Authors whose writing has been professionally edited often marvel at the improvement, apparently regarding a blue pencil as some sort of magic wand. But those of us in the business of wielding that pencil know that most of the wonders we work are the routine adjustments of trained specialists. This book aims at demystifying the copy-editing process, at showing writers how to polish their own prose.

By the time a manuscript accepted for publication is ready for copy-editing, the consulting editor and the author have already attended to whatever major additions, deletions, rearrangements, or new approaches have seemed desirable. Charged with preparing the manuscript for conversion into print, the copy editor, sometimes called a line editor or subeditor, concentrates on the fine points, styling “mechanics” and revising sentences that are unclear, imprecise, awkward, or grammatically incorrect.

The mechanics of style are matters of form, such considerations as spelling, capitalization, treatment of numbers and abbreviations, types of headings, and systems of citation. In a first close reading of manuscript the copy editor focuses full attention on these routine details and brings them into line with house standards. In addition to specifying the dictionaries and other reference works to follow for mechanics, publisters have guidelines governing the choices where these authorities allow options–between, for example, adviser and advisor, the Third World and the third world, two and a half and 2 1/2. The point here is not so much correctness as consistency. Arbitrary variations can be distracting, since they would seem to indicate distinctions where none are intended. Even if house style does not prescribe one of two acceptable alternatives, the copy editor does not allow both to appear indiscriminately but settles on whichever predominates in the manuscript. Conscientious writers, especially if they do not expect the services of copy editors, should similarly verify questionable forms and strive for consistency, but they need no special knowledge to emulate editors in this respect.

Styling mechanics is a painstaking process that leaves little room for paying attention to entire sentences, no less to the argument of the text. Unless you blot out every other consideration, you can glide right over errors and discrepancies. Ideally, therefore, the copy editor devotes a separate close reading-or several readings if time allows-to removing any obstacles to the clarity and grace of sentences. With machanics out of the way, the editor checks sentences for common structural weaknesses and applies the remedies indicated. It is this procedure that the following chapters describe, for it is here that pumpkins turn into coaches.

Although you can profitably learn to apply editorial techniques to your own writing, you will not be working in quite the same way that copy editors do. You will not have to worry about the author’s intentions and sensibilities or about publishing costs and schedules. Copy editors have to guard against distorting the author’s meaning or introducing changes that seem arbitrary or inconsistent with the author’s tone. Often they cannot do as much as they would like, either because the publiser’s budget precludes taking the necessary time or because the author’s attitude discourages tampering with the text. Deciding what to alter and what to leave alone, when to revise and when to suggest a revision, involves considerable tact and judgment, and queries and explanations require sensitive wording. In correcting your own work, you have a free hand. You don’t need editorial delicacy and diplomacy. You only need editorial skills that will enable you to look objectively at what you have written. If you can master them, you can do more to improve your writing than anyone else can.

To use an editor’s techniques, you need, first of all, an editor’s knowledge of sentence structure. The line-by-line editor looks at each sentence analytically, seeing its components and inner workings, using grammatical concepts as a set of tools for detecting and eliminating flaws. If you simply recognize that a sentence sounds bad, you can’t necessarily pinpoint and correct what’s wrong. Like the driver who knows that the car won’t start but has no idea what to look for under the dutifully raised hood, you can only fiddle with this and that in hit-or-miss fashion.

Thus any manual of sentence repair must begin by naming parts and their functions. However much composition instructors would like to avoid jargon, they almost always end up using specialized terminology in training students to look at senteces with an eye to revision. In Errors and Expectations, a breakthrough text for teachers of basic writing, Mina P. Shaughnessy says that explanations of what ails particular sentences “inevitably involve grammatical as well as semantic concepts and are much easier to give if the student has some knowledge of the parts and basic patterns of the sentece … [A]rudimentary grasp of such grammatical concepts as subject, verb, object, indirect object, modifier, etc. is almost indispensable if one intends to talk with students about their sentences.”

This guide, of course, addresses writers far more sophisticated than the students in a remedial composition course, but many college graduates, including some English majors, claim not to know the language of grammar. If you are in this category, do not despair. The subject is much less forbidding than it may have seemed when you were a child, and even grammarphobes may redily lean as adults the battery of terms that made their eyes glaze over in junior high. Though the examples used throughout should clarify technical terms as you encounter them, you can profit most from the text if you start off knowing something about the anatomy of a sentence. Appendix A explains the parts of a sentence in considerable detail, and you may want to turn to it before you read the rest of the book. But this introduction, which provides a short preview of the appendix, may be all you need. Or it may be more than you need. If you’re good at parsing sentences, you can stop right here and move on to chapter 1.

To look at a sentence analytically, you have to recognize (1) the units that fit together to compose the whole and (2) the types of words, called parts of speech, that make up the various units. Let’s look first at the larger elements, the building blocks of the sentence.

A sentence is a group of words-or, occasionally, a single word-that readers recognize as a complete statement. The conventional type says that someone or something acts, experiences, or exists in a stated way (or did do so or will do so). Its two basic components are the subject, the someone or something, and the predicate, the statement about the subject’s action, experience, or state of being.

