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Common Issues in Manuscripts Requiring Corrections: #6 Foreign Words

This is the sixth in a series of posts to address issues I have seen in the work of others with my suggestions for how writers can improve their manuscripts before turning them over to agents, editors, and the many other individuals involved in the process of turning a manuscript into a book.

#6 Italicizing foreign words

The Chicago Manual of Style recommends italicizing unfamiliar foreign words. But what is unfamliar and foreign to one person may be familiar to another. A standard means to determine the familiarity of a foreign word is whether it appears in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary.

When I edit the work of others, I use merriam-webster.com to look up all foreign words and place any not appearing there in italics. I do not rely on whether the words are familiar to me.

The exception—there’s always an exception—to this rule of italicizing unfamiliar foreign words is that foreign proper names are not be italicized.

In my own work-in-progress, set in Tehran in the mid-1970s, therefore, I have not italicized the names of streets even though the words do not appear in merriam-webster.com. In addition, I found many words I thought would be unfamiliar to readers in merriam-webster.com, likely because more than forty years have passed since I lived there.

Image credit: Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

Common Issues in Manuscripts Requiring Corrections: #5 Commas

This is the fifth in a series of posts to address common issues with my suggestions for how writers can improve their manuscripts before turning them over to agents, editors, and the many other individuals involved in the process of turning a manuscript into a book.

#5 Removing commas from where they don’t belong and inserting them where they do

When sentences get long, writers fall victim to the temptation to put in a comma—or two—to give the reader a place to breathe. But sometimes that results in a comma separating the subject from its verb or the verb from its direct object. Often a comma inserted before a conjunction such as and simply breaks a compound predicate into one complete sentence and a phrase that can’t stand on its own.

When editing someone else’s work, I remove unnecessary commas, leaving them in only when their use meets one of four criteria: commas in a series, commas with two or more adjectives, commas with conjunctions (but watch out for this one because it has some rules of its own), and commas in introductory or parenthetical phrases including nouns of address.

The Chicago Manual of Style recommends use of the serial, or Oxford, comma. This is the comma that precedes the conjunction—usually and—that connects items listed in a series. Sometimes it is absolutely necessary to accurately convey meaning. See the example sentences below:

Example 1: The people who influenced my life choices most were my parents, the Pope and Mother Theresa.

Example 2: The people who influenced my life choices most were my parents, the Pope, and Mother Theresa.

Because the serial comma is needed some of the time for clarity, I use it in all cases when I edit a manuscript.

The most common case of commas needing to be deleted is connected to conjunctions. Commas are not needed before every instance of a conjunction (and, or, but, so, etc.). For example, commas before and in compound predicates such as the one below are unnecesary.

My doctor advised that I should reduce the amount of sugar I consume and get more exercise.

That’s where I find the most unneeded commas. As important, commas are not needed after most uses of conjunctions either unless what follows is a parenthetical thought that could be left out without changing the meaning of the sentence..

Read through this post to see if you can identify which of the four rules applies to each comma you find.

Holidays Around the World: International Women’s Day

Source: Flickr.com Credit: Nithi Anand, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

My first exposure to International Women’s Day (IWD), March 8, was in Romania in 1978. That was one year after the United Nations began observing it as a holiday, but Romanians had been celebrating the holiday for longer as the origins go back much further.

International Women’s Day is one of two international celebrations that has its roots in events that took place in the United States but where observations in this country didn’t take hold, at least not until recently, and not to the same degree as elsewhere in the world. The other is Labor Day on May 1, International Workers’ Day, which the Marxist International Socialist Congress fixed as May 1 in 1889. The first parade in the US in September to honor the role of workers in this country was in 1887.

My suspicion is that support for these holidays in this country waned as the socialist and communist parties worldwide took up the causes of workers. In the case of Labor Day, in 1894 we established our own version of Labor Day in observation of that 1887 September parade, perhaps in reaction to the Socialist Congress’s May 1 observation, giving us the excuse that we didn’t need a second Labor Day.

