Editing Foibles

I spent all day editing today. First there was a chapter in a book I’m working on. Then I plowed through two works of fiction and a screenplay by my students. Add to that the segments of three novels by three peers in a novel-writing class I’m taking and another stack of students' papers.

All of the folks whose stuff I read are in grad school, and they all write well—some extremely well. Yet I encountered some of the same punctuation errors again and again. Here are a few of the biggies:

Everyday. This word means ordinary, not daily. If you want daily, you have to put a space in there: every day. I served dinner on my everyday dishes, which we use every day.

The p’s and q’s of m’s and n’s. A hyphen and an n-dash and an m-dash each have different purposes. A hyphen joins words or portions of words, such as x-ray and re-read. We use n-dashes in numerical situations: See 1 Corinthians 13:1–4. And we use m-dashes for setting off parenthetical remarks: I told him I’d be there—barring any unforeseen circumstances—at 7 o’clock sharp.

Hyphens. Hyphenation problems plague even the most experienced writers. If someone has a minor illness, doctors may classify it as a non-life-threatening disease. The hyphens have to go in there. You can’t have a non-life threatening disease, or a nonlife threatening disease (what sort of non-life form is it and what disease was it threatening to spread?). Go with the hyphens when they’re working as a group to modify. If you are a punctuation-challenged person, the best way I know to laugh your way to proper usage is to read Eats, Shoots and Leaves. You know…it’s the one about the panda that walks into a bar, and then he eats, shoots, and leaves. Yeah, most people think pandas eat shoots and leaves, but not with that comma in there they don’t.

In other news, did you watch the opening Olympic ceremonies? The highlight, as usual, was the torch-lighting. Breathtaking stuff. The low? Hmm. I think my husband would say Yoko Ono reading from a piece of paper what she could have easily memorized. Was that three sentences or four? And me? I cast my vote for the racecar spinning in circles and creating smoke. Let the games begin!