A Vanishing Breed?

Merrill Perlman, who manages copy desks at The New York Times, wrote an article, “Talk to the Newsroom” (March 24, 2008) in which she answers those burning editorial questions - including this one about grammar.

Q. I’m a managing editor at St. Martin’s Press in New York City. We are having more and more trouble finding literate freelance copy editors and proofreaders — people who know the basics of punctuation, spelling, grammar, something of what the English language can or can’t do, perhaps enough knowledge of a major European language to add an accent or make a past participle agree with a noun. Are newspapers experiencing the same problem, and if so, how are you dealing with it? — Robert Cloud

A. You’re right, Mr. Cloud, it’s harder to find people who know what good copy editors need to know. You can argue that English usage has gone downhill, or you can argue that English is changing, but a better answer, I suspect, is plus ça change. My copy of “Elements of Style” has the notes I scribbled in sophomore year in high school, and E.B. White’s foreword, written only about 11 years previously. In it, he discusses his revisions to William Strunk’s original text, and talks about deleting “outdated” references or an “intricate rule of composition.” It’s quite possible that Professor Strunk would have told his erstwhile pupil that so doing would send the English language to hell.

Our language skills have been affected by how we use it, I think. Before radio, most information was conveyed in print. Since then, we get as much information by hearing it as by reading it, and that affects how we learn and use English. How else to explain the morphing of “home in on” to “hone in on,” now accepted by some dictionaries? I admit I can’t explain — or condone — horrors like “all shoe’s on sale,” but if it becomes common enough, dictionaries will start to accept it.

We deal with it by screening as carefully as we can. We test our applicants by having them edit stories, and looking at their use of grammar, punctuation, etc., as well as their ability to spot content problems and offer suggestions for repairs. We don't expect our editors to recite the rules of the nominative case or declination of nouns, but we do ask them to know and love the English language enough to protect it without smothering it, or being smothered by it.

Open Acess to Knowledge

On February 12 Harvard became the first U.S. University to mandate open access to research publications of their Faculty of Arts and Sciences. How important is this? Very. While the topic of open access has been thrown around in academic circles for some time, this is the first time that university faculty have stepped up as a group and acknowledged that the academic publishing paradigm fails when it comes to dissemination of knowledge in the Internet age.

Harvard's decision is a sign that the balance of power is changing. I'm not surprised the policy was proposed by a computer science professor. This is an example of open source philosophy spilling over into non-computer related fields. Open access will reshape the landscape of learning, replacing the closed, privileged, (and costly) system with a digital commonwealth available to all.

“The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.”

Parsing Presidential Speeches

As an information visualization interface, word clouds are interesting. The trick is to make the data useful and meaningful at a glance. The wrong mix turns the data into a chaotic soup.

Chirag Mehta's US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud page is a good example. He parsed the most frequently used words in U.S. presidential speeches from John Adams (January 15, 1776: "Foundation of Government") to George W. Bush (January 23, 2007: "State of the Union Address"). His dataset consisted of over 365 documents from Encyclopedia Britannica, ThisNation.com, and WhiteHouse.gov. The results are a mini history lesson.

Some highlights...

• 1776 (John Adams) - assembly, constitution, representation
• 1789 (Thomas Jefferson) - freedom, opinion, federalist
• 1812 (James Madison) - war, British, militia
• 1823 (James Monroe) - respecting, independence, European
• 1847 (James Polk) - Mexico, war, territory, Texas
• 1862 (Abraham Lincoln) - labor, emancipation, slavery
• 1865 (Andrew Johnson) - rebellion, confederate, war
• 1898 (William McKinley) - Cuba, Spain, war, belligerency
• 1903 (Theodore Roosevelt) - corporations, Panama Canal, treaty
• 1917 - (Woodrow Wilson) - war, Germany, empire
• 1933 (Franklin D. Roosevelt) - economic, distress, industries
• 1935 (Franklin D. Roosevelt) - economic, unemployment, stabilization
• 1941 (Franklin D. Roosevelt) - dictators, freedom, strength, war
• 1945 (Franklin D. Roosevelt) - German, Japanese, scientists, offensive
• 1953 (Harry S. Truman) - Communist, Soviet, aggression, freedom
• 1962 (John F. Kennedy) - strength, freedom, education
• 1966 (Lyndon B. Johnson) - Vietnam, war, tax
  
• 1974 (Richard M. Nixon) - challenges, messages, Watergate
• 1979 (Jimmy Carter) - inflation, foundation, families
• 1985 (Ronald Reagan) - economic, freedom, God, tax
• 1991 (George Bush) - aggression, Saddam, Iraq, Kuwait
• 1995 (Bill Clinton) - deficit, families, crime, welfare
• 2005 (George W. Bush) - Iraq, terrorists, freedom, economy