IT department keeps reloading the programmes for one reason or another), (ii) go back and fix it every time, to beat the system, or (iii) give in and insert an apostrophe. I am seriously thinking of changing our style to accommodate this, as the practical approach. I know some people will be horrified that I would do something "incorrect" for pragmatic reasons, but the alternative is that I appear fussy about irrelevant issues. There are far more important things to worry about. This leads us to the next point.
A discussion was held at the first meeting about less and fewer. Less is for uncountable nouns (mass nouns), fewer is for the plural - thus "less sugar", "fewer ants". But "fewer" is hardly even heard any more. Along the same lines as the growing use of "less" for "fewer" is use of the expression "an amount of people" instead of "a number of people". I must add that I only learned the distinction after I left school (which is a long time ago) and it was taught to me by a Frenchwoman - in other words she was more aware of it than first language English speakers. So this is not a new phenomenon.
One argument for sticking to the distinction is that sometimes the meaning can vary depending on which word is used. Thus "less intelligent children" should mean children who are less intelligent (than e.g. last year's class) while "fewer intelligent children" means not as many (as last year). But the word "more" is used for more sugar and more ants, and if I write "more intelligent children" it might indeed be ambiguous without clarification (although if I said it out loud, I would probably inflect it differently for the two meanings). So if we can do without the distinction for the positive, why not for the negative?
I hasten to add that I insist on fewer at work, but I sometimes wonder why.
This whole issue of how to approach change in language and practice deserves more attention and we will return to it at a later stage.
Q: Hélène Mendes had asked for a definition of proofreading, claiming that proofreading means reading a re-keyed version against an original manuscript or typescript (which hardly ever happens today) or checking a corrected version against an earlier version that has corrections marked manually on the hard copy. In all other cases, she claims, one is copy-editing.
A member had asked that this be raised, as it appears that not even all PEG members understand the distinction (no names mentioned). It was gratifying to find that all members present at both meetings did know the difference - defining clauses take no commas (and no pause when you say them out loud), whilst non-defining or "extra information" clauses are set apart by commas. However, one member claimed that there should be no confusion between the two kinds, saying that "that" was mandatory with a defining clause and "which" should only be used to introduce a non-defining clause. Most other members present disagreed with this, claiming that a defining relative clause may start with either "that" or "which", although clearly the person responsible for the grammar check that comes with MS Word does not hold that view. [I am of the opinion that this glitch in the grammar check is responsible for most of the incorrect commas seen today with defining relative clauses - blame Bill Gates! Mary H]
Q: Is this creeping in under the influence of Afrikaans, or is it an international phenomenon? What do other members feel? Example sentence: "The Working for Water project has made significant gains and economic impact on the poor communities in that it has provided employment to about 20 000 people and has cleared about 535 595 hectares of land initially infested with alien vegetation."
This topic gave rise to several issues.
1) The Oxford or serial comma - the comma preceding "and" before the final item in a list, as in "Tom, Dick, and Harry" as opposed to "Tom, Dick and Harry". This is OUP house style, hence the name Oxford comma. If one is not working for OUP, and the use of the final comma is therefore optional, when to use it? Answer: It is useful in cases where one of the items in the list is a two-part item, such as "Cake, bread and butter, and tea", so that the grouping is quite clear. This is more likely to happen when the items are long and complicated, e.g. "The Directorate of Finance comprises seven subdirectorates: Assessments, Rating and Statistics (these two being responsible for revenue generation in the Fund), Financial Administration, Information Technology, Provisioning and Administration, Training and Performance Management, and Human Resources Management".
At the Saturday meeting, three members present no longer use stops with ie and eg - most members still do. It was noted that the method without stops has become accepted in newspapers and more casual contexts.
Whilst the latter form follows the convention that acronyms can be in lower case, as shown above, the former is often found even where it appears to contradict the house style. It was suggested that this may be because Aids is such a short word, and is very similar to aid (help) and aides (people who help).
Christopher Hoskins, our map man, reminded us that the rule used to be no full stop if the abbreviation ends with the last letter of the word (thus Mr and Dr) but full stop with other abbreviations; thus St Mary's (Saint Mary's) but St Mary's St. (Saint Mary's Street). It was noted however that we are not sure which of the two "t's" in Street is represented by the t in St for Street!
This is always problematic, as practice alters so fast. It was noted that it is precisely the people in a certain field, who know exactly what the terminology it means, who do not care if a term is hyphenated or not. The hyphens are needed by readers for whom the concepts are less familiar. Thus an engineer may happily write "The superstructures consist of five span continuous pre-stressed concrete single cell box decks", but the layman will find it much clearer if he says "The superstructures consist of five-span continuous pre-stressed concrete single-cell box-decks".
Although we all agree "carrot's" and "tomatoe's" as plurals are not correct, what about "the 1980's" and an apostrophe with plurals of words ending in a vowel?
There are two main questions surrounding these issues. If you really believe that a modern usage or mistake is damaging the language, losing a useful distinction, then you might delay the trend by fighting it. If the new usage wins out, chances are that you could not have stopped it anyway.
Indeed many of the topics above have been touched on only briefly and could well be expanded, with more examples. Maybe someone can suggest a way of continuing this kind of debate electronically.