Student guest post: Word choice and sexual orientation

Students in JOMC 457, Advanced Editing, are writing guest posts for this blog this semester. This is the third of those posts. Rachel Coleman is a senior from Greenville, N.C. She is pursuing her degree in the reporting track at UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Compared with generations of the past, I’m happy to say that adults in the current generation are experiencing much more freedom in regard to sexual orientation. The world has made significant progress in its acceptance of all people, whether they identify as gay, straight, bisexual or transgender.

But while the general public may recognize and accept your sexual orientation, are the media doing enough to stay unbiased when reporting about people who identify as LGBTQ?

The Associated Press Stylebook says to mention sexual orientation only when necessary, and it makes a point of saying reporters should identify transgender people according to the gender they identify with.

But a story picked up by The Associated Press in 2010 got in trouble for its headline, “Transgender Men Go Topless at Delaware Beach.” The story went on to say, “Police say passers-by complained after the men removed their tops and revealed their surgically enhanced breasts.”

People wondered how a man could get in trouble for being topless—shouldn’t it have said “transgender women?” Many news outlets recognized the mistake and corrected it.

I found a column from Feministing about the same issue. Some reporters seem to have no clue about how to identify someone like Chaz Bono, who is transgender and was in the news recently for his run on Dancing with the Stars. Many had no idea whether he should be referred to as “he” or “she.”

Luckily, GLADD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) provides a Media Reference Guide for journalists who have this problem. They say Chaz Bono should be described as either a man or a transgender man.

After doing a little research, I found a writer who had another great point — that using the term “transgendered” is more biased than “transgender.” In Joanne Herman’s blog on The Huffington Post, she said the extra “–ed” in the word makes the same difference as saying “colored people” versus “people of color.”

I once interviewed a drag queen who said she liked being referred to as “she” more than “he” because being a drag queen was her full-time job. While it always depends on the individual, the media and law enforcers who write reports that identify someone’s gender should take care to ask before they assume what someone wants to be called. If the media make small steps to ensure consistency in their writing, the public will accept these people for who they are, too.

 

My favorite bowl names of the past

A ticket stub from the now-defunct Bluebonnet Bowl, played at the now-defunct Astrodome in Houston.

It’s bowl season in college football. Fans will get to enjoy more than 30 games in the next few weeks. Headline writers will be tempted to “go bowling,” in an attempt to “bowl over” readers.

Nowadays, names for most bowls contain corporate names for companies, industry groups and chain restaurants. But it hasn’t always been that way.

The bowl games of days past are filled with colorful names that reflect the aspirations, culture and history of the places where they took place. Here are my 10 favorites, listed in random order and accompanied by the cities that hosted them:

• Cigar Bowl (Tampa)

• All-American Bowl (Birmingham, Ala.)

• Cosmopolitan Bowl (Alexandria, La.)

• Gotham Bowl (New York City)

• Garden State Bowl (East Rutherford, N.J.)

• Freedom Bowl (Anaheim, Calif.)

• Oyster Bowl (Norfolk, Va.)

• Aviation Bowl (Dayton, Ohio)

• Bluebonnet Bowl (Houston)

• Aloha Bowl (Honolulu)

Defining Black Friday

Black Friday at a mall in San Francisco in 2009. (Creative Commons photo by Steve Rhodes)

The annual Black Friday stories are already in the news.

The News & Observer, for example, offered this preview on the Sunday front page. By the end of this week, Black Friday will almost certainly be the top story on TV news, with the inevitable footage of shoppers milling around in malls and beating down the doors of “big box” stores.

But where does the term  come from? Why is the day after Thanksgiving called Black Friday? This article in Time magazine offers two explanations:

• Because it’s the day that many stores expect to make a profit, or out of the red and into the black, for the year.

• Because newspapers in Philadelphia began calling it that to describe the flood of shoppers in the streets and in stores.

If we are going to cover this as big news, we should at least define our terms. This can be done in the stories themselves or, better yet, in a separate textbox.

Happy Thanksgiving!

UPDATE: Ben Zimmer at Visual Thesaurus explains the Philadelphia connection to the term, and Bill Walsh of The Washington Post offers his viewpoint.

I’m breaking my silence about speaking out

I’m breaking my silence and speaking out: It’s time for headline writers to rein in the use of those phrases. We can do better.

In these examples from The Huffington Post, why not say what Obama said about waterboarding? A more compelling headline would be “Obama calls waterboarding torture.” And it’s better for SEO.

And what obligation does Gloria Cain have to discuss the allegations of sexual harassment against her husband? None. The “breaks silence” headline indicates that she does and is feeling pressure to do so.

