Manual of Style for International Publishing

Berkshire Manual of Style for International Publishing

宝库山国际出版文体手册

First Edition, 2012

Berkshire Publishing Great Barrington Part 1 > Copyeditor’s Manual

snickers elicited from at least a few readers if we had left those phrases stand. (The rest of us, of course, know well that cleavage is a geological term referring most basically to how a rock breaks when you smash it. M-W 11 lists four specific usages before defining the last, and fifth: “the depression between a woman’s breasts.”) We often see non-native English-speaking authors cling to the use of a single mundane (but accurate) word. To add some nuance to a five-line paragraph about agricultural production we replaced six occurrences of the words increased and increase with: rose, advance, grow, output, upsurge, and rise. Sometimes authors use colloquial terms or phrases that don’t translate well (or at all) into English. Please be sure to query the author, being as clear and specific as possible, if you are confused or unable to determine the author’s meaning from the context. Many of our contributors from China write with some ambiguity about time because Chinese does not have true tenses the way the English language does. We ask our Chinese authors to make sure it’s clear whether something has happened in the past, is happening now, or has not yet happened. We ask that you be sensitive to this when editing articles by Chinese authors—and of course all authors, who may get stuck in the present and not write with “persistence” in mind (that is to say, they use words and phrases like recently and several years ago). Berkshire articles should be edited so that when read five or ten years from now the events and subjects are clearly placed in time. (See 1.2.9, “Keeping Our Publications Global and Timely.”) Section 1.7 covers other style/format considerations about copyediting articles for China-related projects, including the treatment of pinyin transliteration and Chinese characters within a sentence, and the fact that Chinese nouns do not have a plural form.

British English versus American English

Many of our authors, of course, are native British English speakers. Because we are a US-based publisher, our guidelines, word preferences, and punctuation are based on “American English.” Some authors from the United Kingdom are quite willing to “Americanize” for us—for instance, they’ll use elevator rather than lift or vacation instead of holiday. Others expect our copyeditors to make the changes, whether that means replacing a word (mail the letter, not post it), correcting British spelling to conform to US rules (focussed to focused, modelled to modeled), or changing quoted material punctuated like this (‘The population

1.2 Ten Almightinesses > 13 www.berkshirepublishing.com © 2012 Berkshire Publishing Group, all rights reserved. Berkshire Manual of Style for International Publishing decreased by 10 percent’.) to look like this (“The population decreased by 10 percent.”). Although many US-based readers would take British-isms in stride, we edit our articles for consistent usage within and across projects, so please be diligent about Americanizing the spelling (see examples in the paragraph below) and replacing single quote marks with double quote marks. Some common differences between UK-based and US-based spelling include towards/toward (all such “movement prepositions”—for example, backward and forward, inward and outward, upward and onward—drop their final “s” in the United States), behaviour/behavior, organisation/organization, aeon/eon (the “long E” sound of “ae” has its roots in Latin), and especially encyclopedia/encyclopaedia. One particularly vexing word, scheme, deserves notice. In the United Kingdom scheme has a specific definition as “a plan that is developed by a government or large organization in order to provide a particular service for people.” Examples from the Macmillan dictionary include:

• The proposed scheme would solve the parking problem. • Have you joined the company’s pension scheme?

Most US readers (and writers) would use the word plan or program in these contexts; in the United States the word scheme often implies an illegal or underhanded way to achieve a goal (e.g., a Ponzi scheme). We ask that copyeditors edit the word scheme based on the context and content of the article. If the author uses it generically (“the government has devised a number of schemes to improve parking in London”), changing schemes to plans or programs might be the most reader-friendly approach. But if the author is writing about a specific scheme, especially if it has a name or is associated with a certain action or result, a good solution would be to insert a brief parenthetical definition of the British usage after the first occurrence of the word. Check out the Johnson blog (http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson)—so- named for dictionary maker Samuel Johnson and sponsored by the UK-based Economist magazine, whose own style guide is published online. Reading Johnson gives you a feel for the way British authors and editors consider the use and abuse of language to affect politics, society, and culture around the world. Although much of the Economist’s style guide necessarily points to the use of language in journalism (and doesn’t always jibe with our style or our authority, The Chicago Manual of Style), some of the blog postings offer sage advice that is pertinent, or at least worth considering, for authors and editors. For instance,

one blogger deems the word challenge as one of the English language’s newest clichés: “No one nowadays has to face a change, difficulty, task or job,” writes R.L.G. “Rather these are challenges—fiscal challenges, organisational challenges, structural challenges, regional challenges, demographic challenges, etc.” One of the more interesting responses to this post, which relates to when the knee-jerk or formulaic use of words brings unintended results, came from R. Kopf:

