Everyone in the creative biz knows that part of the game is entering (and winning) creative contests–like the American Advertising Federation’s Addy Awards or IABC’s Gold Quill Awards. Some of these contests (including these two) are legit, and truly do reward excellence in communications, writing, and design. Receiving such an award is an honor — even if you have to pay anywhere from $25 to $125 to enter the competition.
However, the number of contests out there seems to be proliferating, and some look to be little more than scams. For example, I recently received a mailer for the so-called “Media Achievement Awards,” “honoring the best in media communications.”

Here are some gems from their brochure copy.

• Our judges are award winning, fun, look forward to every competition!
• Submissions will be judged not against other entries but on its own merit.
• We offer two award levels of awards.
• We value your privacy. Entries are not returned and destroyed after the judging process.

Apparently someone (who may not have English as a first language) has decided to cash in and start his own creative competition. Got an extra $50 to burn — and $175 to buy a statuette when you “win”? Send in your entry today!

I.K. writes to say that we recently edited some files in which the cross-references had become broken. For example, a pointer in Section 2 to Section 9 had became a pointer to Section 0; other references simply displayed as “Error! Reference not found.”

The references had “broken” when we split the original file into three sections for editing and then put it back together. Oops.

Luckily, I.K. knew how to fix the problem and sent us instructions on how to do so as well: In the newly merged document, hit Cntrl-A (select all) and then F9 (update fields).  After doing this, the references should again  take the reader to the right place when  clicked.

Easy as pie.

For those of you who don’t know, every month the good people at the Chicago Manual of Style publish a series of Q&A about Chicago style–providing As to readers’ Qs, obviously.

Reading through the Q&A is a good way to refresh your knowledge on a wide variety of Chicago style points. It also provides an opportunity to laugh evilly at the questioners and speculate on topics such as oh this question is so obvious why did they even need to ask? or gracious this question is so nonsensical, this asker can’t even be a real copyeditor, or oh my goodness, the poor dupe, his question only reveals the depths of his ignorance, etc. etc.

For those such as myself, who would never take pleasure in feeling smarter than others, reading the Q&A is purely a way of increasing our knowledge.

Correspondent E.F., a great writer and good egg, writes today with a concern from one of her clients …

He seems happy but commented that I use a lot of one-sentence paragraphs. I never noticed this, but it’s probably a holdover from reporting work. Is there a rule against this? He wasn’t really complaining but sort of musing about it because he says writing workshops claim this is a no-no.

My response? One sentence paragraphs are perfectly fine — as long as they are used smartly and judiciously. Moreover, there’s no rule against them, despite what high school English teachers or “workshop leaders” might tell you — and what you might find in Strunk & White’s Elements of Style.

As a rule, single sentences should not be written or printed as paragraphs. An exception may be made of sentences of transition …

But I don’t use S&W as a rulebook, just as a very general primer on good writing — so I disregard this “rule,” and don’t consider it authoritative.

Moreover, William Safire advises against any pedantic insistence that one-sentence paragraphs must never be used. And Bryan Garner writes in his Modern American Usage that “long sentences slow the reading and create a solemn, portentous impression; short sentences speed the reading and the thought.” Couldn’t the same be said of long and short paragraphs?

I advised E.F. to tell her client — if she had to give him an explanation — that in this age of short attention spans, short paragraphs are often preferred to long paragraphs, and one-sentence paragraphs are perfectly acceptable. Short paragraphs help readers access your copy easily and digest it in manageable chunks. They also help draw attention to important points that are significant enough to stand alone — a critical factor to consider knowing that many readers are actually “scanners.”

Of course, it wouldn’t make sense to have every paragraph be one sentence long. Good writers vary the length of their paragraphs, much as they vary the length of their sentences — as part of the process of crafting clear, readable, resonant prose.

Working with a client in Germany this week on a white paper about m-payment systems — that is, systems that give your mobile phone the same functionality as a credit card, so that you can literally wave it in front of a merchant’s credit card terminal and charge something automatically to your card.

I’ve been writing a lot of original text and also rewriting a lot of the client’s material (he’s writing in English, even though he’s a native German speaker). Here’s one of his recent comments about my work:

I read all the document. I like your text and style! I wish I had such an English!

