In honour of the seventh day of the seventh month, here’s a shot from last fall of my lucky odometer. Not often you see that!
But here’s the thing: Like all things in life, everything depends on how you look at it.
This is a lucky odometer if you believe the number seven has some significance. So what’s my problem?
Using my feeble math skills, these sevens mean there’s only 2,223 km left in my lease agreement. So take my average km usage per month X the 10 months left to go on the lease = the fact that I seem to be, well…Robertsoned!**
**(Canadian proprietary noun: a threaded metal fastening device featuring a unique square indentation on the head. More on Robertson.)
. . . you own four English dictionaries, two style guides (okay, one’s technically on loan), a thesaurus, a French-English dictionary and a rhyming dictionary . . .
. . . and you actually use them all.
How can I possibly use them when every computer comes with a built-in dictionary and thesaurus and often a grammar checker? Easy. There are things that the computer just doesn’t catch. I do use those computer functions, but I don’t rely on them exclusively.
I work sometimes as a freelance copy editor. A publication will have a house style and that includes following a particular dictionary. It goes without saying that I’d better have that same dictionary. I have never yet been told that that dictionary is Microsoft Word. I repeat, Not yet.
Words can have more than one correct spelling. The one that gets published comes down to the dictionary the publisher decides to follow. Canadian spellings freak out my computer software. Red lines everywhere! And computer dictionaries don’t catch when a word’s spelling depends on the meaning intended or how the word is used in the particular sentence. Think: they’re, their, or there. They are all spelled correctly so a spell check wouldn’t flag this as wrong: There party is they’re on the street where their doing construction.
Sorting out spellings and meanings and grammar rules can be a headache. You definitely have to like obsessing about this stuff. But there’s this awesome moment of triumph when you zero in on a typo and then blast it from the face of the paper or screen forever. Gotcha! Hah! You just have to hope the 95 percent rule kicks in when you miss one (you know, the one that says 95 percent of people reading it won’t have noticed).
Some things I’ve had to wrestle with recently:
Is it raccoon or racoon?
phosphorus or phosphourus?
give away or giveaway?
awhile or a while?
through, threw, or thru?
compliment or complement?
affect or effect? (I hate that one!)
and finding the use of “jester” where “gesture” was what was needed put me in a good mood for hours.
But don’t assume then that this blog is free from typos or grammar mistakes, okay? ‘Cause while I try to be correct if I had to obsess over that stuff here too I’d never ever get around to posting.
Here’s a tale about a note that came home from school awhile back. It caused me complete confusion. Why? Because of a bad line break.
It was a slip of paper with all the various possible comments that could be applied to the particular project presented in a series of boxes. In word processing terms, think of a table with text in each box. The circled box, and hence comment on my kid’s project, read:
Understandable
rule but needs
more to be
clear
Excuse me? Needs more to be? As in it needs to be clearer? As in: I need more to be speaking English better?
Surely I wasn’t seeing things correctly. So I looked again at that little slip of paper. I must have read it 10 times. But then it hit me: the line breaks were making me read each line as a phrase. I was reading those words together, such as in a poem, so that meant I was reading the ungrammatical “more to be” together as some sort of dialect or expression that should have no place in a formal marking scheme.
But if I read it as a whole sentence it’s fine, sorta: Undertandable rule but needs more to be clear.
Okay, I got it that way. Needs to add more content to be a clearer rule. Or, broken properly with line breaks:
Understandable rule
but needs more
to be clear.
There. Much clearer. Line breaks do matter. In poems…and apparently in marking schemes.
On Friday I visited the school I attended as a kid, Kilbride Public School. What fun to go back to the place that had such a huge influence on me. My talk was in the library and, while it wasn’t in the same physical location as it was when I went there to school, it was quite amazing to be there again.
I talked to students from grades K to 4 (at different times) about Let’s Go! and The Nature Treasury as well as about the process of writing and editing a book. They tried to convince me that some of them had taken the space shuttle to school, but I wasn’t biting. (Although it may be possible that one or all of them could travel in space by the time they’re grownups.) What a terrific group of kids. Thanks to everyone for listening. I hope that all of you go for your dreams.
And thanks, too, to Sharon and Ruth for organizing the visit.
