I love a red pen.
When I was in college, I would spread out our campus newspaper on a table in the dining hall, searching the articles more for grammatical mistakes than for interesting news. For a few moments after marking up a paper, I would look at my circles and arrows and hashmarks scratched through the newsprint. My friends might have seen this hobby as an arrogant practice, but I reveled in finding someone's mistake and knowing how to fix it. As a Teaching Assistant in graduate school, I had to edit my students' terribly-written lab reports - a process more painful than can be described in words but which bonded all TAs in collective misery. Unfortunately, we were banned from using red pens for fear the color was "too confrontational". All TAs were issued peaceful, purple pens in an attempt to decrease our students' rage at learning they had confused "their" with "they're".
Now, most of my reading is online. When I see an incorrect usage of "effect" glaring at me, I imagine a crimson dry-erase marker for my computer screen as my craving to perfect simmers, leaving me quite unsatisfied.
However, I have found a few sources to help with my grammar fixation. After Deadline, a feature on the New York Times Times Topic blog, discusses grammatical mistakes, poor usage, and cliches that escaped the editors' eyes in the preceding week. Another fun blog to peruse is Apostrophe Abuse. In fact, a simple Google Image search for "grammatically incorrect signs" can be the source of minutes, or hours, of entertainment.
Anyone else privy to the semi-sadistic satisfaction with marking your Sunday paper 'til it bleeds?
I'm your kin, Aleta. So is the essayist Anne Fadiman, who wrote a delightful essay about being a member of an entire family of compulsive proofreaders. She opens with a skillfully constructed scene where she, her brother and parents are studying the menus in a fancy restaurant:
ReplyDelete"They've transposed the e and the i in Madeira sauce," commented my brother.
"They've made Bel Paese into one word," I said, "and it's lowercase."
"At least they spell better than the place where we had dinner last Tuesday," said my mother. They serve P-E-A-K-I-N-G duck."
We stared at one another. You'd think that after all these decades, we Fadimans would have mapped every corner of our deviant tribal identity, but apparently there was one pan-familial gene we had never before diagnosed: we were all compulsive proofreaders...
You can read the complete piece in her collection "Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader" pub. by Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1998.
I'm the same way, and I need to read that essay. My mom's an editor, and with her encouragement, I marked up my 5th-grade science teacher's handout and turned it in with my homework. I was surprised when she didn't appreciate my help. In high school, I participated in a national copy-editing competition; I wish I could say this was the dorkiest thing I've ever done. At work, I've mellowed out a bit and don't edit unless it will be helpful, though it was really hard to keep my mouth shut when someone ended a memo with "sorry for the incontinence."
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