Google News shows us that headlines are filled with these phrases. Wendi Murdoch, for example, is breaking her silence over a pie-throwing incident earlier this year. And Conrad Murray, the doctor convicted of involuntary manslaughter in Michael Jackson’s death, is speaking out. And so on.

Sometimes the phrases are being used interchangeably. Depending on the news source, Sharon Bialek either “broke her silence” or “spoke out” when she alleged that Herman Cain acted inappropriately when she asked him for help getting a job.

I’m not advocating a ban on these phrases. But I would suggest using them with caution. They have become shopworn and often obscure the news rather than illuminating it.

Style should be an open book

A recent article on the Poynter Institute’s website took on the question of style, as in AP, Chicago, etc. I was interviewed for the story, and my viewpoint is that style depends on audience.

What surprised me most in the article was the anecdote in the lead. Apparently, somewhere out there, a journalism professor is requiring students to transcribe the AP Stylebook by hand. The intent of the assignment is to get students to memorize every entry in the stylebook.

The approach in my editing class is the opposite. Every assignment is open book — as in open stylebook, both AP and the stylebook of the journalism school at UNC-Chapel Hill. The objective is to get students accustomed to using stylebooks, figuring out how they are organized and applying the entries to news stories.

My students and I also spend time discussing how a stylebook is different from a dictionary and how some editors use stylebooks other than AP. We also do an exercise in which we resolve unsettled style questions.

My intent with these discussions and exercises is to help students see that style is often subjective. It changes with the times and with the audience.

Memorizing a stylebook seems like a pointless task. That’s particularly true with the AP Stylebook, which issues a new edition every year.

Besides, a newsroom is always open book. Why shouldn’t a classroom be? A managing editor never takes stylebooks away from the staff and demands that writers and editors work from memory.

The latest version of the AP Stylebook, by the way, includes 16 pages on food names and definitions, including “sashimi” and “ghee.” Rather than transcribing that section, perhaps students could eat their way through it. Yum!

I am curious (Chicago)

As an American journalist, I have used the Associated Press Stylebook throughout my career. I’ve found it be a helpful resource on matters of grammar punctuation, word choice and other matters of usage.

I’ve used other stylebooks on occasion, too. When I was in graduate school writing a thesis on a media law topic, I used The Bluebook. More recently, I used the Los Angeles Times stylebook when I worked there during the summer of 2008.

I’ve suggested a “style smackdown” between AP editors and their counterparts from the Chicago Manual of Style at the 2012 ACES conference, which will take place in New Orleans. I’ve since revised that to a “style lovefest” in order to make such a session seem less adversarial. But the idea is the same: Get editors from several stylebooks together for a discussion about what they do and how they do it.

In the meantime, I am contemplating branching out in my style knowledge. Yes, I am style-curious.

I mentioned this weekend on Twitter that one of my goals for the summer is to try to learn Chicago style. Here are some of the reactions there:

• OH, IS THAT ALL? Should only take a minute or two. (Recommend signing up for online access. Easy-peasy.)

•  Give up now. The numbers section alone goes from 8.1-8.80.

• At least it’s logical to ex-journos, unlike APA, where you don’t capitalize book or article titles.

• It’s a little rough at first, but eventually you become bilingual. Then again, I was only fluent in Chicago 14.

• CMS made easy: Yes to serial comma; no to spaces around em dashes.

• Very cool!

My goal is not to become an expert in Chicago style or even fluent in it. I want to know enough to satisfy my curiosity — and so I can ask intelligent questions at a style lovefest, should one take place at the next ACES conference. Let’s hope that happens.

Student guest post: Knowing what you’re editing

Students in J457, Advanced Editing, are writing guest posts for this blog this semester. This is the last of those posts. Kate Sievers is a junior at UNC-Chapel Hill studying journalism and history. She edits for BoUNCe, a comedic magazine on campus, and she enjoys helping out friends who require a freelance editor. When she’s not scouring eBay for deals, she is adventuring around the Triangle.

As the semester ends and paper due dates approach, I find my schedule revolving around proofreading half a dozen papers. However, these papers are not for my classes. They are for my less than grammatically and stylistically inclined friends.

I am more than happy to read through the papers because I cannot resist helping out a friend in need, nor can I resist the thrill of the hunt for errors. The only hiccup that occurs when I am proofreading is that my friends have a wide array of majors — from business to biology to anthropology.

Copy editors find it useful to know a little about the subject they are editing. Advance knowledge can by helpful in extremely technical writing that includes industry-specific jargon. Sometimes, an error is only able to be caught because the reader has inside knowledge of the subject.