The heart of the predicate, and sometimes the entire predicate, is the verb, a word that denotes mental or physical action or asserts existence as past, present, or future. Orinarily, the subject comes first, as in Cildren played, Glass breaks, Poltergeists exist. It is the word or group of words that answers the question formed by putting What or Who before the verb. But though it governs the verb in the predicate, it does not necessarily dominate the sentence. Grammatically speaking, the subject of the sentence may not be the topic under discussion. If you say I prefer vodka to gin, the subject is I, but the subject matter is liquor.

Verb forms that consist of two or more words-for example, were playing, will be broken, and have existed-may be called verb pharases, since a phrase is any group of related words that functions as unit but lacks a subject and a predicate. A clause, in contrast, is a group of related words that does contain a subject-verb combination. Not all clauses qualify as sentences. Though word groups like while they were gone, after we had left, that you won, and as you believe have subjects and predicates, they strike readers as incomplete. Unable to stand alone, these subordinate clauses must serve as adjuncts to independent clauses, which do seem complete in themselves.

A simple sentence contains only one clause. It is, of course, an independent clause, but that term comes into play only when sentences have more than one clause. Two or more attached independent clauses without a dependent clause make a compound sentence, and a single independent clause that incorporates at least one dependent clause constitutes a complex sentence. A compound-complex sentence, logically enough, has two or more attached independent clauses and at least one dependent clause.

Although, as we have seen, a conventional sentence can consist entirely of a subject and a verb, most statements need more words to express their meaning. The predicate may tell not only what the subject is doing but also what or whom the subject is doing it to, that is, who or what is receiving the action. In Jones handles advertising, for example, advertising undergoes the handling. Such a word is called a direct object. If you ask What? or Whom? after a verb denoting a mental or physical action performed by the subject, the answer will be the direct object. In each of the following sentences, the third word is the direct object: I read stories, We made gifts, They gave advice.

A sentence may also tell who or what receives the direct object; that is, it may state the indirect object of the aciton. This element goes between the verb and the direct object: I read him stories, We made them gifts, They gave us advice. When the same information follows the direct object, it appears as part of a phrase, after the word to or for, and the term indirect object no longer applies: I read stories to him, We made gifts for them, They gave advice to us.

Strickly speaking, direct and indirect objects occur only in sentences in which the subject performs the action that the verb describes. If the subject is not acting but acted on-as in Stories were read, Gift were made, Advice was given-the subject receives the action, and there is no direct object. When the subject receives the action only indirectly, as in Rookies were given advice by veterans, the element that resembles a direct object (advice in the example) is called a retained object. The subject of such a sentence would become an indirect object if you revised the structure to make the subject the acting element: Veterans gave rookies advice. A verb is in the active voice when it states what the subject does and in the passive voice when it tells what is done to or for the subject.

Some verbs convery no action but simply state existence and lead to words that say something about that existence. A verb like be, become, seem, appear, or remain links its subject to a complement, a word or group of words that either describes the subject or serves as its synonym, thus completing the meaning of sentence. Each of the following sentences ends with a complement: She seems angry, You look ill, He remained silent, Running Water became chief, Cars can be lemons, We had been friends. Some think of a complement as completing the meaning of the predicate and call it a predicate complement; others think of it as completing the meaning of the subject and call it a subjective complement. Those who prefer one of these terms may use the word complement alone to designate either an object or a predicate complement; here, however, the term has only the narrower meaning given above-a word that follows a linking verb and defines or describes the subject.

The two basic parts of a sentence, then-or, for that matter, of any clause-are the subject and predicate, and the major components of the predicate are the verb and its objects or complements. Although the examples, used so far include onlly single-word subjects, objects, indirect objects, and complements, these elements often comprise a group of related words that function as a unit; in other words, a phrase or a clause may serve as a subject, an object, or a complement. In That he did not reply does not necessarily mean that he did not get your letter, both the subject and the object are clauses; and in She seems out of sorts, the complement is a phrase.

Most sentences flesh out their skeletal parts with secondary components called modifiers-words, phrases, or clauses that describe or qualify other elements, either restricting their meaning or giving supplementary information about them. In The man in the apartment downstairs is eighty-five years old, the modifying in phrase identifies the subject, narrowing the meaning of man to a specific individual. Such a modifier is called restrictive or defining. In My mother’s father, who lives in the apartment downstairs, is eighty-five years old. the modifying who clause in no way limits or defines the meaning of My mother’s father; it simply adds a detail. We would know the subject’s identity even if the who clause were omitted. Such a modifier is called nonrestrictive or nondefining.

Now let’s look at the ingredients of the various sentence components: the types of words, or parts of speech, that serve as subjects, predicates, objects, complements, and modifiers. One of these,the verb technically designates a part of speech, we should say simple predicate when we dicuss the verb’s function in a sentence, but since both terms designate the same word in a given context, the distinction becomes blurred.

Nouns denote persons, places, things, qualities, or feelings (teacher, John Dewey, Chicago, cities, toys, beauty, grief). They serve as subjects, objects, or complements (predicate nouns), and a group of related words that plays any of these roles is called noun phrase or a noun clause (Living on a poet’s income means that you don’t eat very well).