The usually cited event that prompted IWD occurred back in 1908, when women who worked in the garment industry in New York went on strike to protest their working conditions. The next year, the Socialist Party of America observed Women’s Day on February 28, 1909. The movement became international when observing it took on life in Europe. In Russia International Women’s Day was established in 1913. It gained traction throughout eastern Europe after the Russian Revolution in 1917 when a protest by women on February 23, brought attention to the lack of foodstuffs and other privations during WWI. The hardliners in Russia were unhappy that women protested their poor working conditions in February since they expected the women to wait until May 1, International Labor Day, to march and protest in the streets. The date March 8 became the generally observed date because it is the Western equivalent of February 23 on the Russian calendar.

I suspect that’s why I first encountered International Women’s Day in a country under the influence of the Soviet Union. My next experience of the day was 15 years later, in 1993 in Moldova, one of the newly independent states created from what had been the Soviet Union. There its observance was big. Businesses and schools closed for the day.

IWD fell on a Monday in 1993. In that year, a group from Washington planned to arrive that weekend. Flights from the west arrived only once a week, on Saturday evening. They insisted they must leave on Tuesday morning, leaving only Monday, March 8, for a meeting with the many local companies that might be involved in the renovation of the US Embassy in the capital on that day.

As our local staff began making calls to arrange for a meeting, they began hearing objections to being asked to give up the day they were used to spending with their families for a meeting about a project that still seemed far in the future. Some of the Moldovan businessmen arrived with bouquets of flowers for the women at the embassy as their recognition of the unusual meeting date.

Recently, observation of International Women’s Day has become more common in the US, or at least the marketing of it has. My inbox contains a number of email newsletters that mention International Women’s Day as a reason for a sale of something, even if the something is simply a greeting card.

Holidays Around the World: Purim

On February 25, 2021, (the Hebrew date Adar 14), Jews around the world will celebrate Purim to mark the salvation of the Jewish people in ancient Persia from planned annihilation. Purim isn’t one of the Jewish holidays I had heard of before I went to Iran for my first teaching position, in spite of having learned much about Jewish traditions from my first roommate in San Francisco.

In Tehran, my first Iranian friend, Abie Berookhim, came from a Jewish family that descended from the Jews who chose to remain in Persia after the end of the Babylonian captivity. He told me the story of Queen Esther, the Jewish woman who married the Persian king, Xerxes I, without revealing to him that she was Jewish. Xerxes did not require all his subjects to accept his religion, Zoroastrianism. But Esther chose to hide her religion from her new husband.

The story of how Esther became Queen, told in the Old Testament book of the Bible named after her, reads like a novel with all the tension and plot twists we expect in a good story. Xerxes’s first wife, Vashti, refused her husband’s request to appear before a group of his friends and advisors at a feast. Enraged, Xerxes had her executed and asked his advisor, Haman, to bring all the eligible young women to present themselves for Xerxes to choose a new wife. He chose Esther.

Not long after Esther married Xerxes, the king promoted Haman to prime minister. Haman used the power of his new office to plot the death of all Jewish people remaining in ancient Persia. To save her people, Esther had to reveal her religion to her husband, at great risk to herself.

Haman set the plot in motion by proclaiming all people must bow down before him. Esther’s guardian, Mordecai, refused for religious reasons. Haman used that as the provocation to declare that all Jews must be killed. The night before the planned execution, Esther arranged a feast during which she told Xerxes that she was a Jew and that carrying out the order to kill all Jews would mean executing her, the king’s wife. That turned the tide. Xerxes ordered Haman be arrested and executed, and he made Mordecai his chief adviser.

This reversal of fortune forms the basis for the celebration of Purim. Today, Purim celebrations involve feasting, wearing costumes, reciting the book of Esther, and giving charity to those in need.

I asked a Jewish friend to help me complete this post. She explained, “Purim teaches us to find God through joy, through sharing with others, and through overcoming adversity and triumphing over evil. . . .Purim celebrates the joy of overcoming the challenge of the darkness. There is a teaching that when the Messianic Age arrives, the only Jewish festival holiday that will be celebrated is Purim, which most people consider a minor holiday.”

While Purim provides many lessons for today, the one I feel most strongly pulled toward is that hatred is always the wrong course to follow. It also serves as a reminder that the reward of revealing the truth is greater than the risk of keeping it hidden.

Image credit: Photo by Brian Nelson on Unsplash The Hamantaschen pastries represent the three-cornered hat worn by Haman, prime minister of King Xerxes I.

