Subedit anything - Get them on your side

Persuade other people to carry out their tasks in a way that makes your working life easier and you’ll raise your rating as a subeditor, says Humphrey Evans.

Subs work best in congenial surroundings. Sometimes this just means making sure you have a suitable chair, a well-set-up computer system and freshly squeezed orange juice to hand. Less obviously, it involves persuading people whose work affects yours to do it in the most appropriate fashion.

Talk to your reporters. Talk to your writers (or at least send them emails). Talk to your commissioning editors. Let them know what you need in order to help you present their work in the best possible way.

Ask the reporters to do all the things they should be doing anyway – like typing (correct) in brackets like this after esoteric names whose spelling they may have gone to some lengths to establish. You can even ask them to pass through any printed material they’ve latched on to at a press launch so you can double-check things that have yet to make it into reference books and style guides.

Tell your writers that if they get the piece in on time, within striking distance of the right length and covering all the things they were asked to cover in the brief, there's a much greater chance that they'll like what they see appearing in the publication.

Small things help. Ask them to put the subject of the article in any computer filename or email heading. Remember those one-word catchlines? They had a use. Some writers casually submit work headed "Article for X". That’s fine for them as individuals, but less satisfactory when you are processing dozens of articles for X.

You can put together a sheet of "Guidance for Writers" which will save you saying the same thing over and over again. Many of your contributors will be quite eager to comply with what you tell them.

Ask your commissioning editors to ask for everything that makes your life easier. If feature articles in your publication carry a 20-word contributor’s biography, get the writers to write them themselves as part of the commission, rather than scrabbling through reference books at the end of the process.

You can even influence your editor more than you might think. You’ll never beat the hierarchy with a blank contradiction along the lines of "My way is the right way." But you can shift attitudes by presenting yourself as the readers’ representative. Asking "What will the readers make of this?" can cause even the most bull-headed editor to rethink.

Humphrey Evans teaches subediting and the writing and editing skills that all editors need. He works for, amongst others, PMA and the UK National Union of Journalists. Take a look at the NUJ course outline and booking details at www.nujtraining.org.uk/page.phtml?id=1218&category=outline_pt&finds=0&string=&strand=

You can let Humphrey Evans know your thoughts about subediting at prettygoodpics at googlemail.com

And if you want to use a photograph taken with a subeditor's sensibilities, go to www.alamy.com and put prettygoodpics into the search box.

When copyright goes wrong

Copyright infringement can get a publication into deep trouble. Make sure you know what to look out for to avoid wrongly exploiting material, says Humphrey Evans.

Subs need to keep an eye out for the kind of thing that can land their editor in jail or cost their publication serious money. Contempt of court and libel are the obvious dangers, but copyright infringement can be a hidden killer.

Watch out for the sociologist who starts a piece about modern mores with a couple of lines by some copyright conscious singer-songwriter. Or the feature writer who thinks an extensive selection from D H Lawrence will enliven an article on emotional relations. Or, most problematical, the reporter under pressure who lifts wholesale from the internet and other publications without acknowledgement.

There is a provision in copyright law called "fair dealing", which allows reasonable quotation from a copyrighted work to illustrate of make a point, and there is plenty you can do with such material without running into trouble. However, Carla Wilson, copyright specialist with the NUJ’s solicitors, Thompsons, warns: "The only firm rules on fair dealing and copyright are that there are no firm rules. It’s a matter of degree – you can’t just do it on a fixed number of words being safe. You have to judge what’s allowable based on what’s in front of you."

As a sub, you can let through blatant lifts of material in news reports so long as a full attribution is given – although whether the editor will be happy to have it revealed that the reporting is basically coming from another publication is another matter. You can allow through quoted chunks in reviews and criticism, because the Copyright Act allows it. But be aware that those same chunks quoted in a feature following up the review might give problems.

Once you’re away from news reporting and reviews, the test is whether the quoted material forms a substantial part of the original – and a couple of lines from a pop song could easily be all that is substantial about it.

As a sub, you may not be able to just cross things out. But, as with contempt of court and libel, you do need to make sure the chief sub or editor is aware of a potential copyright infringement. Can anyone track down the rights holder and clear permission? Will the editor take the risk of publishing while hoping that no one with the clout to sue will actually notice? Or is the editor going to tell you to delete the lot of it?

Maybe the decision isn’t yours, but the responsibility for initiating the process that leads to a decision is.

You can let Humphrey Evans know your thoughts about subediting at prettygoodpics at googlemail.com

And if you want to use a photograph taken with a subeditor's sensibilities, go to www.alamy.com and put prettygoodpics into the search box.

Read the right words

Everyone who works with words needs to get used to using the spellchecker, but don’t assume you can rely on it. Check every word yourself, says Humphrey Evans.

My life is so sad that I am aware that the label on the back of a bottle of JHB bitter ale describes the three and a half foot tall Sir Jeffrey Hudson, after whom the beer is named, as an "adventurer, courtier and dualist".

The same slip appears in the magazine Showreel, in an article about Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai: "Other techniques include slow motion to add emphasis to the expert killing blow that one samurai inflicts on another during a dual."

Does it matter? We all know what is meant. But it does matter, because it looks slipshod to those readers who spell well and can really bamboozle the 20 per cent or so who have difficulty with letters.

If you can't guess at duellist and duel - and poor spellers can't - you're thrown back to looking at the dictionary. A keen reader with English as a second language backed up by a reasonably extensive dictionary is quite likely to end up believing that Sir Jeffrey held to the doctrine that mind and matter exist as independent entities, a state perhaps related to the intake of beer but hardly conveying the cut and thrust of swordplay.

