The Copy Editing and Headline Handbook

First: I bow to the professional opinions of earlier reviewers, copy-editors all, I suspect. They found fault (of course; it's what their profession does) with Dr. Ellis' book. I didn't. As a magazine journalist who has frequently struggled to tell a story well, I found her book useful, intelligent, and surprisingly entertaining. Her advice on how to pick a "hot quote" or how to end a hard news story are worth the price of admission.

This book is better than most of the books out there, but that isn't saying a whole lot. Virtues: 1) The book isn't too dogmatic. It recognizes that different copy desks have different policies. The most important style rule of all is that, "If your boss has a rule that's different from the AP rule, your boss is right." 2) Ellis talks a fair amount about the politics of editing. 3) Many of the revised examples are better than the originals. My experience with other copy editing books is that the edited versions tend to be as bad as the originals. Gripe: The book just isn't detailed enough to answer the questions you actually have when it's you against encroaching barbarism. The book is better than books like the Strunk and White book that focus solely on what literate people already know, but it doesn't, for example, discuss the word "like" the way I just used like. Yes, Winston cigarettes should taste good, *as* good cigarettes should, but is it really OK in semi-formal English to write "books like the Strunk and White book," or do I have to write "such as" in place of like? Another example is the hyphens in compound modifiers. Why does the Wall Street Journal hyphenate "real estate" and AP not hyphenate it, even though AP is the one promoting the use of hyphens in compound modifiers? What do you do about those horrible companies that capitalize their entire names, or insist on starting their names with strange symbols? I guess the lack of detail isn't really Ellis's fault. She's only one person and can only do so much. The problem is that doing a guide that answers all the questions needs to be a team effort. In theory, of course, the AP style book is supposed to be the bible, but the version available to the public is miserably incomplete. In a perfect world, the AP style committee would get together with all the other major style organizations, hire some top editors, linguists, etc., and come up with a really good style and usage encyclopedia. But, of course, they're all up against that encroaching barbarism problem, so I guess this is never going to happen.