writing

A Unique Book on Editing

★★★★★ : Developmental Editing: A Handbook for Freelancers, Authors, and Publishers (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) (Hardcover) by Scott Norton, reviewed by C. J. Singh on amazon.com, copy posted June 4, 2009 (21 of 23 people found the review helpful.) – See all my reviews

Developmental Editing: A Handbook for Freelancers, Authors, and Publishers

 

In teaching courses on editing at UC Berkeley extension, I assigned various books that focused on grammar, usage, proofreading, copyediting, and publishing. I searched for a book on developmental editing. None. “The Chicago Manual of Style fifteenth edition, merely mentions the subject. Developmental Editing: A Handbook for Freelancers, Authors, and Publishers (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) is unique.

Scott Norton defines developmental editing as “a significant structuring or restructuring of a manuscript’s discourse” and observes that unlike copyediting it cannot be “demonstrated with brief examples. So I’ve adopted the strategy of creating extended narrative examples. Although fictitious and intentionally exaggerated, these ‘case studies’ reflect the range of authors, clients, and developmental assignments.”

The artfully constructed case studies Norton presents engage the reader throughout the book — from the first chapter, “Concept: Shaping the Proposal” to the final chapter, “Display: Dressing Up the Text.” Two examples of his creative case-study approach follow.

“Thesis: Finding the Hook” (pp. 48-67) begins with the developmental editor (DE) taking a first look at the book proposal and noting that the two coauthors, an anthropologist and a sociologist, both second generation Mexican Americans “had too much to say on their subject, and many of their theses contradicted each other” (p. 51).

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A Contemporary Classic on Editing Nonfiction Prose

★★★★★ : Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace (11th Edition) (Paperback) by Joseph Williams, reviewed by C. J. Singh on amazon.com, copy posted June 8, 2013 (11 of 14 people found the following review helpful.) – See all my reviews

 

Years ago, I attended a weekend workshop for instructors of college composition that was led by Professor Joseph Williams, the author of STYLE, visiting from the University of Chicago and Professor Richard Lanham, author of Revising Prose , visiting from UCLA. They presented lucid and witty summaries of their books, Lanham focusing on revising at the sentence level and Williams on paragraphs. Although their books have gone through several editions since, the core concepts remain the same. Both self-teaching books are on my amazon Listmania’s list “Expository Writing: Top Ten Books.”

While teaching Advanced Editorial Workshop, a ten-week course, at the University of California, I regularly assigned the earlier editions of STYLE as the main textbook. Each term, students rated the book as excellent. (The prerequisite to the workshop was a review course, with the main textbook “The Harbrace College Handbook.” Although STYLE includes a 22-page appendix summarizing grammar and punctuation rules, most readers would be well-advised to reread a standard college handbook, such as Diana Hacker and Nancy Sommers’s A Writer’s Reference with Exercises. See my review on Amazon.)

Even a brief browsing of Joseph Williams’s STYLE would persuade most readers that it makes the much touted Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style” look, well, elementary. Simplistic. If the seductively slender “Elements” — easily read in a day, no exercises to do — could deliver the claim on its jacket, by the end of the day there’d be millions of excellent writers.

The 11th edition of STYLE has been ably co-authored by Joseph Bizup. Among the enhancements Bizup presents are reordering of two chapters so that the trajectory is from clarity to grace instead of from sentence- to document-level. He has added many new exercises “grouped under the heading `In Your Own Word,’ that invite writers to work with their own prose” (p v).
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Part One, Style as Choice, focuses on different kinds of rules – – real, social, invented. Three of the many examples of invented rules presented are the usage distinctions between that/which; fewer/less; and who/whom. An invented rule says: “Use the relative pronoun `that’ — not `which’ — for restrictive clauses” (page 15). Williams traces the history of this invention and quotes several noted writers who disregard it. His discussion is included in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (See my review on amazon.)

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Teach Yourself Editing

★★★★★ : The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself (Paperback) by Susan Bell, reviewed by C. J. Singh on amazon.com, copy posted June 10, 2009 – See all my reviews

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The author of The Artful Edit, Susan Bell, a veteran editor of fiction and nonfiction books, teaches at New York’s New School graduate writing program. She notes: “Many writers hanker to learn about a process that lives at a hushed remove from the `glamour’ of writing: the edit. They want what most creative-writing classrooms are hard-pressed to give, which is detachment from their text in order to see it clearly. . . . Classroom critiques, while helpful, are limited. Too often they don’t give a systematic view of a writer’s work, and train him to develop a thick skin more than a sensible one.” This accords with my experience in an MFA program.