For example, when I was looking over my friend’s biology paper on genetics, she interchanged the words “meiosis” and “mitosis” (meiosis is the type of cell division that produces reproductive cells, and mitosis is the type of cell division that makes a perfect copy of a cell). Those words mean very different things and would be a big error if used incorrectly.

In this case, I had prior knowledge because of a course I had taken the previous semester. If I had not known what those words meant, I would have completely missed the error, and I would have had one sad friend when she got her paper back.

In some cases, knowing little about a subject actually improves editing. Without firsthand knowledge, you are not supplying your own information to fill in the gaps of information in a confusing paper.

My friend who is a business major wrote a paper on entrepreneurship. Her sentence structure made it difficult for me to discern her explanations of the different types of entrepreneurs. As it turned out, she had written the paper in a rush, and even she did not know what her sentences meant. So with a little tweaking, her paper was much more coherent.

Copy editing can rely on the luck of the draw when it comes to subject matter. One day you can be reading through an article on bowling and the next it could be about political unrest. If you know something about the subject, that knowledge can be quite helpful in catching errors. But do not despair if you are not familiar with something, because you can easily see if an article makes sense in its organization and structure.

And if all else fails, ask someone who knows about the subject for help.

Student guest post: A new definition for love in the OED

Students in J457, Advanced Editing, are writing guest posts for this blog this semester. This is the 11th of those posts. Alice Miller is a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill and is finishing her studies in journalism and art history. She is soaking up all aspects of her final spring in Chapel Hill including, but not limited to, frozen yogurt, friends and sunny afternoons in the Quad.

At the end of March, the Oxford English Dictionary released the newest additions and revisions to its 600,000-word database. Yet, not all of the new changes fit the traditional definition of “word” itself.

Some chat and text originated terms, such as LOL, OMG and FYI have infiltrated the pages, but those stand-ins for longer catch phrases do not compare with the most controversial addition.

♥.

Still looking for the word of which I am speaking? You didn’t miss it. The heart icon you probably skimmed over has officially been added to the OED. Often created by a less-than sign and number 3 (<3), the heart icon is a sign of chat culture transforming the English language as we know it.

With not much faith in American English traditions, ♥ was incorporated into the OED. What worries me most about this new addition is that it could foreshadow a trend toward icons representing words. While LOL is a stand-in for “laugh out loud,” everyone knows it, or can look it up and find its clear definition. But with ♥, what does it really mean? Love? Heart? Less than 3?

In 1993, the French Academy, the organization in France assigned to protect the authenticity and integrity of the French language, banned the usage of the word “email.” Rather than incorporating the American term into the French language like a few other phrases have been, they banned it all together and came up with a French replacement of “courriel.”

This example is one of the many times the French Academy has fought to keep American lingo from becoming a part of French language.

While the majority of French citizens still use “email,” I applaud the academy’s attempt to preserve the French language. I think this pride of language could be a trend we look up to the French for an example.

It may be faster to insert on small phone keyboards and help stay in a 140-character limit on Twitter, but I think it is troubling to think that ♥ is considered a word. We have 26 letters in the alphabet, with some that deserve some more usage, so let’s stick to letters and leave the icons out of the dictionary.

What’s OSU to you: Beavers, Buckeyes or Cowboys?

I recently spent a day in Ohio at The Columbus Dispatch at the invitation of editors at the newspaper there. My visit was part of a week of training for the newsroom staff.

One of the topics we discussed was writing headlines for the newspaper’s website. The Dispatch has recently made it easier for copy editors to write separate headlines for the print and online editions.

To prepare for my visit, I looked at several issues of the newspapers and its website. I noticed that the Dispatch routinely uses “OSU” as a short form for Ohio State University in print and online.

I hadn’t thought to abbreviate the school in that way, though I can see how it would be helpful to do so in a one-column headline or similarly tight space in print. But what about Oklahoma State University or Oregon State University? Wouldn’t they be OSUs also?

It would make perfect sense to use those abbreviations in Stillwater or Corvallis, not just in Columbus. Readers in each place see that OSU as their OSU. As one person put it when I asked about this on Twitter:

OSU = Oregon State University … But then I live near Seattle and have friends in Oregon.

But what about online headlines, where audience is not defined by geography? Would sports fans outside of Ohio search for news about Ohio State football or basketball using “OSU”? Or would they try “Ohio State” or “Buckeyes”?

Google gives us mixed messages. On the Google homepage, typing in “OSU” offers us the Ohio State University website as the top item. (It probably helps that the university has “osu.edu” as its domain.)

