Heds made easy

Here's the basic, when-in-doubt, fallback rule for writing news headlines: Look for the first independent clause, determine who did what to whom, and write about that. 

North Korea criticized the U.S. on Sunday for slapping new economic sanctions on government officials and organizations Friday after a cyberattack on Sony Pictures — the latest fallout from a Hollywood movie depicting the fictional assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

So even if you (hem) missed the "Friday" in the lede or (kaff) didn't read the brief at the same spot on 2A Saturday:

... your old friend grammar will come to the rescue. Let the relative clauses or participial phrases help you pick meaningful nouns and verbs, but when you have to write a hed in a hurry, ask who did what to whom, and that will tell you how today is different from yesterday, and there's your headline.

Why bother? To be strictly mercenary about it, the War on Editing is not going to end well for us if we can't show that we're doing something useful -- for example, actually reading the stuff before we pick out a few big words to entice and alarm the audience. If what we're doing instead is -- well, let's move down to the fourth brief in the column:

The 54-year-old second son of Queen Elizabeth II was named in papers filed with a Florida court last week as part of the woman’s lawsuit against American financier Jeffrey Epstein, whom she says forced her to have sex with prominent people. The woman claims she was forced to have sex with the royal in London, in New York and on a private Caribbean island between 1999 to 2002.

That's quite a bit of trimming and moving around, the upshot of which is to insert an error in the AP's already tormented prose:

The filing was submitted as part of a lengthy lawsuit against American financier Jeffrey Epstein, who the woman claims forced her to have sex with prominent people, including Prince Andrew.

I'm glad we got rid of the "claims," though the effect is somewhat lost when the "sex with the royal" graf is tacked on, with "claims" intact. If you wanted to fix some grammar, on the other hand, there's this on page 4A:

Scott, who suffers from insomnia, tried flotation at the NeuroFitness Center in Southfield, one of three places in Michigan that has flotation tanks, after a friend recommended it.

The relative clause is pointing to "places," not "one," so it needs "have." There's a reason variations of this one are going to show up several times over the course of the semester. You'd be surprised how much trouble you can stay out of -- in heds and text -- if you pay attention to the grammary bits.

How about "sanctions" as a hed verb? Correct grammar, unpleasant usage. "Sanction," meaning to confirm or authorize, has been around since the late 18th century; the OED dates the "impose sanctions on" meaning to 1956. I won't sit around and tell you it's "wrong," but I'll be happy to tell you I dislike it. Not nearly as much as "defend" to mean guard an opposing player ("Smith defends Jones," as in the football cutline on 1C), which doesn't seem to have reached the dictionary's notice yet, but certainly enough to gently suggest changing it. Ignoring the rules is a poor way to win that discussion, and it's not going to be much help next time the desk has to defend a position from the budget ax, either.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2015/01/04/5424091/palace-sex-claims-against-prince.html#.VKtOXcnfWuI#storylink=cpy

Basics of editing: Forbidden verbs

Here's the basic cutline rule again: Don't tell me what I'm seeing. Tell me why I'm seeing it. Follow that rule and you'll never be tempted to write "celebrates" when you can write about what's being celebrated. If the touchdown was, as the game story contends, the most significant play of the first half, borrow that description: "Michigan's Devin Furness took a pass that appeared headed for a Penn State defender and walked it in for a 43-yard touchdown in the first quarter."

As for "shares a laugh with," just don't.

Canon to right of them

A bad week in spelling -- more broadly, in "having somebody look at the stuff before you print it" -- is coming to a painful end downtown:

Tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman, the 2014 artist-in-residence, exploded out of the gate as if shot out of a canon in his inaugural set at Cadillac Square in the heart of downtown.

OK, maybe everyone was blinded by the explosion of good writering, which only gets gooder as it proceeds:

Beyond the music tonight, there was a noticeable change in the city’s psyche. The last year has not been easy for Detroit. The city’s bankruptcy has produced a hornet’s nest of conflict and pain, creating a thick fog of civic angst that has sometimes made it hard to remember the undeniable seeds of the city’s rebirth.