My office was reviewing tenders [formal written offers]. The boss opened the cover letter on the first, read it and tossed the tender onto the pile with the comment, “We don’t want them.” “Why?” “Because they ‘look forward to working with you on this challenging project.’ We don’t want someone who thinks it’s challenging. We want someone who’s done it many times before and regards it as a ‘piece of cake.’”

The Johnson blog is also a good place to find an occasional jab directed at “Americanisms,” or at least what the Economist editors define as such. Our tendency “to verb nouns or to adjective them” is one of their pet peeves, and thus they recommend that we don’t access files or critique style sheets. Take this advice with a grain of salt (or your cliché of choice) and just keep in mind that editing the language used by native- and non-native authors can impact the reader’s comprehension, for better or for worse. Substitute autumn, a word that is understandable throughout the English-speaking world, for fall, which is used to mean one of the four seasons only in the United States. Similarly, do not assume that everywhere in the world the months of June through August conjure hot weather and school vacations, or that football in the UK is the same as our soccer. If you’ve made changes in an article to Americanize it, please include a query to remind the author that Berkshire’s guidelines specify the use of US spellings and points of style. Query for the author’s approval, however, if the changes were numerous or if you have doubt about translating a term or an idiom correctly. Authors will appreciate this courtesy. Berkshire’s CEO, Karen Christensen, who began her career as an author in London, remembers working with a London publisher on her 2004 The Armchair Environmentalist. She had been back in the United States for ten years by then, but she was able to comply when the editor asked her to “write it in English,” using UK spellings and references to kettles and woollies (two lls, and meaning winter sweaters and

1.2 Ten Almightinesses > 15 www.berkshirepublishing.com © 2012 Berkshire Publishing Group, all rights reserved. Berkshire Manual of Style for International Publishing other warming garments). She was startled, however, to learn that the publisher had hired someone else to Americanize her text for a US edition and had not even given her, the American author, the chance to check it. 1.2.6 The Serial Comma, Oxford University Press, and Twitter

At the end of June 2011, a misunderstood and widely circulated tweet announced that Oxford University Press was abandoning the serial comma (alias the Oxford comma, so-named centuries ago by one of the earliest Oxford usage guides). What is the Oxford comma? And—to paraphrase (just barely) a line from a song by the band Vampire Weekend, which also got its share of media attention that same week—who gives a f**k? Compare the use of commas in the following two sentences:

• Traditional methods of sports training in China were based on concepts of the “three unafraids” (unafraid of hardship, difficulty, and injury) and the “five toughnesses” (toughness of spirit, body, skill, training, and competition). • Physical education programs in China today supplement traditional methods with more scientific techniques of coaching, sports psychology and sports medicine.

Writers use the Oxford comma (examples are in bold after the words difficulty and training in the first sentence), to separate the second-to-last and last items in a series of three or more items. Strunk and White, the Chicago Manual of Style, and most book publishers (including Berkshire) favor the serial comma. Associated Press (AP) style and most newspapers (including the New York Times) frown upon it and punctuate with commas as in the second sentence. The serial comma is thus the bane of (and a bone of contention among) US, UK, and Australian reporters, book authors, and publishers. Judging by the brouhaha surrounding the Oxford Twitter reports, many people do indeed care about the serial comma. As it turns out, Oxford is not banishing the use of it from their publications—only from in-house communication. (Berkshire in- house staffers are not so lucky—just as we will continue to use it in our books, we ask that they use it in correspondence and marketing materials.) We are true believers in the ability of the serial comma to make a sentence, and the author’s message, clear.