User talk:Noraft/Copyediting school

Okay, open this diff [1] in a new window, then check out my comments on it below. When you see "graf," that is shorthand for "paragraph"

• Line 30: First two edits ("to bring" and "kill") not necessary. The intention was "to knock the North Tower (Tower One) into the South Tower (Tower Two)" everything after that was a consequence of the intention. You could say "and bring" instead of "to bring," however, there is another "and" later on in the sentence, so the original writer probably made the choice to use an active verb to keep two consecutive ands out of the sentence (X and Y and Z is poor style).

Yup - my mistake - original intention was to make it in the style of "to A, B and C" but after fiddling with all the options it looks like I forgot to delete the extra "to " and left it as "to A, to B and C".

• Line 30: Third edit ("which") is good.

Yousef arrives in America

• The copyedits to the first graf in this section substantively changed the meaning of the graf in ways I don't think you realized. For example changing "Providing a smokescreen" to "The intent was to provide a smokescreen" introduces the idea that the smokescreen was planned, when the prose does not state this. Maybe it was, but that's not what it says. It may have been an accident that Aja was arrested, but it happened to serve as a smokescreen that got Yousef off the hook.
• I consider all the copyedits in this section to be unnecessary, actually. Word economy is very important when copyediting. You want to tighten prose, not loosen it. The primary time when you make something longer is when that's the only way to accurately convey meaning while observing all grammar and style rules.

Point taken. I will aim to reduce or keep the same word count

Next diff:[2]

• Line 32: First edit. "To" is poor form here. Jeff caused Joe pain. Jeff caused pain to Joe. The first form is preferred.

To be honest that seemed unnatural to me as it was. It may be because of the pluralisation or a UK/US thing.

"To show Jeff the exact pain he had caused Joe" I would always read as "To show Jeff the exact pain he had caused to Joe".

It seems like a hanging end - "he had caused Joe (to feel/to suffer)" I realise it is implied that he would feel it if it was caused to him though :¬)

Assembling the bomb

• First graf: The prior version looked good. Your copyedits loosened it up a bit.
• Second and third grafs: Good work!

The sentence split the actions up and I tried to rearrange it so that it was clear that the bomb was being assembled in Yousef's home. The original read as if two were building it in another place and that Yousef was building it at his home.

Explosion and aftermath

• First edit: You took two sentences and combined them with a conjunction (and). Longer sentences are harder to read. Both sentences worked well on their own.

That's all the time I have for the moment. Feel free to ask questions. I'm impressed with your desire to develop your skills! ɳorɑfʈ ^Talk! 02:59, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointers on that. I think I made some basic errors that I can iron out in future: especially the "smokescreen" example and adding too much in when it may not be needed.

I admit that short sentences do not appeal to me and as a result of that I will also need to be careful to avoid personal bias possibly influencing edits

I will go and change the smokescreen edit from "intending" - It was a bad assumption on my part derived from the practice of drug mules who sometimes use the "Let them catch one so that the other carrying more gets through" philosophy.

I will try and do a couple more from that page and then move on the next month as I do not have enough experience in some of the other articles from Feb 2008 such as "Mobile phones on aircraft" and "Ninpuu Sentai Hurricaneger"

Thanks for the help so far

I will try the "Omerta (novel)" next - if you can give that a once over when I have finished it perhaps I can reach a little higher towards the desired standard before taking off my stabilisers :¬)

(would it cause any problems to copy it into a subpage first ? - it would make it easier to be checked before going live with my edited text)

Chaosdruid (talk) 07:58, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

Wouldn't cause any problems, but you can't break Wikipedia, so don't worry about it. Be bold! ɳorɑfʈ ^Talk! 08:08, 14 June 2010 (UTC)