... but enough evidence has piled up over the past few days to call for a reminder of the Basic Rule of spellering: If you don't know how to spell a word, look it up. If you think you do, look it up anyway. As in this from Thursday:

For millions of children across the country, walking alone to school is a right of passage.

Wrong write. You want a ritual of passage, not some sort of entitlement to passage. And the online hed is too good to overlook:

 

And there's this from a 1A feature on Monday -- now fixed online, though the transposition bumble in the second graf remains:

Sanders bounced back from near-oblivion to a become growing national player in desserts and candy.


The con- fectioner, also known for its ice cream and hot fudge topping, has seen double-digit sales growth over the last three years, fueled in part by native Michiganders buying the products they remember from their childhoods, said company President Ron Rapson, who said annual sales are about $25 million.

Pick on spelling with care; the only sure result of catching an error is committing one yourself in the booking process. But this much negligence in this many prominent places in a couple of days suggests a flaw in the machine. If you don't take the finished product seriously, you shouldn't expect your readers to.

Don't do any of this

If you have to lead the front page with a poll (and you don't), you should at least try to avoid contradicting your main hed in your deck -- or your lead graf in your second graf:

LANSING — Democratic challenger Mark Schauer has edged ahead of Gov. Rick Snyder by two percentage points, according to a new poll of likely voters in the Nov. 4 election.

The results from EPIC-MRA of Lansing come just before the Labor Day holiday which is seen as the kickoff of the main campaign season and were released exclusively to the Free Press, WXYZ-TV (Channel 7) and statewide media partners. A 2-point lead is within the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, meaning the race remains a statistical dead heat.

You can be leading, or you can be in a dead heat, but you can't be doing both at the same time. (No, there's no such thing as a "statistical dead heat," and if there was, it wouldn't be defined by a meaningless term like "within the poll's margin of error.") A safe conclusion from these results is that both candidates' support has changed since July. Schauer, the Democrat, is doing a little better, while Snyder, the Republican, is doing a little worse. Both changes (43% to 45% and 46% to 43%) are also "within the margin of error," but they're both also meaningful. The smaller one has roughly two chances in three of accurately reflecting the value in the whole population, rather than being an accident of sampling. A good headline summary might be "Race still hypothetically tight, and things probably changed a little, but still maybe not" which in turn is a good argument for not leading the paper with poll stories.
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Word matters order

Does this mean official cookouts can finally begin after Labor Day? Or (alas) that another editor failed to step in and help a food feature say what it meant, rather than what it said?

Here's a handy tip. If you can put a comma between two adjectives before a noun, their order doesn't matter:

A cold, rainy morning

A rainy, cold morning

If you can't, that should be a sign unto you that their order does matter. Some textbooks call these "cumulative" adjectives, because the meaning builds up as they go along:

What kind of cookout? An unofficial one. What kind of unofficial cookout? The last one.

What the writer means, you'd like to suspect, is that Labor Day is somehow the informal end of cookout season, or the unofficial last cookout (why Michiganians don't mind being characterized as such complete weenies about cooking outside, I don't know). Sometimes, word order really does matter.

While we're at it?

Brining chicken can add a layer of flavor and provides a cooking cushion, taking the guesswork out of overcooking it, even boneless, skinless chicken breast.

If you've tried it before, you'll recall that there's almost no guesswork involved in overcooking a chicken breast. The story got its feet crossed somewhere between "takes the guesswork out of cooking chicken" and "reduces the risk of overcooking chicken."

And a few more points for the Never Do This list from the food section. Never tell people what "we" usually think, and never use exclamation points to end your lede! Especially if it's as exciting as this one!

(Updated to fix a couple of the things editors catch, with appreciation to the editor who caught them)

Editing basics: Post hoc, ergo shut up

No, you can't go home after you run the spellcheck. Somebody still has to look at the stuff and make sure it's true about all the things it's allegedly being accurate about -- even if, or especially if, the glass offices desperately want it to be so.

