adventures in editing papers for a scholarly journal

[calimac]

It was the one-L Malory who wrote Morte d'Arthur. The two-L Mallory is the one who climbed Mount Everest.

(same author) Did you mean Keats, or Yeats?

(different author) Try not to take your citation page numbers from the mass-market paperback when the specified source is the original hardcover. They are different, you know.

(an even more different author) How about offering citation page numbers at all?

(a diligent author) Some scholars know that the MLA has discontinued the silly and ugly practice of requiring brackets around supplied ellipses. Most, however, don't. I slay them with glee.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Is that where all those brackets come from? I've been deleting them for years, but I never knew whose idea it was. Though when I started working for Academic Press back in the 1980s they trained me to just use ellipses. . . .

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yep. The MLA put it in, I believe in the 2nd edition of their style manual in 1998. The idea was to distinguish supplied ellipses from those in the original. The problem was that very few works cited, bar the occasional highly experimental or extremely hesitant novel, already had ellipses in the original text, and virtually no scholarship did, so these ugly and superfluous brackets erupted everywhere. I first came across them the next year when an editor added them to a paper I'd submitted. I was incensed, and would have withdrawn my paper had it not been too late.

However, with the 3rd edition in 2008 MLA came to its senses and realized that, in those rare cases where the ellipses were in the original, you could just put in a note of some kind saying so. So they cancelled those stupid brackets, but many people never realized it.

Ellipses

[pink-halen.livejournal.com]

My software emphatically doesn't like ellipses. It says I have multiple punctuation. It's a good thing that I know what an ellipses is.

Re: Ellipses

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Mine automatically turns the three dots into a single character (formed of three dots).

Re: Ellipses

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Mine tries to do that too, but on both Word for Mac and Mail, there's a keyboard command that undoes the last thing that was done—which can be an automatic correction like that.

You can also type with spaces between the periods: . . . instead of ... . Really that's more correct typographically anyway, or such is my understanding.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

You know what tees me right off about US editors?

Their assumption that everyone has a title and/or surname.

I got asked for the full name of Attila the Hun a while back (Mr Hun? And presumably his latest wife would be Mrs Hun). I also got told that Cromwell's personal chaplain was Hugh Peters.

Um, no! He was Hugh Peter and people (even editors) need to check their sources rather than lamely repeating the same old errors!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Well, there's a lot of people who think Leonardo's surname was da Vinci, and not all of them read Dan Brown.

Some "a little learning is a dangerous thing" type once went through the Wikipedia entries for the Hanoverian kings of Britain and made it so that their surnames were all Hanover. House of Hanover, right? Having totally misunderstood the distinction between a house name and a family name. Fortunately it eventually got fixed.

Whether that person was an American or not I don't know, but I'm frequently finding Americans with no idea that "head of state" doesn't mean "head of government," since in the US they're the same office.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Yeah, in the recent news I saw a reference to Trudeau as Canada's new head of state.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Really I think it would be "Mr. the Hun." The particle usually goes with the surname, after all. . . .

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

This is true! :o)

[pink-halen.livejournal.com]

And I will bet a huge salary there isn't any three l Malllory!

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

win.