The point is that these kinds of differences don't register with computerised spell checkers. You have to pick them out by eye and know enough about the background of words to determine what should actually appear.

The Independent on Sunday didn't mean to print a sentence about politicians and their policies not coming to the voters roar, an altogether different concept to the intended raw. Nor did the Guardian want to identify Huw Thomas as the compare of the world premiere of Frank Zappa's musical Thing-Fish.

There's a difference between the similar sounding acolyte and aconite that requires a knowledge of their meaning if you're going to sort them out when a writer has mixed them up. There's a difference between galleons and galleys which made nonsense of one writer's recommendation of a suitably relevant punishment for drunken, holidaying louts arrested on Greek islands.

So the message must be: run the spell checker, but make sure you're reading the stuff as well. Unless, of course, you're happy to connive in such delights as that memorable small ad in the Yorkshire Post where a successful businessman, a widower, aged 44, sought an affectionate, understanding female to shave the enjoyable things in life.

You can let Humphrey Evans know your thoughts about subediting at prettygoodpics at googlemail.com

And if you want to use a photograph taken with a subeditor's sensibilities, go to www.alamy.com and put prettygoodpics into the search box.

Abbreviate! Abbreviate!

Abbreviations do a useful job so long as you keep them under control. So be aware of what you can do when things turn acronymious, says Humphrey Evans.

Abbreviations satisfy our urge for speed and brevity: in Britain, we all say TUC and BBC and even NUJ. But subs need to think about what the readers will recognise. So TUC and BBC are fine for British publications but require annotation for something international, while NUJ ought to go in full just about everywhere except the Journalist.

Just to spell it out, these are the Trades Union Congress, the British public service broadcaster and the National Union of Journalists for which this article was written.

Introduce abbreviations your readers may not yet be aware of so as to cut down repetitions of a longish phrase. Assisted reproductive technology, for instance, can become ART in later mentions. Putting it in brackets after the first, full out, appearance of the phrase helps readers spot what is going on. Interestingly, quite a few publications seem to have decided that IVF can appear without explanation.

I like the fact that abbreviations, like jargon, take you into other people's worlds. Nursing Times, for instance, will happily use D&V: nurses know all about diarrhoea and vomiting.

Don't, however, always feel bound to inflict upon your readers abbreviations used by practitioners. There's a US Congress subcommittee with an abbreviated title that is 32 capital letters long; it's better referred to as the print and paper procurement committee. Nasdaq becomes the hi-tech stocks exchange rather than whatever the letters actually stand for.

Some abbreviations do, fortuitously, encapsulate the message, as with MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or USAid, the US Agency for International Development, although there are many out there that seem more tortured.

Where they turn into pronounceable words, or acronyms, treat them as such. No one even thinks of laser and radar as acronyms. If they are titles, give them initial capital letters, as with Nato and Unicef - but check if your style guide is still wanting UNICEF capped up throughout.

Do look out for interesting ones, as well. Researchers sometimes invent abbreviations just to get a handle on what might be happening out there - and these could be worth an article in themselves. A couple around at the moment are ORI, obsessive relational intrusion, which lies somewhere between stalking and social incompetence, and FAF, fresh air factor, which is held to make the difference between sheets hung out on a clothes line and tumble dried.

You can let Humphrey Evans know your thoughts about subediting at prettygoodpics at googlemail.com

And if you want to use a photograph taken with a subeditor's sensibilities, go to www.alamy.com and put prettygoodpics into the search box.

Connect and control

Put a little dash in your copy by spotting when hyphens are a good idea to connect words together and when it might be better to leave them out, says Humphrey Evans.

Potatoes roasted in goose fat are about as tasty as they get and should be described like that. Don't get tempted by the apparently more succinct goose fat-roasted potatoes (which I once came across in a cookery piece) as, from the readers' point of view, the goose doesn't link with the fat leaving the hyphen to connect a couple of incomplete segments rather than establishing a whole.

Goose-fat-roasted potatoes is hardly better as readers encounter far too many problems disentangling the hyphens while goose fat roasted potatoes leaves them still constructing the concept long after they have finished reading the words. You might get away with it in speech, because you've got intonations and micro-pauses to play with. Forget about it in print.

What you're looking at is the realisation that hyphens can't rescue an over-ambitious attempt to shoehorn meaning into an assemblage of words. Get the words right first, and then use hyphens to help the readers see as quickly as possible which words belong with which.

I'd happily put a hyphen in well-tended garden; I'd accept a reference to a retired army major and his good-works-obsessed wife; and it amuses me from time to time to play with building up a really lengthy string of hyphenations that produces, almost effortlessly, a new super-concept.

What bothers me is situations where hyphens interfere with understanding.

My own particular bête noire is people writing New York-based writer. Our eyes jump along the line as we read - the technical term, if you want to know it, being saccades. That hyphen seems to mark a landing point for the next jump so our eyes see York-based almost before we have registered New. As a result, I'm inclined to leave the hyphen out.

And then, of course, there is the need, as any sub soon realises, to keep an eye on what the H&J program is up to. You don't want Michael Foot turning into a leg- end, or the upsetting the- rapist or hor- semen, or even the frivolity of garden statuary appearing as fig- urine.

Lastly, subeditors should perhaps reject the hyphen that dictionaries sometimes put in the title. Treat it as a back formation from the hyphenless activity of subbing or subediting rather than as emphasising the underling status implied by sub-. Or think of it as being a stand-in for the editor, a substitute.

You can let Humphrey Evans know your thoughts about subediting at prettygoodpics at googlemail.com

And if you want to use a photograph taken with a subeditor's sensibilities, go to www.alamy.com and put prettygoodpics into the search box.