Free style

It can be risky fishing for business in the uncharted waters of the internet. What may seem like a goldfish nibbling the bait dangling from your website may be a shark who'll savage your tasty offer and swim off without remorse.

In other words, whenever someone you don’t know approaches you through your website, asking for a free sample before committing to paying for your professional language services, be very cautious indeed.

Silly me, I let myself get bitten this week. The "shark" was a researcher in material sciences based somewhere in the Far East. As a rule I don’t do samples because I think the client recommendations on my business website let people know what they can expect from my copywriting or editing services. But the sun was shining, I’d just landed a huge book to edit over the summer and was in a generous mood so, why not?

I told Dr So Me-One (as I think of this "someone") that I’d be glad to do a sample one-page edit from the paper he intended submitting for publication in the Journal of Materials Processing Technology (JMPT).

The quality of Dr So Me-One’s English was generally fine. After checking that the paper complied with the JMPT submission guidelines, I whizzed through editing the sample. Then I sent off the corrected page with a comment pointing to the one and only confusing sentence I hadn’t managed to decipher. I offered an interpretation, and politely asked Dr So Me-One to let me know if I’d gotten his meaning right.

Well, dear Reader, it took another three sets of e-mails before that one sentence was clarified. And then, at the end of this lengthy exchange, Dr So Me-One dove back into the nether depths, never to surface near me again and leaving me ruefully aware that this shark had bitten off far more of my time than I’d ever intended to serve, certainly for free.

Live and learn, and on the upside, it was a useful little lesson. It reminded me (a) to be wary of strangers wanting something for nothing and (b) even better, it led me to the serendipitous discovery of one of the best style guides to academic writing I’ve ever come across. Writing a good paper for JMPT is clearly written for material scientists submitting to JMPT, but I think authors in any academic field would benefit from its free advice. Take a look at this sample:

"What readers like is clarity about the purpose of the work, clarity about how it fits into previous work, clarity about what was done and clear evaluation of the outcomes without any hint of ‘salesmanship’. Inexperienced writers often make statements of the type ‘the model and experiments showed perfect agreement’ where actually the statement ‘the model matched the experiments well within normal operating conditions, but was never less than 20% inaccurate outside of this range’ is both more honest and more useful."

Go read the rest of the article now. Or at least bookmark the link and check it out later. I’m trying to find out who wrote this epitome of lucidity so I can give the author proper credit. Watch this space!

Before I go, here’s another link for lovers of style, free or otherwise. Arts & Letters Daily is an old favourite of mine, updated six days a week and edited by Denis Dutton. Besides lecturing in philosophy at the University of Canterbury (NZ) and writing critically respected and popular books, Prof. Dutton is editor of Philosophy and Literature and, incidentally, was the driving force behind that scholarly journal’s notoriously funny Bad Writing Contest.

Let me leave you now with something at once free and stylish yet completely different: Anky van Grunsven of the Netherlands riding the sublime Salinero in the freestyle dressage final of the World Equestrian Games. Enjoy, and see you next week!

Very Bunny

As Easter draws near it is time for my annual confession. Yes, dear Reader, I’m not Ragini Werner, your freelance editor and author’s friend who’s been faffing about online blowing NEEDSer’s horn to all and sundry (more sundry than all at this early stage). No indeed. I am in fact the Easter Bunny. You’d never have guessed it, but I do declare it’s true. I am the Bunny. Not just any Bunny, the Dutch Easter Bunny or Hare to be precise: Paashaas.
Perhaps I should explain, for those of us not bilingual. For starters, paashaas may look like one word but it’s actually two (the Dutch do this joining up thing a lot) (like the Germans do) (well, stands to reason, Dutch is a Germanic language). To un-Dutch eyes it may look like it but you don’t say paashaas like ‘pash-ass’ (as in: kiss my donkey with fervour). It sounds just like the open vowel of the plural of Dad (repeat after me: Papas) and the open (etc.) plural of laughs (say again: ha-ha’s). Now, join up the dads with the laughs and hey presto, you got it! Paashaas.

Moving on quickly now, paas also rhymes with the plural of Mum (see below) and even the planet Mars, but in that case only without you saying the ‘r’. Did you know Dutch spelling is very WYSIWY Hear and that’s really handy but o yea verily, don’t get me started on spelling, that’s a whole other kettle of vis. To return to our lesson: when you add ‘r’ to paas you get paars which sounds like ‘parse’ (I know it’s hard, but do try to keep up) and paars means ‘purple’ and as an adjective it gets inflected when placed before a noun (unless the noun is neuter). In short, I am the Paarse Paashaas, otherwise known as the Purple Easter Bunny. And that's definitive!

