Commentary: "Notes for the Copyeditor"
Science fiction writer Robert Sawyer's website has much of interest.
Today I encountered "Notes for the Copyeditor" and I was intrigued. A couple of his statements on usage surprised me, and I like his versions.
I am interested to see how his thoughts on thoughts translate to the page. He's free to be inconsistent, of course. Consider:I use italics for:
* emphasis ....
versus (from the "Manuscript Format Checklist")Emphasis and foreign phrases shown by underlining rather than italics (although this rule seems to be falling by the wayside).
Apparently, it has fallen far enough in his eyes that he uses italics now himself. That's fine; I understand the history but think italics an improvement.
His sample short story, intended to show proper manuscript formatting, uses underlining rather than italics. It has a couple of curiosities:
* there are no italicized thoughts
* an em-dash is used to trail off dialog, and even narration
* The narrator can be as flabbergasted as any character:It was --
No. No, it couldn’t be. It couldn’t.
But it was. A spindly, insectoid figure, perhaps a meter
high, coming toward the lander.
(At that point, it was pure narration, not in a character's POV.)
* He used a comma after a quoted phrase even though it is not dialog:"Gitanda hatabk," were the first words spoken to the travelers from Earth
This was surprising to me.
Overall, I'm finding his commentary and advice to be generally quite valuable.
He's also done a nice write-up of Robert Heinlein's Rules for Writers.
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Today I encountered "Notes for the Copyeditor" and I was intrigued. A couple of his statements on usage surprised me, and I like his versions.
I am interested to see how his thoughts on thoughts translate to the page. He's free to be inconsistent, of course. Consider:I use italics for:
* emphasis ....
versus (from the "Manuscript Format Checklist")Emphasis and foreign phrases shown by underlining rather than italics (although this rule seems to be falling by the wayside).
Apparently, it has fallen far enough in his eyes that he uses italics now himself. That's fine; I understand the history but think italics an improvement.
His sample short story, intended to show proper manuscript formatting, uses underlining rather than italics. It has a couple of curiosities:
* there are no italicized thoughts
* an em-dash is used to trail off dialog, and even narration
* The narrator can be as flabbergasted as any character:It was --
No. No, it couldn’t be. It couldn’t.
But it was. A spindly, insectoid figure, perhaps a meter
high, coming toward the lander.
(At that point, it was pure narration, not in a character's POV.)
* He used a comma after a quoted phrase even though it is not dialog:"Gitanda hatabk," were the first words spoken to the travelers from Earth
This was surprising to me.
Overall, I'm finding his commentary and advice to be generally quite valuable.
He's also done a nice write-up of Robert Heinlein's Rules for Writers.
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