Such, alas, is the case with the offlede from today's Washington Times:

... Since Illinois started granting concealed carry permits this year, the number of robberies that have led to arrests in Chicago has declined 20 percent from last year, according to police department statistics. Reports of burglary and motor vehicle theft are down 20 percent and 26 percent, respectively. In the first quarter, the city’s homicide rate was at a 56-year low.

Pretty interesting correlation there. Too bad a clear conscience and a pure heart can't turn correlation into cause, no matter what your first named source says:

Read more »

Editing basics: Stick to the question

Sometimes the nice folks at Ask the Editor just take their, and everybody else's, eye off the ball:

Q. Regarding the use of gender neutral nomenclature, how should we refer to manholes and manhole covers? – from San Francisco on Wed, Aug 13, 2014

A. Use the impersonal pronoun it for an inanimate object.

Yes, but that's not the issue, is it? Nobody's really wondering whether a manhole cover, like a noble ship of the line, ought to be "she" on second reference, or whether such decisions show us as we want to be seen in the great social scheme of things. The writer has a simple question, and a simple answer -- how about "utility hole"? -- will let everybody go about their business.

Lesson for editors: Don't overthink the easy ones. The nearest exit may be behind you. Time you waste is time you can't spend on something that matters.

Editing basics: That's what 'corrections' means

That "corrections" label at the top? It means the story got something wrong (or "gave erroneous information," or "had incorrect information"). You don't need to repeat that in the text. The correction needs to explain what you got wrong and then provide any necessary non-incorrect information.

The "erroneous information" about the first appears to be its appearance in a breakout box of downtown stores that "have recently closed" (why that includes a Caribou that closed a year ago is a different question). As for the "incorrect information" about the second -- imagine if you had people around the office who read stuff before it was published and considered it their job to ask questions like, you know,  whether two Spanish-themed coffee shops was a little much, even by Royal Oak standards. You could call those people "copy editors." (One of them might have also pointed out that the last sentence in a paragraph only needs one period, not two, and that you don't usually follow a question mark with a comma, but that's getting into the rest of the article.)

Streak and eggs: Spellcheck won't save you

Today's lesson in editing basics: Spellcheck is a tool, not a colleague. Ask it whether you spelled anything wrong in the hed above, and it's not going to go out of its way to say "No, but ..."

Speaking of which: What's the latest from Iraq, Fair 'n' Balanced Network?

In addition, a senior U.S. official said the effort to retake the damn is mostly a Kurdish Peshmerga operation.

When you're dealing with human prose, there's no substitute for the human brain. If you wouldn't ask a screwdriver to do your thinking for you, why rely on a computer?

Editing basics: Let me be your salty dog

 How salty were those fries, Nation's Newspaper of Record?

Because of an editing error, an article on Thursday about the elimination of reduced-fat French fries in some Burger King outlets misstated the number of stores that decided to eliminate the item, called Satisfries. It is slightly fewer than 5,000, not about 7,500. The article also misstated the amount of sodium in Satisfries and regular fries. Satisfries have 300 milligrams of sodium, not 300 grams; regular fries have 480 milligrams, not 480 grams.

We'll be reviewing some of the basic rules of copy editing in the weeks ahead (there is, after all, a new semester closing in), so here's one to start with: Whenever you see two numbers, do something with them. That doesn't mean you should turn every proportion into a percentage, or every mean into a median, at first sight. It should suggest that your first reaction upon seeing a number -- let's say, "six" -- in a news story shouldn't be "omg SIX!!!!!" Rather, you should look the number, and the person waving it at you, squarely in the eye and ask: Six of what?

In this case, you might be asking: What does 300 grams of something mean in real money? Whether you get to the answer by flipping open your stylebook or by looking things up on the Googles, you're going to arrive in a similar place: An order of regular fries doesn't come with a pound of salt, even if all the weight of salt came from sodium by itself.

Broadly speaking, there's little you can do as a copy editor that's more valuable than to have some suspicion about the things you're looking at. It's risky to overstate the role of common sense, but here, it's a rather good starting point.