What’s that harrumph? Don’t tell me you’re not convinced. But Reader, my dear, it’s elementary (or alimentary considering how many chocky bunnies head down that canal come Easter time). I am positively, existentially purple. Long ago I settled into my purple haze. I love purple. Take a look at how I use it in this blog, better yet click over to the NEEDSer business site and check out the purple there. Any e-mail reader of mine can attest to my propensity for typing in purple (fittingly so, I always feel, considering my proclivity for purple prose). I could go on (and on) but let me rest my case: Purpurata, ergo sum. ‘Clad in purple, therefore I am.’

Thank goodness we’ve settled the purply bit. Yet how does that parse with the bunny bit? See here, snapped for your eyes only, your not so bashful Blagger caught snoozing on the job. Either that, or it’s my holier than a rabbit warren look. If this shock-doc depiction of me having a bad hare day doesn’t convince you, then I really don’t know what could.

And what’s all this got to do with anything important? Well, my babbling on about Dutch is not mere digression. It’s my mad March hare-y way of pointing you to the best guide for sorting out the quirks and oddities of ‘Dunglish’. Living in the Netherlands, as I do, I do lots of work for people who write English with a Dutch accent = Dunglish. My job is to edit out the Dunglish and to do that well I often dip into one of my favourite stylebooks: Righting English That’s Gone Dutch by Joy Burrough-Boenisch, linguist, editor/translator and fellow member of the Dutch-based professional association SENSE, the Society of English-Native-Speaking Editors. Burrough-Boenisch may be writing on a serious subject, but she has a lovely light touch. Her puns still get me laughing, no matter how often I read them. Clear writing and clever wordplay, what more could a word-lover want?

I leave you now with Mama Cass Elliot, who (I am told) once told a reporter that prior to its release this hit song was nearly called Getting Bunny, Every Day. A case, perhaps of hare today, gone tomorrow? See you next week!

Lucid in the Sky

Lucille the cat was always clear: no one, not even me, her trusted tin-opener, was ever going to touch her tummy. If you strayed too close, out would come those diamond-sharp claws and take that! And that and that and that! Dear little Lucille never learnt the difference between overkill and making a point but who could blame her for being being transparent? Point is, she was always admirably clear in her catty communication. And before you start thinking that she was some bitch trollcat from hell, let me assure you that she was really a rather placid old puss who lived to a golden age and purred her wee chops off whenever she got what she wanted: a tin full of “Whiskas”.

Shy Lucille never lived up to her crabby namesake, Lucy van Pelt, from the Peanuts strip by Charles Schultz[1]. Once upon another time I played Lucy in the musical, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Yes, dear Reader, nipping my dream of budding into a ballerina (see last week’s episode) I turned into a thespian and roamed the repertory theatres of New Zealand. My not-so brilliant career was shortlived yet loads of fun and led to a nice collection of newspaper clippings. One such is a publicity shot for Lucy captioned “She’s no singer”. The piccy shows me posed, arm aloft, gob open like Brünnhilde--broad of The Ring--but the words say that I’m not warbling Wagner, just catching a ball. Which is clearly the cue for the lucid Miss Ball, whose ditsy facial expressions were such a loony part of her TV show “I heart Lucy”.


But I digress (well, not really). What’s inspired this week’s episode has less to do with this giddy trio of Lucilles than one sentence in the introduction of The Economist Style Guide. “Do your best to be lucid”, it says and goes on to quote Stendhal, “I see but one rule: to be clear”. I couldn’t agree more.

Yes I know, The Economist Style Guide needs no boost from me, even in our economic climate, but if you happen to be looking for a guide to writing that actually practices what it teaches[2], I’d say unto thee, choose this one. Jane Steinberg explains why on Amazon.com: “Rare is the style guide that a person--even a word person--would want to read cover to cover. But The Economist Style Guide, designed, as the book says, to promote good writing, is so witty and rigorous as to be irresistible.” I couldn’t resist it and leave you now with an irresistible example of psychodelic lucidity. Fly high, land safely and see you next week!

Footnotes
[1] In keeping with Lucy van Pelt's habit of demanding 5¢ for her psychiatric help, this week’s la-la-la Lucy Poll demands that you tick the sum you’d pay in £sd (sterling) for this episode.
[2] Have a look at this brief lesson on text revision. First one to spot the RAW (“Read And Weep”) mistake wins the Blagger’s first RAW Award. I invite you to use Comments to inquire about your prize and/or to share your own examples of editorial hubris. We live to learn, yes even the Blagger.