Word Wise

Verb Your Enthusiasm

People expect a lot from verbs: God, it seems to me, is a verb, not a noun. – Geodesic-dome architect Buckminster Fuller Theater is a verb before it is a noun. – Dancer and choreographer Martha Graham Love – the feeling – is a fruit of love, the verb. – Author Stephen R. Covey Life is a verb. – Writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman God. Theater. Love. Life. That’s asking an awful, don’t you think? So let’s ratchet it down a notch or two and just say that verbs are really, really important. In fact, a brain-imaging study conducted at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England, showed that the brain’s motor cortex responds to merely reading action words like active verbs. Verbs, in other words, stimulate readers, kickstart their imagination, draw them in, compel them to think.                                                                                                                                                                                                 And yet despite their significance to quality writing, we often hide them by turning them into nouns, adding suffixes like “tion,” “sion,” “ance,” and “ment”: discontinue becomes the discontinuation of, apply becomes the application of, achieve becomes achievement, and on and on. Worse, these new nouns often need an extra verb to make sense. They also go hand in hand with passive verbs and combine to make us sound like complete blowhards. We end up writing “make an application for a personal loan,” for instance,” rather than “apply for a personal loan."                                                                                                                         Identifying and rectifying these hidden verbs will make your writing more powerful and in the moment. To do this you first need to identify a phrase or sentence’s "verbal essence."                                                                                                                                           Take this sentence:  You must make an application in writing to join our group. The verbal essence? You must apply. The better sentence? You must apply in writing  to join our group. Here’s another: With the government’s decision that agreements between the public and private sectors are to be allowed, an explosion of activity has occurred. The verbal essence? The government has allowed and activity has exploded. The better sentence? Now that the government allows agreements between the public and private sectors, activity has exploded. Sensitizing yourself to these hidden verbs will make your writing more robust and compelling. They may not bring you any closer to God or to doing the perfect plié or grand jeté, but if nothing else they’ll rev up your reader's motor cortex, and that’s something right there.

Mind Your Ps and Qs

You don’t often (if ever) get to experience other people being edited, how editors and writers interact, how editors use gentle but smart persuasion and how writers react. So I was especially interested when, during the second installment of HBO’s “John Adams” last week, there was a scene depicting Benjamin Franklin editing Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence.  “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable that all men are created equal, etc.,” Franklin reads aloud from Jefferson’s manuscript. “Sacred and undeniable,” he repeats thoughtfully in a tone that implies he was half-asking a question (“sacred and undeniable?”). “Smacks of the pulpit,” he says. “Does it?” Jefferson asks. “These truths are self-evident, are they not?,” Franklin asks. “Perhaps,” responds Jefferson, a little uncertain. “Self-evident then,” says Franklin. “Self-evident?” “Self-evident,” Jefferson says gently.  As this passage illustrates, editing is as much a skill as it is an art, taking into account not only your intelligence but your ability to be diplomatic, tactful, and caring. Like all art – the creation of and response to – editing is subjective. Yes, grammar has its rights and wrongs, but remember that when editing a colleague, it’s not your voice that should shine through, but the writer’s. It’s not your self-esteem on the line, but the writer’s. An editor’s “bed-side manners” can have a critical impact on the final product. Just as no two writers will write a document in the same way, no two editors will edit a document in the same way. Well-intentioned people can disagree without either necessarily being wrong. A skillful editor, like Franklin as depicted in “John Adams,” shows respect for a writer even as he shows him a better way. That should be self-evident.

The Wednesday Word Wise Roundup

• About two weeks ago (Feb. 21) Dallas Morning News copy editor Nicole Stockdale came out from behind the curtain to write a piece for the paper about her craft. She notes that while occasionally readers point out to her mistakes that made it through to print, sometimes it’s the complaining readers that are wrong. “Sometimes our job is to contradict fusty rules foisted on kids by a misguided English teachers” she says. Read her thoughts on the art of copy editing here, as well as her responses to these sorts of misguided readers. It will help each of us who work with colleagues or clients who sometimes accuse us of an error when we, uhm, know better.

• John McIntyre, the Baltimore The Sun's assistant managing editor for the copy desk and a past president of the American Copy Editors Society, calls Bill Walsh, the “panjandrum of the copy desk” at The Washington Post, but disagrees with him about the flip creation of new words – McIntyre brings up “words” like wikify, impactful, and even bootylicious, But, he says, while you may “cordially dislike”  them (ok, I’m rather partial to bootylicious), "if it is comprehensible to another speaker of the language, it is a word.” In other words, get used to it. McIntyre (and Walsh) are both excellent, thoughtful writers themselves and both their sites are worth reading regularly. Check out McIntyre here and Walsh here.