Bell cites editing practices of several established writers such as Tracy Kidder’s The Soul Of A New Machine, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.

The second and third chapters (nearly half of the book) present a detailed analysis of the editing process of several drafts of F Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” It’s a good choice of novel as most readers are likely to be familiar with it. Moreover, the editing back and forth between Fitzgerald and the publisher’s editor, Max Perkins, is well documented in books such as Scott Berg’s “Max Perkins: Editor of Genius.”

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A Fast Method for Revising Good Writing into Great Writing

★★★★★ : Revising Prose (5th Edition) (Paperback) by Richard Lanham, reviewed by C. J. Singh on amazon.com, copy posted March 12, 2010 (55 of 55 people found the review helpful.)  – See all my reviews.

Years ago, I attended a weekend workshop for instructors of college composition that was led by Professor Richard Lanham, author of Revising Prose , visiting from UCLA, and Professor Joseph Williams, author of Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace , visiting from the University of Chicago. They presented witty and lucid summaries of their books, Lanham focusing on revising at the sentence level and Williams on paragraphs. Although their books have gone through several editions since, the core concepts remain the same. Both self-teaching books are on my Amazon Listmania’s list “Expository Writing: Top Ten Books.”

In the preface to “Revising Prose (5th edition)” Lanham notes: “Writing may have been invented to keep bureaucratic accounts….As the world has become bureaucratized, so has its language….Revising Prose was written as a supplementary text for any course that requires writing. Because it addresses a single discrete style, “Revising Prose” can be rule-based to a degree that prose analysis rarely permits. This set of rules — the Paramedic Method –in turn allows the book to be self-teaching.”

In each of the five editions of “Revising Prose,” Lanham added fresh examples and exercises to its core content: the Paramedic Method comprising eight steps as follows.

1. Circle the prepositions;
2. Circle the “is” forms;
3. Find the action;
4. Put this action in a simple (not compound) active verb;
5. Start fast – no slow windups;
6. Read the passage aloud with emphasis and feeling;
7. Write out each sentence on a blank screen or sheet of paper and mark off its basic rhythmic units with a “/”;
8. Mark off sentence length with a “/.”

Basically, Lanham’s Paramedic Method advises you to delete prepositional phrases and “is” forms and replace them with active verbs.

Below are four brief examples and a test-yourself exercise from the book.

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A Witty, Scholarly Dictionary of English Usage

MWDEU★★★★★ : Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (Hardcover), reviewed by C. J. Singh on amazon.com, copy posted September 5, 2009 (2 of 2 people found the review helpful.) – See all my reviews

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (MWDEU) is a thoroughly researched and witty compendium on usage. Unlike ‘Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary,’ which has only occasional usage notes, MWDEU presents 2,300 detailed entries. Each MWDEU entry, typically, comprises a history of its usage, with examples cited from classic and contemporary texts, and concludes with a recommendation — not a prescription — from the editorial board. As an example of the MWDEU editors’ comprehensive review, let’s take a look at the “less/fewer” distinction.

The authoritative usage reference in academia, “The Chicago Manual of Style, fifteenth edition,” prescribes a simple-to-follow rule: “Reserve ‘less’ for mass nouns, or amounts–for example, less salt, dirt, water. Reserve ‘fewer’ for countable things–fewer people, calories, grocery items, suggestions. One easy guideline is to use ‘less’ with singular nouns and ‘fewer’ with plural nouns” (p. 221). This simple prescription, however, is oversimplified. It is inaccurate as MWDEU notes below.

MWDEU begins its detailed entry (pp. 592-94) by commenting on the above rule: “This rule is simple enough and easy enough to follow. It has only one fault — it is not accurate for all usage…. ‘Less’ refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured and to number among things that are counted.

“As far as we have been able to discover, the received rule originated in 1770 as a comment on ‘less’: ‘This Word is most commonly used in speaking of a Number; where I should think Fewer would do better. “No Fewer than a Hundred” appears to me, not only more elegant than “No less than a Hundred,” but more strictly proper–Baker 1770.

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Excellent Copyediting Tutorial on the Current Chicago Manual of Style

★★★★★ : The Copyeditor’s Handbook: A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communications (Paperback) by Amy Einsohn, reviewed by C. J. Singh on amazon.com, copy posted August 17, 2011 (35 of 37 people found the review helpful.) – See all my reviews.

