A note on copy editing. A friend who teaches at USC’s Annenberg School for
Communication tells me her journalism students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels
know so little basic grammar that they can’t tell the difference between a noun and a verb.
It’s not that bad at the new, improved New York Times Book Review. Yet. But consider this
sentence from the excellent essay in yesterday’s
edition by Thomas Frank, a nekkid pundit I admire:
Despite its naked partisanship and its extreme vulnerability to refutation, the
red-blue narrative held the punditry in such awe that, inevitably, it generated its precise antithesis
…
Somebody (a copy editor?) should have caught the error (minor, it’s true, but this is the Book
Review after all). The incorrect phrase should have been written: “… the red-blue narrative WAS
held BY the punditry in such awe that …”
Using the passive voice would not have been great, but adding those two little words would
have fixed the problem without rejiggering the sentence to keep it in the active voice (like so:
“The punditry held the red-blue narrative in such awe, despite its naked partisanship and its
extreme vulnerability to refutation, that …” etc.).
Class dismissed.
