Blue Moon; it’s Advantage Romney; revealing less secrets

View 739 Friday, August 31, 2012

Blue Moon tonight. For a good explanation of what that used to mean, and what it means now, see

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/08/31/last-blue-moon-until-2015-lights-up-night-sky-tonight/

Look up tonight and remember Neil Armstrong.

Romney was presidential. His speech went well, and there were no mistakes. The Republicans now have the advantage. And I thought Eastwood was hilarious. It’s time for our walk. More later.

Does grammar matter? When I first got into this racket, Mr. Heinlein was kind enough to critique some of my work. He was not only specific, but included some generalities. One of them involved grammar. His position was that meticulous use of proper grammar was important, not because he was a grammarian, but because those who cared about proper grammar cared a lot, and those who didn’t would not be offended by good grammar. I suspected that he was more ardent about the subject than that, but I ever had that conversation. He did require me to pledge that I would get Skillin and Gay Words Into Type, and read it once a year until I was familiar with it. It was good advice and I have never regretted keeping that pledge. When text editors acquired the art of spelling and grammar checking I immediately turned them on. It’s not that I am a slave to them. I generally decline the advice that Microsoft offers. I use Word,. Its grammar check isn’t awful, but the old Word Perfect had a better grammar checker. I don’t ignore the little green lines, but I don’t ignore them.

Byte had a full crew of both technical and style/grammar editors, and indeed that was a good part of BYTE’s strength. The magazine began by taking scholarly articles by engineers and academics and hammering them into readability, and one reason I was popular with the editorial staff was that it didn’t take much work to make my columns publishable. It took some, and I benefitted from them; I tend to use run-on sentences, and to make sentences far too long. I suppose I got into that habit from reading Macaulay. And even after we worked very hard on Mote in God’s Eye we were astonished at the number of changes the Simon and Schuster copy editors wanted in the manuscript. Some of them were simply due to misunderstanding: S&S wasn’t a science fiction house, and some of our constructions were both ungrammatical and confusing. We rewrite those and when we had to we insisted on saying it our way rather than the way some style manual wanted us to say it; but I will have to say that the result was a much better story. I know that most authors believe that copy editors are the class enemy, and all of us complain about stodgy old grammarians turning our dynamic prose into stodgy gump, but I for one am grateful to my copy editors at BYTE and at my publishing houses. Indeed one of my major concerns about the eBook era is that many books will now be published without any copy editing, and the result may not be all that good.

Of course some authors disagree. Today I saw a short screed from an author celebrating the eBook publication of his first novel, this time with the author’s original words rather than the copy editor’s. He calls it an author’s cut. Moreover, he’s a professor. And in his exposition he says he rejoices in his new edition because *I accepted too many copy-editor ticks (though much less than in my earlier works).”

I suppose the world has changed, and it no longer matters.

For those who don’t know what I am talking about, a copy editor would have insisted on changing that to read (though many fewer than in my earlier works). Which probably illustrates Mr. Heinlein’s point: fewer and fewer readers will care about grammar, but some, including old fogies like me, will notice.

I expect there’s a serious essay lurking in this, but day is getting hotter, and I do have other work to do.

CBS predicted last night that the talk shows would concentrate on Clint Eastwood’s odd ad lib performance, and ignore everything else that happened in Tampa last night. That seems to be happening in some cases, but I don’t see how that will affect the election. Romney was presidential, everyone else was supportive, and it was a great night.

The President has the prerogative to leak anything he likes. A Chief Petty Officer does not. The White House formally released part of the bin Laden story and leaked a lot more of it. I haven’t read the Mark Owens book, but apparently it doesn’t give away any classified information that the President hasn’t already revealed. But now the DOD wants all the royalties from the Mark Owns book. I knew the country was desperate broke, but are we that bad off?

I confess mixed emotions on all of this. When there was a serious effort to have me write the Delta Force story with Charlie Beckwith we had many discussions about this. There are conflicting principles involved. I wish the Chief well, but he did sign a contract to allow the Agency to review the book. Of course if he had submitted it for review there might have been fewer than a thousand words (none consecutive) left when they got through with the manuscript. But you knew the job was dangerous when you took it….