While teaching UC Berkeley’s courses in “The Professional Sequence in Editing,” I regularly assigned selected exercises in this book’s earlier editions as preparation for more complex exercises in class. The students’ evaluations of the book were always favorable.

Copyeditor's Handbook: Einsohn

This edition presents a fast-track introduction to the many changes in the Chicago Manual of Style, sixteenth edition, 2010. I particularly appreciate the handbook’s references to the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. (See my review of this great usage dictionary on Amazon.) Ever since its publication in 1989, I have regularly enjoyed reading MWDEU’s scholarly entries. These 2300 entries, often witty, drawn mainly from literary sources are a refreshing contrast to Garner’s stridently prescriptive injunctions in the Chicago Manual, drawn mainly from journalistic sources.

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MFA in Paperback! – “Deepening Fiction”

★★★★★ : Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers (Paperback) by Sarah Stone and Ron Nyren, reviewed by  C. J. Singh on amazon.com, copy posted July 23, 2006 (32 of 32 people found the review helpful.) –  See all  reviews
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Deepening Fiction assumes the reader has already studied an introductory text on the fiction-writing craft such as Mark Baechtel’s Shaping the Story or Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. (I recently posted my reviews of the Bachtael and the Burroway books on Amazon.)
Although Deepening Fiction is designed primarily as a textbook for advanced courses, I found it entirely accessible for self-teaching. It could very well serve as the focus book of a study group as it poses intelligently worded discussion questions on each of the twenty-two stories in its anthology section. Among these stories, sixteen are by contemporary writers.
In the preface, the authors observe: “More experienced writers are ready to understand just how much writing is revision, how much we develop the shape and meaning of the story over multiple drafts. Our goal is to help writers connect craft to the particular work they are wrestling with. … The long middle stretch of the writing apprenticeship–between initial learning of the basic concepts and the production of meaningful, memorable works free of inconsistencies and clichés–can be a hard one. … It’s one thing to learn the difference between scene and summary and quite another to figure out what parts of a particular story to render as scene, what as summary, and how these choices influence the story’s meaning.”
Scene, summary, flashbacks, backstory, and transitions are the topics constituting chapter 5, which presents illuminating story analyses of Lan Samantha Chang’s The Eve of the Spirit Festival and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Rooster and the Dancing Girl.
Chapter 1 reviews issues in complexifying characters, with illustrations from Tobias Wolff’s Powder and ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.
Chapters 2 and 3 take on complexifying point of view beyond first, second, third, with story analyses of Margot Livesey’s The Niece, Jorge Luis Borges’s Inferno, I, 32, and Anton Chekov’s Gooseberries. As an example of stories that require first-person narrators, Alice Munro’s The Turkey Season is analyzed. Orientation, by Daniel Orozco, a frequently anthologized story to exemplify second-person point of view (as done in Burroway’s textbook) is persuasively analyzed instead as a monologue. Second-person narration is illustrated by Adam Johnson’s Trauma Plate. The authors note that this is the only short story “we know of, in fact, uses first, second, and third person.” Johnson contributes several substantial paragraphs explaining his point-of-view choices in revising successive drafts of the story.
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The Classic College Textbook on the Fiction-Writing Craft (The Current Edition)

★★★★★ : Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (8th Edition) (Paperback) by Janet Burroway, reviewed by C. J. Singh on amazon.com, copy posted January 14, 2012 (43 of 44 people found the review helpful.)–  See all my reviews 

 

In the current edition, more than half of the 22 stories are new, including works by contemporaries like Stuart Dybek, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Ron Hansen, Sherman Alexie, and Junot Diaz. A welcome return are short-shorts, one of the highlights of the sixth edition that were dropped in the seventh. Also, the new edition features a more detailed discussion of the revision process: it presents the early and final drafts of a short story, “Keith, by Ron Carlson, an established writer and professor of creative writing at UC Irvine.In the preface to the eighth edition, Burroway notes that “the idea of a text for writing fiction is itself problematic. Unlike such subjects as math and history, where a certain mass of information needs to be organized and conveyed, the writing of fiction is more often a process of trial and error–the learning is perpetual and, paradoxically, the writer needs to know everything at once. If a text is too prescriptive, it’s not true to the immense variety of possibilities; if it’s too anecdotal, it may be cheering but is unlikely to be of use.” Excellent criterion, emerging from the author’s decades of writing and teaching experience. This edition, like the seventh and sixth, engages and isn’t too prescriptive. Continue reading →
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