Common Issues in Manuscripts Requiring Corrections: #4 Hyphens and Numbers

Image credit: Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

This is the fourth in a series of posts to address common issues I have found in manuscripts with my suggestions for how to improve them before turning them over to agents, editors, and the many other individuals involved in the process of turning a manuscript into a book.

#4 Putting Hyphens and Numbers together

Because some numbers, when spelled out, require hyphens, I often see hyphens in numbers where they don’t belong, usually because of the confusion between the general rule for spelling out numbers and the rules for using hyphens in compound modifiers. Below is a general rule for spelling numbers with hyphens and some specific rules for writing out numbers as times, fractions, and prices.

General rule: A hyphen must separate the two words representing numbers between twenty-one and ninety-nine. At least for now. Given the nature of commonly hyphenated words eventually becoming spelled as single words over time, this may change. Numbers representing multiples of ten do not require hyphens since they are single words.

Hours of the day rule #1: No hyphen is needed between the hour and the minute when writing out times of the day unless the spelled-out time is used as a compound modifier. The minute may need a hyphen if it is spelled with two words.

I have a meeting on the fourth Monday of every month at five thirty. (no hyphen between the hour and the minute)
My five-thirty meeting doesn’t usually begin until five forty-five. (hyphen between the hour and minute needed because it is a compound modifier and hyphen in forty-five because that is how it is spelled)

Hours of the day rule #2: No hyphen is needed between the hour and the word o’clock, because o’clock is usually only used with the hour and none of the hours between one and twelve require hyphens. When using a twenty-four hour clock, numerals are used.

The meeting was scheduled for three o’clock.

Hours of the day rule #3: No hyphen is needed when citing a time using a half or a quarter hour unless used in a compound modifier.

The meeting started fifteen minutes late, at a quarter after three, because one of the key presenters hadn’t arrived.

Fraction Rule #1: A hyphen is needed when writing out fractions whether they are used as nouns or modifiers.

Reduce the amount of time to bake by one-half. (a fraction used as a noun, the object of the preposition)
The recipe called for one-half cup of milk. (a fraction used as a modifier)

Fraction Rule #2: No hyphen is needed when writing out a whole number and a fraction together unless the combination is used as a compound modifier.

I walked three and three-quarters miles yesterday. (the number and fraction used as a simple modifier)
My three-and-three-quarter-mile walk took me just over an hour. (the number and fraction used as a compound modifier with the noun mile)

Price Rule: No hyphen is needed when writing out prices unless the numbers require a hyphen to be spelled correctly or if the numbers are part of a compound modifier.

I paid a dollar and seventy-five cents for a pastry at the bakery. (Seventy-five requires the hyphen because that’s how it is spelled.)
That dollar-and-seventy-five-cent pastry was the best I have tasted in years. (The full cost needs to be hyphenated because it is a compound modifier of pastry.)

Whenever I edit the work of someone else, I look closely at every hyphen to see if it is necessary. For times, fractions, and prices, the above rules apply. In other cases of hyphens between words, I check the dictionary or determine if the hyphenated words form a compound, multiple-word modifier.

Common Issues in Manuscripts Requiring Corrections: #3 Numbers

This is the third in a series of posts to address common issues I have found in manuscripts with my suggestions for how to improve manuscripts before turning them over to agents, editors, and the many other individuals involved in the process of turning a manuscript into a book.

#3 Writing out numbers vs using numerals

The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) offers two principles to determine when numbers should be spelled out and when numerals should be used. The general rule requires spelling out all numbers from zero to one hundred. The alternative rule requires spelling out numbers from zero through nine. This applies to ordinal variants such as first, second, third, and so on.

In general, when editing the works of others, I follow the first general rule in novels and the alternative rule for short stories or other short pieces.

But, CMS recommends different approaches in certain instances.

When including percentages, CMS recommends using the numerals with the spelled out word percent (Section 9.18 in the 16th edition). See the example below.

The U.S. current account deficit widened by $17.2 billion, or 10.6 percent, to $178.5 billion in the third quarter of 2020, according to statistics released by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. The revised second quarter deficit was $161.4 billion. The third quarter deficit was 3.4 percent of current dollar gross domestic product, up from 3.3 percent in the second quarter.
See Bureau of Economic analysis website

CMS provides an exception to that rule as well. The text of Section 9.18 in the 16th CMS edition begins, “Except at the beginning of a sentence . . .” since CMS advises numerals should not begin sentences.

