Grant recommends two blogs about writing well and copyediting: Merrill Perlman writes The Language Corner blog for the Columbia Journalism Review, and Philip B. Corbett of the New York Times reports on actual grammatical and usage mistakes in that newspaper in his blog, After Deadline. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Blogs on Writing Well”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.
And I’m Grant Barrett. Martha, I spend my days in the trenches of editing and copy editing. You know, when I’m not doing the show.
Well, I’ve got to tell you, one really nice thing about it is that it just trains you to edit text really fast. It’s kind of a high-speed approach. You’ve got a deadline coming. This stuff needs to be clean. You’ve got to read everything. No time for fooling around.
Right. Deadlines are handy. And so you’re looking for shortcuts, right? You want to learn from other people’s mistakes.
Well, there are two blogs that I read that let me learn from the mistakes of the pros. One of these blogs is The Language Corner at the Columbia Journalism Review. Merrill Perlman edits this. She used to be the director of copy desks at the New York Times. And she just talks about errors, you know, style errors, copyediting errors, the things that people are doing wrong that she finds in the reading that she does of professional journalists.
For example, she recently tackled overnight, but she tackled it as a noun instead of the usual adverb. Like, you know, it’s going to rain overnight as opposed to it’ll get colder in the overnight.
The overnight? The overnight?
Yeah, the overnight. Yeah, interesting, right? She does a ton of this stuff, and so I can read her stuff, and she doesn’t talk about the outliers. She talks about the common mistakes, the things people are doing repeatedly.
Another blog which does exactly the same thing, also associated in one way or the other with the New York Times, is by Philip Corbett. This is the After the Deadline blog. It’s on the topic section of the New York Times. Philip will write about the mistakes actually in the pages of the New York Times.
Oh, wow. Airing the dirty copy laundry.
Yeah, the mistakes that have slipped through.
Oh, wow. Genius, right? Because it actually gives them more credibility, not less, when they talk about their mistakes.
Exactly. So the kind of thing that he talks about, I loved this one. He pointed out how many times that newspaper has misspelled the names of Alberto Gonzalez, Warren Buffett, and Danielle Steele.
Was there a little chart?
No, not a chart, but they do it with frequency because these names are just a little less obvious than you would think.
Oh, really? So lovely blogs. We’ll link to these both, the Language Corner at the Columbia Journalism Review after the deadline from the New York Times.
If you’ve got some blogs to recommend about language, drop us a line, words@waywordradio.org, or give us a call, 877-929-9673.
