Those snakes in the grass…
No, this isn’t about either political candidate—the whole election thing is getting to be a drag anyway. (I’ll be voting Green this year, foregoing the usual “vote for the lesser of two evils” that has made my entire electoral life miserable—so that’s settled.) This post is about editing. Yeah, I know. If you’re a reader, you just expect what you read to be well edited. “Skip the details and just do it,” you say. If you’re a writer, it’s one of those things that must be done as part of your job, but you’d rather just be writing. That reader is like your boss in the day-job; s/he doesn’t care how or when you do it, s/he just wants it done. Readers rule; so does your boss. Whether you’re indie and do it all, or traditionally published and just getting that next MS ready for an agent or editor when s/he asks for it, you have to edit.
I’ll let both readers and writers off easy. After 19 novels and 3 short story collections, I could write a whole book about editing, all kinds of editing—content and copy editing and proofreading, even if we don’t delve into the details of each one. Editing is a wee bit like that recurring nightmare where, night after night, you fall overboard from a cruise ship and become food for sharks. I do so much of it that I edit those streaming news tickers on newscasts, restaurant menus (I tend to avoid Chinese and Thai menus—can’t blame them really because English is so weird), and spoken speech on movie soundtracks. I catch many errors now, but here I’ll just talk about apostrophes. You’ll see the reason for the title of this post in a moment.
Guides to the proper use of apostrophes are legion, and most differ. Writers should pick one and be consistent about using it, at least throughout a novel. (That’s a meta-law about editing, by the way: be consistent!) What guide do I use? Not one recommended by writing gurus! As much as I criticize the NY Times, I use The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage. They make their own rules for “All the news that’s fit to print.” I follow their rules because I think journalism is the best thing to study if you’re going to become a writer (OK, that’s a stupid reason)—if you feel that you need to study something specific.
It’s much better than an MFA. The press doesn’t use flowery prose and boring narratives. While you can’t learn to write good dialogue in your studies, journalistic prose is more akin to minimalist writing in fiction (hard-boiled for mystery lovers), and that’s what I write—if you’re writing crime stories, it’s what you should write too, but I’m an advocate for all other genres as well, save for that genre that’s not really a genre, and sort of a trashcan for forlorn manuscripts, literary fiction. I suppose if you’re willing to have high school students hate you as English teachers force them to read your great American novel, go ahead and good luck. For the wannabe great American literary giant, an MFA could be a teeny step in that direction…maybe. Otherwise, pick journalism. It just might give you a well-paying job later on too, while an MFA might lead to your writing verses for greeting cards or fortune cookies, or becoming an agent or editor.
After all this hyperbole, let’s review a bit what the Times editors say about using apostrophes. Fortunately for me, it’s all spelled out on page 24 of my version. Generally speaking, an apostrophe is used to create the possessive form of a noun (bear’s) and indicate a contraction or omission: it’s for it is (why can’t MS Word’s grammar checker learn this?); ’16 for 1916 or 2016 (write out the whole year if there will be confusion). It’s used for plurals of letters, numbers, and acronyms: p’s and q’s; on the 7’s; TV’s. (There’s some confusion possible here too: According to the Times, “you have four TV’s in your home” and “sad state of TV’s sitcoms” are both correct. English isn’t precise, my friends, and so much is left to context.)
But those possessives can often be my Waterloo. For a singular possessive not ending in -s, no problema: boy’s. For a plural possessive where the noun doesn’t end in –s, same thing: women’s. Nouns ending in –s, whether singular or plural, give me headaches. If you catch one error in my prose, it’s likely to be an example of this. The Times wants boys’ but they also want James’s. Now we’re getting into the snakes in the grass: What are you going to write when multiple James possess something? James’s’s? And you’re to omit the –s if the possessing noun is followed by a sibilant: Texas’ population instead of Texas’s population. It’s enough to make you chew your fingernails. Take a name like Onassis, consider more than one (Ari and Jacky), and I suppose you’d get the Onassis’s’s yacht show but also Onassis’s pastimes, where you’d have no idea whether it was just Aristotles’s or Jacky’s or both (that sibilant –p). Onassis’s’s is, of course, a real snake in the grass (I’m not speaking badly of the dead, only about the s’s and apostrophes).
Did you think that all words ending in –s just added an apostrophe? I seem to remember learning that in sixth or seventh grade and having such rules hammered into me in high school. It isn’t that simple, whether you follow the Times’ manual (Times is considered singular, by the way, while times is plural, but a book about time zones would still be called a times’ manual—I’m confused, so you must be!) Who knows? Maybe I’ve got this all wrong, but I’d’ve got it wrong using any other manual too (by the way, I’d’ve is a correct use of apostrophes—no snakes but unwieldy as hell, yet I’ve seen one writer use it). No wonder people whose mother tongue isn’t English have such difficulties. Spanish was orderly and efficient for me in comparison. Anyone for Esperanto?
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