Google Opens an Outpost in Ann Arbor

In any kind of formal prose I’d say a correction is necessary. The commas only after the coordinator  are liable to irritate readers after a while.

I might just drop the comma after the coordinator without necessarily adding one before it; but maybe that’s a BrE tendency.

For my most recent book project, I had the pleasure of working with a copy editor who contacted me after each chapter with questions regarding style and vocabulary. She kept a style manual for the book project, and added/changed items as we moved through each chapter. The process was vastly superior to the copy editing on my previous book, which happened without any involvement from my end, and which in turn resulted in a great number of unwarranted changes that I cringe at to this day. And that irked me, because I also am a copy editor and an editing teacher. 

The copy editing process always should be collaborative to some degree. That may not always be possible in a “hot news” situation, but in such cases the reporters and copy editors generally have an established rapport already, and the text is relatively ephemeral anyway — it won’t be around long enough to sweat over a misplaced comma here or there. With the glacial pace of academic publishing, particularly book publishing, there is no need or justification for autonomous editing.

I think the single best answer to “Should I continue to impose my preferred style, or put everything back?” is “Talk it over with the author.” That would be time well spent.

 ”It’s his name on the book, after all.”

Or hers, of course: And imo that’s a very important thing to keep in mind when copy editing a ms. A sense of “ownership” is important for a production editor to have, but she or he has to remember whose name goes on the title page.

Charles Peters, founder of The Washington Monthly, once described the copy editor’s job on a periodical as “keeping the Old Man from embarrassing himself in public.” It’s similar for book editing. It’s been my experience that, the better the writer, the more copy editing is accepted and even appreciated by the author or, as the case may be, the title-page editor. Sometimes they even express gratitude at being “liberated” from some hoary superstition about sentence-starting conjunctions, sentence-ending prepositions, restrictive “which,” split infinitives, and the like.

After all, the author and editor have a common goal: the best book possible, given the constraints of budget and schedule.

I like your wayward writer because the subject (as in nominative case) doesn’t change. I follow this rule and, presumably to the consternation of editors, I do so throughout a manuscript. My thinking is that I wouldn’t have used the comma if I didn’t have the parenthetical phrase. 

Is the writer British?
I was taught never to place a comma before a conjunction, your writer’s style makes perfect sense to me when read aloud.

 I agree with breader. Contact the author. Since he seems to be consistent, and since you were following standard grammatical practice, I’m guessing that the author would understand and appreciate your present dilemma. His consistency suggests he cares about good writing; he may very well agree to have you continue modifying the commas per standard editorial practice. But if he feels strongly about how he punctuated those sentences, then you know you have your work cut out for you. A global search for “, and” and “, or” and “, but” will at least save you some time, though I realize that this would pull up serial sequences, too. Please tell me you’re not editing on paper!

Here’s my admittedly weird analogy. When I was a renter, I always cleaned the apartment when moving out before having the landlord inspect it. It always looked clean, and I always got my deposit back. One time, however, I decided to go over the little nicks in the white woodwork baseboards with a little white paint. (Many of the nicks, part of normal wear and tear, had been there when I moved in.) This landlord later praised the apartment as being the cleanest he’d ever seen it. My conclusion: You’d never have noticed the little dark spots in the woodwork, but once they were cleaned up, there was the general sense of a well-done apartment. And that’s how I feel about editing. The general reader might not be able to point out an errant comma or a bit of wordiness or rough syntax, but when these minor things are mostly removed, the reader has a sense of a well-written book.

My view, for the little that it’s worth, is that the second version (‘cigarette, and keeping’) damages readability by favouring a convention for a  ’comma before a conjunction joining two independent clauses’ at the expense of a convention that to my mind is more relevant for readability: ‘to set off parentheticals with commas’. The third version (‘cigarette, and, keeping’) honours both conventions, and I read it easily, but I find the original version the most natural.

Reading Carol’s preferred version, I experience a mental jar when I reach the comma in ‘alley, she felt again’ and have to go back and re-parse what the comma indicated was the parenthetic ‘and keeping an eye on the alley’. I notice this usage in real life, and it always jars (which is why I notice it): a parenthesis with only a closing comma is an unlovely and unnatural creature.

As Carol says, these are mere “conventions”; and, since different people have different conventions, you will never please everyone. There can be no universal justification, so I agree with Timothy O’Brien’s comment that ‘writers who have a clue what they are doing’ should be left to follow their own conventions. I hope Carol feels the same. Her writing this post shows she has leanings that way, but for some reason she shies away from revealing whether she decided to let the author have his way or start a (surely pointless) battle of conventions.

It’s close, but not the same. I would put a comma before but not after “but.” And I wouldn’t use a comma after “life.” I think this is a more open punctuation style, and if the author were consistent in using a closed style I’d leave it alone as long as it was done correctly—more like the third example given, but with no comma before the “and.”

They both make me pause, actually. The first because the subject changes, so ideally you’d have a comma separating the two clauses. In the second, I’d either take out the second comma (for an open style) or add another one after and (for a closed style, though that would make it quite chunky). The way the second version stands, you don’t automatically know that the sentence will continue after the parenthetical. “The fruit stand sold peaches, and for the first time that season” is a perfectly acceptable sentence on its own. 

Rewrite it thus: The fruit stand sold apples, and peaches were unavailable for the first time that season.

This really is editing-as-diplomacy. Is the writer a prima donna, or one who’s grateful for the copy editor’s help? It seems that talking to the writer is the only way to know.

But regarding the present problem: Comrades, consider taking a step back (especially if the writer is NOT a prima donna). Does any of us swear to leave the writer’s sentence breaks inviolate? Aren’t our first responsibilities to the reader and publisher rather than the writer? I ask these questions because I think that if God were copyediting that passage he’d turn the writer’s two sentences into four: “Sal Friday took a drag on her cigarette. Keeping an eye on the alley, she felt again for her .38. When she heard the switchblade open against her neck, she froze. But for the first time in her life, she knew what to do.”

When I was copyediting full time, I often found that when two alternatives (like keeping the writer’s unorthodox commas versus making the sentences comma-heavy) both looked bad, the answer was to do something else entirely. (Or delete the sentence! Boy, that worked an awful lot of the time.)

Just like that, eh? All the time? A rule trumps readability every time? Pah.

Did anyone ask whether this was fiction or academic writing? I think it would make a big difference.

I don’t know which rocked my world more – to learn that it’s okay to end a sentence with a preposition or to see how many people can get so worked up about, and how much time can be spent discussing, commas.  OK you pedants – have at it. I’m sure that these two hyphens are driving you crazy and I just fed you some more commas to mess with (as opposed to more commas with which you may – or can – mess). 

This is tedious. As an editor (inserts as many friggin’ commas as you want here) I couldn’t even read this.