The example above also illustrates the second CMS exception under certain circumstances, which allows for violating the general principles for the sake of consistency and flexibility. If a pargraph would otherwise include both numerals and spelled out numbers, follow the same pattern throughout each category of numbers. In the example above, the dollar values are represented by numerals, but references to the economic quarter, third, follows the general rule because the quarters and dollars are different categories.

In all cases, consider the reader and what would make it easier to understand. In many cases, numbers in a graph or chart simplify the readers’ task. The same BEA website includes many examples of charts and graphs.

The bottom line: The manuscript should be easy for the reader. If following the rules makes reading harder, break the rule as needed.

Common Issues in Manuscripts Requiring Corrections: #2 Quote Marks

I have noticed a number of common issues with texts I’ve edited over the years. Merriam-Webster.com and my copy of The Chicago Manual of Style are my most valuable tools to address them. In some cases, the issue isn’t one of grammar, punctuation, or even style but of formatting.

This is the second in a series of posts to address these issues with my suggestions for how all writers can improve their manuscripts before turning them over to agents, editors, and the many other individuals involved in the process of turning a manuscript into a book.

#2 Standardizing quotes as smart quotes

Microsoft Word offers two styles—smart quotes and straight quotes. Smart quotes, sometimes referred to as curly quotes, curve one direction to indicate when they open a quotation and curve the opposite direction to indicate when they close a quotation. Straight quotes appear the same no matter where they appear within text.

Don’t forget single quotes and apostrophes as well. An apostrophe may look the same as a closed smart quote, but if an apostrophe is at the beginning of a word, such as when it replaces an initial letter as in the word ’tis, be sure the mark is curving the correct direction, not as a smart open quote mark.

When editing someone’s work, I replace all straight quotes with smart quotes. This is easily done using Microsoft Word’s Find and Replace feature.

Complicating the issue of knowing whether you’ve used the right style is that some typefaces don’t really curl the quotes and apostrophes. The fonts embedded in the theme I’ve chosen for this blog, for example, display quotes that curl in the bold, indented portions, but in the regular text of this piece, the quotes appear straight, though the tops lean slightly to the left for open quotes and to the right for closed quotes.

When working on your manuscript, be sure to use a typeface that clearly displays whether the quotes are smart or straight, such as Times New Roman. Once you are certain all the quotes and apostrophes are correct, it won’t matter if you change it to a font that displays all quote marks as straight lines.

On the matter of where to place closing quotes at the ends of sentences, The Chicago Manual of Style continues to prefer closing quotes to appear outside periods and commas but inside other punctuation, such as semi-colons, colons, question marks, and exclamation points except when a question mark or exclamation point is part of the text being quoted. A number of online platforms, such as Medium.com, do not follow this style, preferring instead the style followed in Britain where the punctuation is included within quotes only if what is quoted includes the punctuation.

When editing someone’s work, I follow The Chicago Manual of Style on the placement of commas and periods inside quotation marks.

Common Issues in Manuscripts Requiring Corrections: #1 Hyphens

I have noticed a number of common issues with texts I’ve edited over the years. Merriam -webster.com online and my copy of The Chicago Manual of Style have been my most valuable tools to address them.

This is the first in a series of posts to address issues with my suggestions for how all writers can improve their manuscripts before turning them over to agents, editors, and the many other individuals involved in the process of turning a manuscript into a book.

#1 Inserting hyphens where they belong and removing from where they don’t

There are lots of rules for when to use a hyphen, including when two words are joined to serve as a single modifier for a noun. An example is thirteen-year-old girl. The three words that modify girl are joined by hyphens in order to clarify that none of the words alone is an adequate descriptor. The short video below illustrates why hyphens in such cases are essential to conveying the correct meaning to readers. It also points out that hyphens are not needed when the same multiple-word modifiers follow the noun they modify. Just in case it wasn’t confusing enough to begin with.

There is at least one exception—when the first word of a two-word modifier is an adverb ending in –ly. The rapidly advancing train does not need a hyphen between the rapidly and advancing before train. And this exception is likely one reason writers fail to insert hyphens in other instances of an adverb + adjective modifier.

