In eighth grade, at the last assembly of middle school, I won the School Grammarian award. This was not much of an honor; it was, like most of the “awards” passed out that day, made up by the school’s algebra teacher. I seem to remember a few kids getting real prizes, or at least real in the sense that they were printed on some gold-border certificate paper from Staples and handed out in front of the rest of the student body, which was sprawled over half the gym floor in half-sitting, half-sleeping slouches. We didn’t have chairs at Oak Hill, ostensibly because we were an “independent” private school, but actually because no one had bothered to budget for 100 folding chairs.
The place was a strange combination of bare-bones accounting — an old ranch building was co-opted for the schoolhouse, and the bedroom they converted into my grade four classroom was so small that the inside door blew open every time the outside door was pulled shut — and top-of-the-line furnishings. For Oak Hill’s debut year, every student sat in his own cushy, fabric-covered rolling office chair, until the teachers convinced the school’s wealthy, wine-magnate founder that such chairs were more appropriate for board members and CEOs than a bunch of third-graders predisposed to spinning wildly in their seats and holding chair races across the classroom.
But I digress. The awards assembly was, as it turned out, a similar combination of off-the-cuff theatrics and prep-school (or wannabe prep-school, considering the delinquents and socially odd students the school tended to attract) ceremony. The graduating eighth grade class comprised only nine students, and I assume one or two of those kids received actual commendations, most likely for their math skills or acting talent. The School Grammarian award was a joke, but I took it seriously, and made it up to the front of the gym before realizing that there was no certificate for me to collect or microphone at which to give an acceptance speech. I did an awkward hand-shake dance with my math teacher and returned to my “seat” — backpack as headrest, legs crossed at the ankles in an “I’m not sleeping” position — with my face burning.
I’d like to think that I’ve grown less awkward since that eighth-grade assembly, but I know the grammarian in me has not disappeared. In an ideal world, I would get my act together and find a job copy-editing. It’s not the most glamorous profession, but it has the advantage of feeling a lot more obtainable than a job in the ad industry or at a publishing house. I get massive, procrastination-aided anxiety whenever I try to write. You know what they say: Those who can’t do, teach. That’s not quite true — I’ve had plenty of teachers who could out-“do” the smartest Jeopardy contestant — but it is perhaps accurate that those who can’t write are destined to edit. With that in mind, here are two of the sharpest bits I’ve read lately on the importance of the right word in the right place:
From the March 2011 issue of Oprah Magazine, a piece called “Before I Forget,” by Beth Macy:
Lynn Forbish. The sight of that name in your e-mail in-box could turn your palms sweaty and your face red. No matter how many years you’ve logged as a journalist or how many awards you’ve won, a note from the Queen of the Copy Desk could bring you to your knees: “Never use five words when one will suffice — just don’t make it one of your usual cliches.”
Frankly, were I the copy editor at Oprah, I would’ve deep-sixed that hyphen: “Inbox,” not “in-box.” But who knows. I suppose I should find out what the AP Stylebook has to say on the subject. But whatever the answer, I’d still love to be Queen of the Copy Desk. Someday, when I finally get around to “getting my act together,” maybe I’ll have that engraved on a nameplate.
Christopher Hitchens, in the June 2011 edition of Vanity Fair, remembers receiving this advice from a writing teacher, possibly William Safire. (Aside: Safire, like Hitchens himself, was a great writer with dubious political beliefs.) In “Unspoken Truths,” Hitchens writes:
The rules are much the same: Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don’t say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro.
Again, the copy editor in me longs to make a change. As I typed, my fingers automatically inserted a comma after “boy.” Should there be a comma there? No. It could probably go either way, but I’m not about to say Christopher Hitchens made an error. I may not agree with a lot of Hitchens’ libertarian dogma, but there are elements of his politics that I do subscribe to, and like Safire, his talent with words is undeniable.
As for me? Check back in a few years. Maybe I’ll have that nameplate after all.
. . . So Well Read. . . 