But in Google News, the top “OSU” hit is a story about Oregon State baseball.  (The Beavers swept Hartford over the weekend.) Next are links to Ohio State basketball and Oklahoma State Cowboys basketball.

So what to do? I asked SEO/social media expert Erika Napoletano of Redhead Writing to point me in the right direction. She suggested that I use the keyword tool in Google AdWords. There, I found that “Ohio State” is searched on Google about twice as much as “OSU.” Perhaps that is our answer.

I’ve added further exploration of this part of Google to my to “to do” list for the summer. In the meantime, my overall advice on writing headlines for online media remains the same. Write for people first, then Google. Here’s a handout (PDF) that I use in class and other settings.

Of course, for some people, OSU may mean something completely different. As one Twitter friend wrote:

Ohio State University or some religious order I can’t think of right now. I remember seeing it after a nun’s name.

That would be the Order of Ursuline Sisters. Or, as that OSU’s sports teams might be called, the Fightin’ Nuns.

Student guest post: Why can’t Microsoft Word be smarter?

Students in J457, Advanced Editing, are writing guest posts for this blog this semester. This is the seventh of those posts. Tim Freer is a senior graphic design and editing major at UNC-Chapel Hill. He spends his hours writing, enjoying the company of friends, debating philosophical issues and in the near future (he hopes) traveling the world.

Microsoft Word is easily the most widely used word processor in America. It was what I grew up typing with, and I’m sure most of the people of my generation can relate to that.

Word has long boasted many useful tools for paper-writing, checking spelling and grammar and offering templates for users, along with much more (including long-standing problems that still have yet to be fixed). Especially given the recent technological surge, I can’t help but feel that Word should be a much smarter program than it is.

Considering the vast array of technological wonders we’ve accomplished in the last few years — touch screens, 3-D movies, video chat, video games that map your body movements and transfer them to the screen — you’d think that we would be able to formulate a program that can  provide useful grammatical insight while simultaneously allowing users to format a visually appealing page.

However, that reality remains elusive. At the most basic level, Word is often frustrating, even for a common user like me.  The faulty grammar check is one of the biggest turn-offs: Nothing is more annoying than writing a grammatically accurate sentence, only to see it underlined in squiggly green because Word misinterpreted a comma or an apostrophe.

As a writer, I have conditioned myself to know the difference between sound-alikes like ‘tail’ and ‘tale.’ “The boy stepped on the cat’s tale” is an obviously flawed sentence that Word could never see because its abilities are so limited. This is a very basic example, but it applies to countless other words and grammatical situations; eliminating these misunderstandings could be highly useful for practically everyone.

Grammar is just the start of it. In terms of layout, Word is also ages behind a program like Adobe InDesign, which allows for much easier placement and organization of pictures and text boxes. This makes Word’s on-spot placement and irritating text wrap seem clunky and outdated.

As far as I know, you cannot change the spacing in Word without the format of the entire document reverting back to its original size and font. Even if Word can do that through changing the default settings or doing some other complicated maneuver, the point is that these annoyances are a non-factor in InDesign. Indentations and bulleting are still problematic and inconsistent in Word as well.

Why Microsoft Word has fallen this far behind the technological curve is somewhat puzzling, because it clearly seems to be within our capabilities to improve it. Is it that far-fetched for a program like Word to be able to map word rhythms and patterns, analyze similar-sounding words and multiple meanings, and sniff out those little ‘tale-tail’ mishaps?  What if, similar to Word’s built-in spell check, thesaurus and dictionary, it had a pre-programmed AP style guide (or any other guide, for that matter) that could detect flaws accordingly and suggest changes?

I understand that more complex functions like these could have difficulty analyzing sentences as they are being written, but how much more complex is that, really, than the basic automatic grammar and spell check? Regardless, if the function were not automatic and instead initiated by the user for the sake of revision, that argument becomes more difficult to make.

Before I get ahead of myself, I must clear up one reservation I have with all of this. There is truly something to be said for people being able to formulate sentences themselves without seeking wisdom from a screen. A pampered society is a stupid society (and in this case, a potentially illiterate one). I certainly want my kids to be able to use proper grammar, to write and to spell on their own.

At the same time, at least at a professional level, the utility of a program with a built-in style guide or group of style guides would be undeniable. Though it may be less exciting to create a problem-free, all-encompassing word processor than it is to create a dazzlingly realistic video game, the former could quicken the transfer of news and information around the world considerably. It’s astounding to think of how much more efficient writing and editing news stories could be if newspaper staffs didn’t have to leaf through their AP style guides looking for guidelines that may or may not exist at all.