Flip, Don't Flop

I’ve been known to e-mail, talk on the speakerphone, gaze out my 64th-floor office window overlooking Chicago, drink my coffee, and scan a blog all at the same time – occasionally to my shame and regret because with all that going on, each activity distracting me from the other while, as I get older (and older), I have fewer brain cells to keep track and ensure that each action is completed successfully, I’ve sometimes clicked “send” when I wasn’t ready to send. Then all hell breaks loose. I usually blurt out an expletive, which freaks out whomever I’m talking to on the phone (especially if it’s my mother), so I immediately have to both quickly explain and excuse myself and abruptly hang up, whether that conversation is at its natural conclusion or not. Then I have to quickly e-mail my recipient and apologize for wasting his or her time with a half-finished e-mail. The I have to go back and rewrite the e-mail and resend. Then I have to silently damn myself for being sort of an idiot, which is the most unpleasant part of all. By this time I’ve made a fool of myself in front of two people – by phone and by e-mail – and my coffee is cold. But here’s how I’ve changed my ways (you’d think I’d stop multitasking, but you’d be wrong). Now I: write the body of my e-mail first; fill in the subject line second; and add the recipients third. In other words, I craft my e-mails backwards. Not only do I no longer accidentally, absentmindedly, and distractedly send half-written e-mails, but there have been two interesting and unintended side effects to this method of e-mailing. One, my subject lines are better because they're more focused. And two, I‘m targeting my e-mails better, adding fewer people to the “to” and “cc” lines because having written the message I instinctively realize that not everyone I had originally thought needed the e-mail actually does.  It’s a bit of work to get into the habit of flipping the order of the elements of writing an e-mail but it’s worth it. Better e-mails. Happier moms. Hotter coffee. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Bullet Train (Of Thought)

Look up “bullet” in your trusty 2007 AP Style and all the entry says is: See weapons. Not much artillery there if you’re wondering how to format a bulleted list. Next up, the Chicago Manual of Style, which does address the issue but in such mind-numbing detail that only the most hardened Ph.D. student – you know, the kind of high-strung, anal retentive type doing his dissertation on Milton – will have the discipline to read through it (for all you hardened Ph.D. students, it’s in sections 6.124 through 6.130 in the 956-page 2003 15th edition). Even so, the rules are hardly hard and fast. So in the interest of my usual let’s-just-get-on-with-it attitude toward these things, commonly accepted - but by no means absolute - style for bulleted lists is as follows: list the first item, beginning with a lowercase letter and ending with a semicolon; list the following items the same way, ending each with a semicolon; list the second to last item the same way, but end it with a semicolon followed by "and” and a comma; and, list your last item, again beginning with a lowercase letter, but end it with a period. A few other thoughts: If you’re not comfortable with all the punctuation, skip it altogether. The only time you’d definitely want to use punctuation is if each item in your list is a complete sentence – as it is in this particular list; in that case, start each item in your list with a capital letter and end each with a period. Avoid creating lists that are a mixture of phrases and complete sentences so you don't have to deal with the whole punctuation thing. Why do that to yourself? I’m not really a stickler on how bulleted lists should be styled as much as I am a stickler for styling them consistently within the same document. However you choose to style bulleted lists you’ll be able to find support online somewhere for your choices. Should anyone ever challenge you, you can say, hey, but I found it: here here here

Twist & Shout

I like a good contortionist act as much as the next guy – maybe even better – but more and more I’m noticing people twisting themselves into knots trying to rename simple things or use different words in lieu of perfectly pleasant and acceptable ones. They do this in pursuit of I’m really not sure what.  A press release I read recently about a new hotel referred to its four “dining offerings,” which it turns out means the joint had four restaurants. “Darling, where should we eat tonight?” “Oh, I don’t know, honeybunch, you choose a dining offering, maybe sushi?” On a related note, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been known to refer to hunger as “food insecurity,” which to me sounds as if people are afraid their soufflé is going to fall or embarrassed to be shopping at their local Safeway or Jewel instead of Whole Foods. (Consequently, if you’re not hungry - you've just downed a half-pound of that really good yellow curry chicken salad from Whole Foods, say - according to the USDA, you’re “food secure.”) In our profession we may be especially prone to this sort of gobbledygook because we want to be creative; we want to appear smart; we want to seem like we’re with it; we want to come off serious. In the end, what we sound is silly. So avoid referring to plans as pathways to growth or departments as service lines or HR departments as talent management centers or skills as value-added differentiators or programs as strategic-growth platforms or deals as definitive agreements. A release about a major merger recently referred to the fact that 6,000  people were going to be out of a job as enrollment reductions.  If you really want to be creative, appear smart, seem like you’re with it, come off serious, and, I might add, be honest, concentrate on clarity and preciseness in your writing. Say it like it is. Give it to me straight. Don't beat around the bush. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” Leonardo da Vinci supposedly said (though he probably said it in Italian), and he knew. He was one of the most complex men to ever live.

Note: If you know of, have read, or have used other gobbledygook like this, send it to me. I'll include it next week.