Jose Carillo's Forum

MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH

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Team up with me in My Media English Watch!

I am inviting Forum members to team up with me in doing My Media English Watch. This way, we can further widen this Forum’s dragnet for bad or questionable English usage in both the print media and broadcast media, thus giving more teeth to our campaign to encourage them to continuously improve their English. All you need to do is pinpoint every serious English misuse you encounter while reading your favorite newspaper or viewing your favorite network or cable TV programs. Just tell me about the English misuse and I will do a grammar critique of it.

Read the guidelines and house rules for joining My Media English Watch!

How substantive editing differs from just correcting for grammar

I would like to present a very interesting, very instructive, and I must say very provocative feedback from a professional editor about the grammar-and-usage critiques I’ve been doing in My Media English Watch. Norman P. Aquino, who registered as a Forum member last August 25, 2011, is currently connected with the international business newspaper Financial Times and was previously associate editor of BusinessWorld for nearly 13 years and briefly business editor of GMA Network.   

Norman’s feedback:

When editing copy, one does not only correct it for grammatical errors. You also need make it more readable and usually, that means cutting a long sentence, eliminating verbal deadwood, using action words and starting off with the main clause.

[The lead sentences below and the versions I corrected for grammar were taken by Norman from my August 7, 2011 critiques, “When newspaper reporting confuses rather than informs and clarifies.”]

Original:
“A week after an animal rights group offered a P100,000 reward for any information leading to their arrest, a couple believed to be involved in the production and sale of gruesome ‘fetish’ videos showing small animals being tortured to death by scantily clad girls were arrested by the police in Burgos town, La Union.”

Your corrected version:

“A week after an animal rights group offered a P100,000 reward for any information leading to their capture, a couple were arrested by police in Burgos town, La Union, for their alleged involvement in the production and sale of gruesome ‘fetish’ videos showing small animals being tortured to death by scantily clad girls.”

Here is how I would change it:

“Police in Burgos town, La Union have arrested a couple suspected of producing and selling fetish videos of animals being tortured to death by scantily clad girls. The arrest came a week after an animal rights group offered a P100,000 reward for information leading to their capture.”

Original:
“CITY OF SAN JOSE DEL MONTE—Alerted by a reduction in next year’s Internal Revenue Allotments (IRA), the city government has decided to beef up its 2012 revenues by allowing a private environmental landfill operator to accept waste from Metro Manila and its Bulacan neighbors, Mayor Reynaldo San Pedro said.”

Your version:
“CITY OF SAN JOSE DEL MONTE—Alerted by a reduction in next year’s Internal Revenue Allotments (IRA), the city government has decided to beef up its 2012 revenues by allowing a private environmental landfill operator to accept waste from Metro Manila and its Bulacan neighbors, Mayor Reynaldo San Pedro said.”

My version:
“CITY OF SAN JOSE DEL MONTE — The local government will allow a private landfill operator to accept waste from Metro Manila and its Bulacan neighbors as the city beefs up its revenues after a cut in its 2012 Internal Revenue Allotment, Mayor Reynaldo San Pedro said.”

Original:
“CAMP PACIANO RIZAL—The Laguna police are now searching for witnesses who could lead to the identity of the killer of the company driver of Honda Cars Philippines Inc. who was shot dead during rush hour on a major thoroughfare in Sta. Rosa City, Laguna, on Tuesday afternoon.”

Your version:
“The Laguna police are now searching for witnesses who could help identify the killer of the company driver of Honda Cars Philippines Inc. who was shot dead during rush hour on a major thoroughfare in Sta. Rosa City, Laguna, on Tuesday afternoon.”

My version:
“CAMP PACIANO RIZAL—The Laguna police are searching for witnesses who could help identity the killer of Honda Cars Philippines Inc.’s driver who was shot dead during rush hour traffic in Sta. Rosa, Laguna, on Tuesday afternoon.”

Original:
“COTABATO CITY, Philippines – The governance  of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) is now bent finally on transferring its regional seat to Parang, Maguindanao from this city – its temporary seat for the past 20 years.”

Your version:
The government of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) has finally firmed up its decision  to transfer its regional seat to Parang, Maguindanao from this city – its temporary seat for the past 20 years.”

My version:

“COTABATO CITY, Philippines - The Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) will transfer its seat to Parang, Maguindanao from this city, where it has held power for the past 20 years. (Two decades doesn't sound a bit temporary.)”

I am out of time so I would rather throw the rest, especially the dengue piece, in the trash can. (That writer needs to go back to high school and study English.)

Cheers,
Norman

My response to Norman’s feedback and copyediting approach:

You’re absolutely right about what copyediting* is, Norman, and I would like to assure you that your prescription is precisely what I’d do myself when doing a professional copyediting job. In my Media English Watch, however, I made it clear from the very start that I would confine my critiques only to egregious and instructive English grammar and usage errors in the four major Metro Manila broadsheets (I expanded that coverage three months ago to include the news websites of the two leading Philippine TV networks). I wouldn’t intrude on the personal style of the reporter or on the institutional style of the media outlet, nor attempt to alter the word choices, syntax, and structure of the original passage to enhance narrative or expository quality; in short, I would simply point out grammar and usage errors and offer corrective measures for them. 

While commendable, to copyedit news stories or specific passages as you suggest—and as you have demonstrated in your sample copyedits above—oversteps the parameters of my advocacy for excellence in English grammar and usage. I think that such a slash-and-burn approach to copyediting is called for only in the case of particular publications with high and well-defined standards for journalistic prose (and are willing to pay a high price for topnotch and highly select writers), not in a teaching medium like My Media English Watch that only seeks to help English-language learners—and English-challenged journalists—improve their grammar and usage.

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*For those not in the know about the editing craft, there are three general levels or types of editing that a manuscript undergoes before release to its target recipient or in preparation to getting published. The first level is proofreading by the author himself or herself or by a third-party proofreader—an activity that involves correcting or refining the material for spelling, grammar, and sentence structure. The second level is copyediting for factual correctness, narrative or expository continuity, and writing style—what the trade calls substantive editing. The author himself or herself normally does this type of copyediting repeatedly before finalizing the manuscript for submission to a prospective publisher, but the process is invariably repeated by the publisher prior to accepting material for publication. And the third level is copyediting for printing—an activity that’s done by professional copyeditors to ensure that the manuscript meets the specifications of the publication’s stylebook and policy guidelines. By the time a manuscript gets printed, therefore, it has already gone through so many stages and levels of editing, thus making the likelihood of major grammatical, factual, and stylistic mistakes theoretically very minimal.

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