Pronouns function exactly as nouns do, but without naming anything. Most of them stand for preceding nouns or pronous and derive their meaning from the words they replace-their “antecedents” or “principals” or “head words.” While such pronouns provide a useful means of avoiding repetition, they are clear only if they refer unambiguously to their antecedents. (In the last sentence pronouns is the antecedent of they and their.) Of the various types, those that come first to mind are probably the personal pronouns. These have the forms I, we, you, he, she, it, and they as subjects or complements and the forms me, us, you, him, her, it and them as objects. Other important categories are the demonstrative pronous-this, that, these, and those-which point to the words they replace(as These does in the preceding sentence), and the relative pronouns-principally who, whom, which, and that-which introduce clauses modifying the words they stand for. Indefinite pronous-for example, one, another, some, each, and everyone-differ from the other types: although they qualify as pronouns (since they perform the functions of nouns but do not name anything), their identities do not depend on antecedents. Indefinite in meaning, words like anyone, many, and few do not refer to specific individuals and thus have no need for principals.

Two parts of speech serve as modifiers-adjectives and adverbs. Adjevtives modify nouns or pronouns, indicating some quality of the words they describe (a colorful sunset, a heavy object, a long interval), showing degree, amount, or number (slight increases, several ideas, two signs), or singling out an individual from its category ( a book, my report, the third quarter). A group of words that modifies a noun or a pronoun is called an adjective phrase or an adjective caluse (the woman in the gray flannel suit, the man who came to dinner).

Adverbs qualify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. When modifying other modifiers, they usually indicate extent or degree (extremely happy, somewhat earlier, quite witty, fairly well, partly responsible). Most adverbs answer the questions How? Where? When? or Why? about the verbs they qualify (danced gracefully, went there, arrives early, sometimes regrets, therefore declines). A group of words that modifies a verb or a modifier is called an adverbial phrase or an adverbial clause (went to the bank, refused because I had an earlier engagement).

The two remaining parts of speech that concern us, prepositions and conjunctions, are more functional than substantive: they show how the elements they precede fit into the context. A preposition-a word like by, in, of, on, to, or with-relates the noun or noun equivalent it introduces, the object of the preposition, to another word in the sentece. A preposition by definition is always part of a phrase that consists of itself and its object or objects, along with any modifiers. In the last sentece the prepositional phrases are italicized.

Conjunctions, the second category of connectives, come in two main varieties, coordinating and subordinating. The coordinating conjunctions-principally and, but, for, nor, and or-link elements equivalent in weight and function. In other words, they join compound elements: two subjects of the same verb, two verbs with the same subject, two objects, two complements, two modifiers, or two dependent or independt clauses. The subordinating conjunctions indicate the roles of modifying clauses, usually adverbial ones. Such clauses may, for example, state a condition (if, unless), a time (when, before, after), a contrast (although, than), or a cause (since, because). While a coordinating conjunction can connect parallel clauses, a subordinating conjunction is always part of a clause, just as a preposition is part of a phrase. In the last sentence, while and as are subordinating conjunctions.

As dictionary part-of-speech labels indicate, many words have fixed identities, but many others commonly function in two or more ways. Some words can be nouns or verbs (love, hate, promise, race, effect, object), others can be adverbs or adjectives (fast, early, late), and still others can be adverbs, conjunctions, or prepositions (before, after, since). Like can be a preposition (You look like your sister), a verb (I like my work), an adjective (I am of like mind), or a noun (Likes repel). Near can be a preposition (I sat near the stove), and adjective (We had a near miss), and adverb (The hour draws near), or a verb (We are nearing our destination).

Even words that are usually confined to single roles can sometimes function atypically. Thus, horse and kitchen, ordinarilyidentified as nouns, assume the guise of adjectives in the phrases a horse race and the kitchen sink; adjectives can turn into nouns, as in the beautiful and the damned; and parts of verbs regularly become nouns or adjectives, as in I like dancing and a found object. In general, we recognize a word as one part of speech or another by the way it functions in a given context. Since nouns and pronouns function in the same ways, we obviously have to tell them apart by their inherent differences (forunately, that’s not difficult), but we identify most words as the parts of speech whose roles they are playing. In Fish swim, for example, we identify Fish as a noun because it is the subject of the sentence (subjects mus be nouns or pronouns, and fish is clearly not a pronoun). In the sentence They fish, the same word is the predicate, and thus it has to be a verb. In Don’t tell fish stories, where fish modifies the noun stories,we call it an adjective, the part of speech used to qualify a noun.

Parts of speech do have characteristics apart from the roles they play-adjectives have comparative forms, nouns can be singular or plural, verbs have many inflections, and so on. Some grammarians, in fact, would say that fish in the last example is an attibutive noun, not an adjective, becuase it lacks the comparative forms intrinsic to descriptive adjectives (we can’t say, for example, that her story is fisher than his, but yours is the fishest of all). Such niceites, however, are largely outside the concerns of this book.