In a later email he says:

I really like your smooth text!

Dear client, I really like your smooth emails! You are the coolest and I love working for you!

I have to share a recent email exchange between me and one of my clients.

Client: … wanted to pass along to you a comment by a senior manger here about the write-up that Bethany did. The manager said that the package submitted was one of the top five that he had ever seen. Congratulations. Please let Bethany know.

Me: Wow, that is outstanding. I will certainly pass this along, right now. It’s always a nice feeling to know that you’ve done a good job.

Client: You and your team members do not do a “good job,” you do a “great” job!

Me: I am smiling. Thank you for saying that. You are too kind.

Client: I speak the truth.

There is nothing better than working for someone like this — someone who has the highest standards, who demands and recognizes outstanding work, and who understands what you do — and values it.

Dear client, I will keep you nameless here, but thank you so much for everything you do. It is an honor and a pleasure to work for you.

A.P. writes to say that the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition, is now available on CD-ROM. This is in addition to the print edition (of course) and the online version, which is available to paying subscribers only.

I find Chicago’s index easier to use than I used to–and I don’t know if that’s because I’m a more experienced editor, or because the index itself has become more user-friendly and intuitive. But I still think it can be a trial to find the answers to certain questions. Having a fully searchable version of the manual certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Just ran across a nice summary of when to use which and when to use that … which I always find hard to explain. From the Dayton PRSA website:

The difference between “that” and “which” can be vague until you get the hang of it. “Which” sets off parenthetical information — stuff that can be lifted right out of the sentence without changing the sentence’s main point. “That” introduces information essential to the main point of the sentence. “The press conference, which will be held at 2 p.m., will include a question-and-answer session.” “A company that listens to its customers will succeed.”

Thinking of which clauses as parenthetical information — bracketed by commas, rather than parentheses — is a nice way of explaining this distinction. And we didn’t even have to use the words restrictive and nonrestrictive, which tend to make non-editors’ eyes glaze over …

OMG! OUP has a book club! And it’s about classics! (Sound of me fainting dead away).

(Sound of me picking self up.) OK, ANYWAY, last month’s book was Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. I’ve never read this and have just ordered it from the library. The current book, the one for June, is Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I will reveal that I started to read Tess about a year ago, got about a third of the way through, and found it so full of impending dread that I had to put it down. If I recall, Tess was about to make a terrible mistake driven by guilt and doubt and desire, a mistake that you just knew would wind up coming back to haunt her a hundredfold.

By myself, I just couldn’t bear to finish the book and see poor Tess crushed by circumstance and fate (at least, this is what seemed to me was going to happen). But for Oxford … I’ll pick it up where I left off and do my darnedest.

Thus, I looked much like a Warner Bros. cartoon character (head spinning, steam coming out of ears, eyes popping) when I found this article from Harper’s Magazine–an extensive essay by Wallace about Garner and his Modern American Usage. It goes far in explaining Garner’s particular genius, putting his MAU in the context of a greater tradition of writing on the English language, and showing why he is such a masterful rhetorician.

An excerpt:

It’s now possible to see that all the autobiographical stuff in ADMAU’s Preface does more than just humanize Mr. Bryan A. Garner. It also serves to detail the early and enduring passion that helps make someone a credible technocrat — we tend to like and trust experts whose expertise is born of a real love for their specialty instead of just a desire to be expert at something. In fact, it turns out that ADMAU’s Preface quietly and steadily invests Garner with every single qualification of modern technocratic Authority: passionate devotion, reason, and accountability (recall “in the interests of full disclosure, here are the ten critical points …”), experience (”that, after years of working on usage problems, I’ve settled on”), exhaustive and tech-savvy research (”For contemporary usage, the files of our greatest dictionary makers pale in comparison with the fulltext search capabilities now provided by NEXIS and WESTLAW”), an even and judicious temperament (see e.g. this from HYPERCORRECTION: “Sometimes people strive to abide by the strictest etiquette, but in the process behave inappropriately”), and the sort of humble integrity (for instance, including in one of the entries a past published usage-error of his own) that not only renders Garner likable but transmits the same kind of reverence for English that good jurists have for the law, both of which are bigger and more important than any one person.

What can I say? Reading the essay was (one of) this girl’s dreams come true.