The Wednesday Word Wise Roundup

• I was searching for something on The New York Times Web site earlier this week and as so often happens I didn’t find what I was looking for but I did find something interesting I wanted to pass along (despite it being from 2004, it’s still relevant). An interview with the editor of the letters-to-the-editor page, the piece is an excellent primer about how to write letters to the editor (whether it’s to the Times or elsewhere)  and what papers look for in letters. He writes: “Your suggested length for letters is about 150 words. Why so short? (Or, as one writer put it after I cited the brevity of the Gettysburg Address, 'Why does Lincoln get 250 and the rest of us a measly 150?')…Ideally, the letters page should be a forum for a variety of voices, and that means letting a lot of readers have a turn. With our limited space, we have room for letters that make their case with a point or two, but not for full-length articles.” Read the rest of it here.

• Also in the Times, but more recently (last Sunday, Oct. 21) was this article in the Style section (if you can pull yourself away from the wedding announcements of various Yale and Vassar graduates and stories about formal dinners in the Fragonard salon at the Frick, the Style section often has lots of worthwhile things to read) headlined “Your Modifier is Dangling.” It’s about a bad habit some of us have (a-hem) of correcting the grammar of friends and family and lovers and colleagues and strangers overheard on the bus. It mentions a “grammar vigilante” group on Facebook called “I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar” that has, believe it or not, 200,000 members. One great piece of advice: “Don’t point out the mistake. Instead, repeat what was just said, but with correct usage this time, and in your own sentence. Then keep talking.”

Comments

[JP]

Great observation about the bad habit of gratuitous editing.

John McIntyre, assistant managing editor for the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun, recently provided an excellent insight about this on his blog (http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog/2006/12/we_are_not_correctional_office.html). To wit: "Dr. [Samuel] Johnson said, 'No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.' In a similar spirit, don’t edit unless someone is paying you to do it."