By the time you finished taking the Copy Editor Quiz in this space last week, I hope we convinced you that handling that nightly task for a newspaper is a pretty tough job.
Despite the overwhelming response — we received more than 500 entries — I think the test persuaded most of you to stay in your day jobs.
Check closely the two verbs in those first sentences I just wrote (persuade and convince). Language purists will tell you that you have to be “persuaded” to do something, and you have to be “convinced” of something.
Those two words turned out to be the key to scoring a perfect 10 on the quiz we published last Saturday in the paper and online on ajc.com. Out of all those entries only one reader, Jim Wallace, a former copy editor for the Journal-Constitution, got all the answers correct. And Jim disqualified himself because of his past employment here at the paper and his appreciation for his former boss, Jim Smith, the AJC’s copy desk chief who helped design the test.
The entries came from all over and from people with a broad range of backgrounds. Not that many of them were former copy editors, but all of them who took the time to write said they had a deep appreciation of language and had fun taking the test.
(Many of them also sent along resumes in case we were interested in paying them to do this.)
Those of you who participated should know that you caught almost all of the obvious errors in the test sentences — mostly word mistakes. The majority of you scored a 70 on the test, a few dozen got an 80 and only five got nine out of 10 correct. (One of those got convince/persuade correct, but missed the incorrect use of the word “gel” as a verb.)
Interestingly, many of you took the time to write through some of the sentences that you thought were awkwardly written. Indeed, you often made them read better, but missed the incorrectly used word in your new sentence. (A copy editor would say you may have talent as a line editor, but still need work to become a good copy editor.)
Many of you, like Terri Skaggs, a marketing coordinator for a pharmaceutical company and mother of two from Cumming, found the quiz a challenge.
“I enjoy anything that has to do with words, especially editing,” Skaggs wrote. “I edit everything that comes across my desk — whether requested to or not.”
Here’s the test with the correct answers:
The answers:
1. Halfway round the world that same day, workers at the United States Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, also unable to obtain their usual newspapers, poured over similar printouts, which are produced on sheets about the size of a tabloid newspaper.
The correct verb is pore, meaning to gaze intently or steadily. The other word means to flow in a continuous stream.
(And, yes, it’s OK to say “halfway round” the world.)
2. John Heimlich, an economist for the Air Transport Association, a Washington-based industry trade group, said the airlines could try to use stock options to convince the government to offer longer-term loans or better interest rates.
Convince is the wrong word. Persuade is the correct word. You must be persuaded to do something.
3. “Sometimes when you make a lot of changes, it takes time for a team to gel,” right fielder Brian Jordan said.
This was a tricky one. We meant to quote Jordan as saying that the team hadn’t jelled yet. Gel is considered a noun in proper usage.
4. While they grope for answers to Japan’s mounting economic problems, the country has been stricken by a series of random calamities, including several grizzly murders and the sinking of a school ship near Hawaii.
This one is out of the venerable New York Times. Unless some ferocious bears were involved (they weren’t), the Times should have written about grisly murders.
5. The Catholic children had to run a gantlet of stone-throwing Protestant protesters for a third day as they walked to school.
This is the correct one. Many readers mistakenly believe that gauntlet is always the correct word. Gauntlet is the armored glove of knights of yore. They threw it down in a challenge. Gantlet is an ancient form of punishment involving having to run between rows of tormentors. While many dictionaries find both acceptable, in this case gantlet would be preferred.
6. They reportedly noticed white powder on the mail stacked on the palates and notified their supervisor, who contacted authorities.
Mail is usually stacked on pallets, portable platforms. The palate is the roof of the mouth.
7. The forum and its elite agents of global capitalism had come under siege in recent years by unruly hoards of antiglobalization protesters.
The correct word is hordes, as in a large, uncontrolled crowd. A hoard is a supply of something.
8. Giants owner Peter Magowan’s remarks were halted by a growing chant of “Sign him, sign him,” an illusion to Bonds’ contract, which expires this weekend.
An allusion is an indirect reference to something. An illusion is an unreal or false impression. Allusion is the correct word in this case.
9. “If it hadn’t been for my father getting a wild hare on the day I was born to invest in IBM and Coca-Cola, we probably wouldn’t be in the situation we’re in,” she said.
Unless her daddy caught a rabbit the day she was born, we meant to say it was her father’s “wild hair” that paid off. A few of you had never heard of this expression.
10. It has been a torturous legal process that began in May 1998 when the Justice Department and 19 state attorneys general sued Microsoft, saying it illegally thwarted competition.
Tortuous is the correct word. It means full of twists and turns. The other word means inflicting severe pain to force information or get revenge. Some legal proceedings can seem awfully painful, but in this case we meant tortuous.
On the headline-writing challenge, you did pretty well in capturing that short story about the record drought and wildfire threat in five words or fewer. But most of you stuck with words that were in the story. The best submission came from Tom Derby, an Atlantan who said his background is mostly technical, “but I enjoy trying to communicate as correctly as possible.” He wrote Wildfire danger reaches flashpoint as a headline. That would have made me want to read an otherwise routine story.
Thanks for your entries. Let’s do this again sometime.
Contact Mike King by e-mail at insideajc@ajc.com, by phone at 404-526-5819, by fax at 404-526-5611 or by writing P.O. Box 4689, Atlanta, GA 30302.
