Copyediting McPhee, I tried to keep my head. There was not much to do. McPhee was like John Updike, in that he turned in immaculate copy, and his editor, Pat Crow, he of the green rubber boots in the elevator, was neat and decisive. Really, all I had to do was read. I’d heard that McPhee compared his manuscript with the galleys, so anything The New Yorker did he noticed. I just looked up words in the dictionary to check the spelling (which was invariably correct, but I had to check) and determined whether compound words were hyphenated, whether hyphenated words should be closed up or printed as two words, or whether I should stet the hyphen. It was my province to capitalize the I in Interstate 80, hyphenate I-80, and lowercase “the interstate.”
But in Part II of “In Suspect Terrain” I came to this sentence and thought I might have spotted an error: “But rock columns are generalized; they are atremble with hiatuses; and they depend in large part on well borings, which are shallow, and on seismic studies, which are new, and far between.” The itchy-fingered copy editor hovered at the threshold. I wanted to let her in. I wasn’t going to touch the comma, but I was desperate to correct that “new, and far between” to “few, and far between.” I could save McPhee from making a horrible mistake! But many people with finer minds than mine were lined up to read the copy when I was through, beginning with Eleanor Gould and finishing with a phalanx of proofreaders. They would not assume that “new” was a typo for “few,” and if they had any doubt they could query it, asking the author through his editor, and there would be no harm done. But I was hellbent on rectifying what might be a glitch in a cliché. It was a Friday—I remember, because I knew that if I made this change I would have to live all weekend with the possibility, which could swiftly morph into a certainty, that I had made a mistake. Two mistakes: I would have gone beyond my province, and I would have introduced an error into McPhee’s carefully wrought prose.
So I stayed my hand, the itchy-fingered hand with the pencil in it, and spent the weekend with a clean conscience. As soon as I left the office, I felt relieved that I had let it alone. What ever made me think that McPhee would misspell, or even mistype, the word “few”?
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Another common problem that demands judgement is the dangling participle. With a dangler, you can either fix the subject of the sentence to match the participle or give the participial phrase its own verb, turning it into a clause.
My favorite example of a dangler is the road sign for weigh stations: “Trucks Enter When Flashing.” A participial phrase generally attaches to the subject: so although we know that “Trucks Enter When Flashing” means that when the light is flashing the trucks must enter, grammatically it’s the trucks that are flashing. Fishing around for an example of a properly used participle, I think of a minnow wriggling on a hook and what it might say as the game fish approaches: “Looking up, I noticed I was bait.” See? The participial phrase, “Looking up,” attaches to the subject, “I.”
A lot of people are not bothered by danglers, and even good writers occasionally slip up. A good writer who is also stubborn might cling to a dangler, pretend she did it on purpose, because she knows what she means and she thinks the sentence communicates that. This writer is clinging to a rope that has failed to swing her to the next branch. For many danglers, there is no obvious perfect fix, which can make the writer, and sometimes the editor, want to retain the original, even if it’s technically flawed.
Once I objected to the sentence “Over tea in the greenhouse, her mood turned dark.” The editor said, testily, “Can’t we just leave it?” I insisted that her mood wasn’t hovering over the tea (well, maybe it was, but I was feeling literal-minded that day). The sentence became “As we drank tea in the greenhouse, her mood turned dark.” It’s not anything that jumps out, but there is something more brooding about the version with the dangler.