Editing help request

[rivka]

You're right. That's better.

[Annie Subjunctive]

Oh, I think I like the "that is."

[Farmgirl]

Need a grammar nazi:

In proofing/correcting a young child's grammar paper.  Sentence she wrote was:

"I think the most beautiful thing God created is beautiful flowers."

Is that okay -- or does "thing" evoke the necessity for it to be singular instead of plural "flowers"?  I read right over it with nothing flashing warning bells at me, but someone else said perhaps there is a singular/plural problem?

[Tante Shvester]

Even though there are lots of individual flowers, they are really talking about one thing -- the concept of flowers as a whole.  I'd use the plural "things" if the sentence included flowers and something else:

"I think the most beautiful things are beautiful flowers and cuddly kittens."

[Jonathon]

It seems wrong if you think about it too much, but it's pretty standard idiomatic English.

[Ela]

I hate when I keep reading an article and keep seeing mistakes I missed the previous 10 times I read it.

Anyone have time to take a quick look for me? I just want to weed out any glaring grammatical errors.

And it's only one page *wheedle*

[dkw]

I can do glaring errors.

dscopatz

at gmail dot com

[Ela]

Thanks! Sent

My mind is tumbling as we are also helping my son get ready to leave for England this afternoon, where he is going to grad school.

[Annie Subjunctive]

Does anyone want to read a lit review on English teaching in Asia? I'm looking for as much editing and feedback as I can get. If you've got time, I'll email it to you.

[Brinestone]

When do you need it back? I could do it, but not tonight.

[Annie Subjunctive]

In a week.

[pooka]

I might have time to look at it this weekend.  I believe you have my email.

[Annie Subjunctive]

Domo. Domo domo.

[Ela]

What are you thoughts on starting an article with "although"? I'm supposed to be editing an article that starts that way and it's bugging me.

Although health care agencies and providers have increased efforts to improve breastfeeding rates (initiation, exclusivity and duration), breastfeeding rates in many countries still fall short of agency recommendations.

I want to rearrange that first sentence altogether.

In other news, I'm bothered that her title is a phrase I don't recognize, and she didn't define it till the middle of the second paragraph. I'm going to ask her to define it from the get go.

[Jonathon]

I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with it, but I think it works better when there's been something leading up to it. This feels like it's kind of jumping into the middle.

[Kate Boots]

I would skip the "although" at the beginning and throw a "however" in the middle.

[Ela]

I would skip the "although" at the beginning and throw a "however" in the middle.

Yeah, I was thinking of doing something like that.

[Ela]

I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with it, but I think it works better when there's been something leading up to it. This feels like it's kind of jumping into the middle.

I thought it felt like jumping into the middle, too. I think that's what's bothering me about it.

[Jonathon]

I think Kate's suggestion could work, but I would expand that first half of the sentence to at least a couple of sentences.

In recent years, health care agencies and providers have increased efforts to improve breastfeeding rates. [sentence or two explaining those efforts] However, despite these efforts, breastfeeding rates in many countries still fall short of agency recommendations.

[Kate Boots]

I think Kate's suggestion could work, but I would expand that first half of the sentence to at least a couple of sentences.

In recent years, health care agencies and providers have increased efforts to improve breastfeeding rates. [sentence or two explaining those efforts] However, despite these efforts, breastfeeding rates in many countries still fall short of agency recommendations.

I didn't feel comfortable adding or subtracting content. 

[Ela]

I don't think she will add content in the first paragraph, but I like Jonathon's edit. I took it.

[Ela]

So, I'm reviewing an article in which the writer obsessively splits words from one line to the next in a way I find very distracting (examples: breastfeed-ing, sit-uations, doc-uments). The divisions, I'm guessing, are correct, but I don't often see words split in that way. Also, I wonder if some person will end up putting the article on line with those breaks, even if there's not a line break in the online. I've seen it happen before when the person putting the article online wasn't paying careful attention.

I'm just wondering if it's normal to have so many words split between lines for an article intended for publication, online or otherwise. One would thing that the splits, if necessary, would take place during the layout of the article on the page.

But I'm not an expert, so I'm asking.

[Jonathon]

Line breaks are pretty common in published material (at least in print or PDFs or other mediums designed to look like print). But, as you said, that takes place during layout. It's unnecessary to break words in a Word document and can actually create problems for the editor, because you have to check to see whether they're automatic hyphens created by the software's hyphenation system or whether they're hard hyphens that have manually been typed in.

If they're automatic hyphens, it's easy to get rid of them by turning hyphenation off. If they've all been typed in, then it's a pain to get rid of them all, because you can't just do a find/replace. And if you don't get rid of them all, it can create problems during layout, because then you'll get random words with hyphens in them in the middle of lines.

So yeah, if you're editing a Word doc or something similar, there's no reason to break words like that. Hopefully it's just a setting that you can turn off.

[Ela]

That was pretty much what I thought.

I suspect the person who wrote the article may have typed it the way she did in part because she is not a native English speaker.

Also, she split the word knowledge as knowl-edge, which looks weird to me, but when I looked it up in the dictionary, that's actually where the split is.

I don't think any of her splits were wrong, I just thought they were unnecessary in a draft for review, and I fear they may result in the type of problem you mentioned when layout takes place.

[Jonathon]

I'm not sure I've seen a writer manually hyphenate words at the end of lines before, but I've seen a lot of other weird things like that from native speakers. I think sometimes it's just a lack of experience with the publishing process, though I'm remembering one very elaborately formatted manuscript we got from a professor who was retiring. All of the drop caps and running heads and other junk that he probably spent a lot of time putting in had to be taken right back out. You'd think someone who'd been in academia for so long would have a better understanding of how the whole process worked.