But there is more to consider, especially when two words are used together as unique nouns or verbs. In the past, hyphens may have been used, but what once required a hyphen doesn’t always still require one. Consider that in the course of the 20th century good-by became goodbye and to-morrow became tomorrow.

Over time, concepts described using more than one word have evolved from words separated by a space into words being connected by a hyphen until eventually they are now written without a space or a hyphen. For example, the name of the great American pastime was written as two words in the nineteenth century: base ball. By the early twentieth century, it evolved into base-ball, and later in the last century, the hyphen dropped out and we have baseball.

I recommend relying on Merriam-Webster to learn when hyphens are needed. I can offer no shortcuts. There are no hard-and-fast (I had to look that one up) rules to explain how long a term must be in existence in hyphenated form before the hyphen is dropped. Since you’ll never know which words have reached that point and which have not, you just have to look them up. Or keep a list for your own reference.

When I edit someone else’s work, I remove hyphens that are not needed when I find merriam-webster.com now lists what once were two words used for a single concept to be single words. I recommend using Microsoft Word’s Find feature to locate each instance of a hyphen in order to identify words to look up. Be sure to look at the part of speech as well. Two words used as a verb may not need a hyphen, but the same two words used as an adjective may. For example, wake up as a verb does not need a hyphen, but wake-up as an adjective, such as in wake-up call, does. Don’t stop reading until you find the instance you need to confirm.

Holidays Around the World: Day of Unification in Romania

Each month in 2021 I plan to publish a short post about a holiday in the world that I believe is little known in this country. It is only coincidence that the first holiday I chose for January is Unification Day in Romania. But the synchronicity of this January holiday reflecting the concept of unification seems appropriate for our country which faces challenges to our unity on this, our 59th Inauguration Day. Can we learn anything from the Romanian Day of Unification, a holiday celebrating an event going back to 1862, as we observe our every-four-year Presidential Inauguration Day?

January 24, 2021, will be the 159th anniversary of the Romanian Day of Unification. I suspect most Americans may know little more about Romania than from their memories of the Christmas Day trial and execution in 1989 of that country’s despotic ruler, Nicolai Ceașescu, and that Dracula came from there. And that may raise the question in your mind of just what was unified on January 24 in 1862 that merits celebration now?

To explain, it’s necessary to go back to the second half of the nineteen century when much of central Europe remained under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. Their reach didn’t include the principalities that eventually unified as Romania in 1862, but both the Austro-Hungarians and the Ottoman Turks had claimed portions of the regions that eventually became Romania for centuries. That situation gave rise to leaders such as Vlad Țepeș, better known as Vlad the Impaler, who later served as the model for Dracula.

Though Țepeș played no role in the unification of Romania (which followed his rule by more than 400 years) he became a Romanian hero because of his bold stance against both the Austro-Hungarians and the Ottomans. Țepeș ruled Wallachia, the southernmost of two principalities that had existed independently side-by-side with one another and the Austro-Hungarians. The other was Moldavia in the northeast.

On January 24, 1862, Wallachia and Moldavia joined one another as the Unified Principalities. Another four years were needed to prepare a constitution that formalized the name Romania. It took another fifty years for three other regions, Transylvania in the west, Bessarabia in the east, and Bukovina in the north, to join with the Romanian Kingdom in 1918 at the conclusion of the First World War. December 1 marks that event as the Day of Great Union, the holiday considered Romania’s national day.

What impresses me most about the January 24 Day of Unification celebrations is that it was the beginning of unifying land into Romanian. It wasn’t the final unification. The holiday marks a smaller union within what eventually became modern Romania. (Unfortunately, that Romanian no longer exists. At the end of World War II the Allies snipped off bits of Bessarabia and Bukovina and turned them over to the Soviet Union which shrunk Romania to its current boundaries.) Nonetheless, Romania celebrates both the greater unification and the earlier, smaller unification.

And so I ponder: When will we in the United States begin to find ways to recognize and observe signs that mark our unification moments, both in the past and in the future? Are we prepared to search for common interests and begin celebrating them in place of remembering and observing events or symbols that divide us?

I hope that this day, Inauguration Day, will begin our search for healing.

Photo by Joshua Ghostine on Unsplash of Castle Bran, also referred to as Dracula’s Castle though Vlad Țepeș was never there.