Copy editors know best: A journalist’s guide to avoiding common language missteps

You can always learn something from a copy editor. Unfortunately, with many of us still working remotely, an unplanned chat with our colleagues on the copy desk doesn’t happen often. Even worse, many news organizations have laid off most of their copy editors and outsourced those left to regional hubs miles and miles away.”

Rob Tornoe, digital editor and writer, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Epitome — it’s a noun we all know and have used in our work, but chances are many of us have been using it wrong.

Recently, I wrote a story about longtime Philadelphia Eagles announcer Merrill Reese, who was awarded the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame. As I wrote in my story, “Reese said he thought the epitome of his career” up until that point was entering the Eagles Hall of Fame in 2018.

So, what’s wrong with my use of epitome? According to Bob Yearick, columnist and author of “The War on Words,” it’s often misused to mean “pinnacle” or “high point” when it actually means “a person or thing that is a perfect example of a particular quality or type.”

His correction reminded me of a scene from the fifth season of HBO’s “The Wire” — often repeated in newspaper circles. In the scene, a young reporter gets corrected by a veteran copy editor for writing, “120 people were evacuated.” As the editor notes, “A building could be evacuated. To evacuate a person is to give that person an enema.”

You can always learn something from a copy editor. Unfortunately, with many of us still working remotely, an unplanned chat with our colleagues on the copy desk doesn’t happen often. Even worse, many news organizations have laid off most of their copy editors and outsourced those left to regional hubs miles and miles away.

I thought it might be fun to seek knowledge from Yearick and some copy editors about the low-hanging fruit of the English language, which writers often trip over in the mad dash to meet a deadline.

Yearick, an avid reader of regional newspapers in and around Philadelphia, said his main bugaboo isn’t misusing certain words or grammatical mistakes that slip by editors. It’s clutter and redundancy.

“We can all write and speak in a briefer way,” Yearick said, pointing to a famous line written in 1657 by French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal and adapted by folks like Benjamin Franklin and Woodrow Wilson: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”

From Yearick’s point of view, one of the most abused words in journalism is “literally.” In almost every case, unless the word is part of a direct quote, your copy can benefit by deleting the word entirely. Why write the ship was literally sinking when sinking itself would suffice? Besides, it’s often misused to mean figuratively.

“You should literally never use literally because it’s almost never correct,” Yearick said.

Another common redundancy? The overuse of “that.” As a fun experiment, look at a few of your most recent stories and find all the times you inserted that in your copy. Remove it from the sentence; nearly 95% of the time, it reads better without it, making your copy less passive.

Redundancy was one of the areas Kenn Finkel focused on during editing workshops he gave at Gannett newspapers during the 1990s. He explained, “Redundancy is clutter, but it is easily dealt with — remove it.”

Some examples Finkel offered: They will speak on Sunday (get rid of “on;” Sunday will suffice), an old adage (did you ever hear of a new one?), advance planning (what other kind?), a personal friend (as opposed to an impersonal one) — or one of my favorites — flatly refused.

“Don’t modify verbs unless they need modifying,” Finkel suggested, “such as halfway refused, mildly rejected or partly denied.”

In terms of common mistakes, when it comes to less vs. fewer, try this — less is for things you weigh or measure, while fewer is for things you count. You emigrate from a country and immigrate to one. And a gauntlet is a glove. “You throw down a gauntlet when you challenge,” Finkel wrote. “But you run a gantlet when you move between two lines of people trying to hurt you.”

Jeffrey Barg, a grammar columnist who writes The Angry Grammarian newsletter on Substack, has his own set of annoying grammatical mistakes he’s eager to help writers avoid.

Let’s start there — anxious vs. eager. “A book I read gave the best explanation of this,” Barg said. “You’re not anxious to spend a languorous evening with your oldest married friends; you’re eager to do so. Unless you’ve been sleeping with one of them for the past six months, then you are anxious.”

It’s vs. its is a common misstep made worse when we write on our phones, which Barg says often autocorrects to the wrong one. But a mistake we can’t blame on our phones is equating hysterical with hilarious. “Stop using them as synonyms,” Barg suggests. “You sound hysterical. And it’s not funny.”

There are also common turns of phrase we get wrong all the time, such as bated breath (bait is for fish), for all intents and purposes (not intensive purposes), moot point (not a mute point or even a moo point, as Joey argued in “Friends”) and I couldn’t care less (as Weird Al Yankovich points out, I could care less “means you do care, at least a little”).

When Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 election and was replaced by a ticket featuring Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, it gave writers something else to worry about — how to handle possessive apostrophes. “It is not at all obvious because there are no universal rules about this,” Bard said, “And anyone who tells you that is either wrong or lying. … My guidance to people is: as long as you are consistent, you can’t be wrong.”

For example, the Associated Press Stylebook says only an apostrophe is needed at the end of singular proper names ending in S (Harris’). That’s also what our stylebook says at The Philadelphia Inquirer, but The New York Times and The Washington Post don’t follow the same convention. They opt to add ‘s for the singular possessive (Harris’s).

The Wall Street Journal gets really persnickety, going with ‘s for all singular proper names (except ancient classical names, such as Euripides’ dramas or Achilles’ heel) but opting for just an apostrophe when “there’s more than one syllable and the last one starts and ends with an s or a z sound” (Kansas’ law or Jeff Bezos’ company).

Got all that?

As for Walz, the singular possessive is easy enough — Walz’s. When it comes to the plural possessive, add es’ at the end of both candidates’ last names (the Harrises’ dog, the Walzes’ home).

There are a host of digital tools, such as Grammarly, that can help keep your copy crisp and correct. Among my favorites is Hemmingway, a free web-based app that helps keep your paragraphs bold and direct by pointing out hard-to-read sentences and highlighting the overuse of adverbs. Finkel would have approved of this since he worked to help a generation of journalists write with nouns and verbs and avoid unnecessary adjectives and adverbs.

“Adjectives are the crutch of the insecure writer… [a] well-written story does not require a lot of adjectives and adverbs,” Finkel noted. “Why use a verb with a precise meaning, then clutter your sentence with an adverb that has the same meaning?”

Rob Tornoe is a cartoonist and columnist for Editor and Publisher, where he writes about trends in digital media. He is also a digital editor and writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Reach him at robtornoe@gmail.com.