1.  It’ll be better before you’re married.

This one’s a classic, used for scrapes, bruises, and crushed expectations.  Thus far and for the foreseeable future, it’s been true.

2.  There are two kinds of offense:  offense given, and offense taken.

This is one piece of Dad’s advice that I shrugged off at the time—mostly because he liked to impart wisdom during my morning Cocoa Puffs, an inviolate time in my daily routine (I took offense)—but have come to appreciate more and more as I encounter people and situations.  There seems to be more offense taken than given in the world, considering the number of angry people protesting and suing and writing angry songs against girlfriends, wealth, and the establishment.  I support justice and egalitarianism:  I don’t support picking fights because you’re thin-skinned.

3.  There are four types of male/female relationships precedented in the Bible:  husband/wife, betrothed, brother/sister, and parent/child.

This one is rather hotly contested, mostly in that it lumps friendships into the brother/sister category and excludes dating altogether (My dad prefers the courtship camp.  Or maybe arranged marriages; I never asked.).  I wonder how he would respond to this video.

I’m not sure I fully agree with him on this one, but nevertheless it has proven to be a useful second perspective in the torturous seas that are college social dynamics (Who decided that putting young, marriageable people of both sexes in a social pressure cooker called “college” was a good idea?).

4.  I’ll just flip on the Weather Channel.

This is usually what he says about four hours before he goes to bed a three in the morning after a John Wayne movie comes on TNT.  If it’s the one with Mississippi in it, I might be watching it with him.  Something about those chaps …

5.  Anything worth having is worth sharing.

This one partially explains why we have two boats, three snowmobiles, two lawn tractors, and four Triumph antique sports cars (yes, be jealous).

It also explains why he loaned a car to strangers broken down on the side of the road because they needed to get to Virginia, and why his truck is always the first to pull up and the last to leave when someone needs help moving, and why he offers boat rides to families we’ve never met if he sees them watching the boats from the dock.

6.  I’ll take a look at it.

This is the one he says at least once a day, when the faucet drips, when the engine makes a kind of whirring-whistling-rattling-like-a-spectre noise, when the table leg is loose, when my ankle feels funny, when ten-year-old me had a splinter, when the driveway is icy, when the basement floods, when the woodstove needs to be replenished at ten o’clock at night in bitter January.

If I can remember half the things my dad always says, I’ll do okay.

This is possibly the most beautiful sentence I have ever read.

I am in love with the opening sentence of Stephen Crane’s novel, The Red Badge of Courage.  Editors and agents, and my publishing professor, talk a lot about the importance of the hook:  that first sentence of the manuscript that captivates, seducing the reader onward like a harpy’s song.

I am seduced—take me, Stephen.

Everything about this sentence entrances me.  In a mere twenty words it sets a scene, presents a conflict, and tells a narrative.

The opening words sweep like a paintbrush across the page, coloring a wet, green scene of spring morning when the frost is still leaving the ground.

The following phrase raises the curtain on a sleeping monster sprawled across the countryside.  The pulse quickens, the lungs tighten in the chest, the knuckles whiten.

Then follows a perfectly placed comma, pinning the reader to her seat, trapping her breath in her lungs until they threaten to burst, escalating the tension to its utter breaking point—then the sentence exhales, long and slow:  “resting.”

The beast snores once, scuffing its paw against the damp grass as it dreams, and the reader gapes from a safe distance, taking deep, quiet breaths so as not to disturb it.

The remainder of the novel is a psychological tale, a literary case study of a first-time soldier.  It is slow and brilliant, though not everyone’s cup of tea.  It’s not among my favorite novels, though I admire and enjoyed it.

That first sentence, however, left me breathless.  My dad always says that anything worth having is worth sharing:  it would be a tragedy, if not a crime, if I did not share such a gem.

I carried it around in my backpack, showed it to my roommate, showed it to my adviser.  I cushioned it between my psychology book and my laptop like its pearly sides were porcelain, lest—horror—it should wrinkle.  I held it gingerly with my fingertips, weighing its mass and import, surveying it with awe and fear.

Safe in my apartment, while the cold wind snapped outside and my roommate made tea, I used my grandfather’s tarnished Japanese-dagger letter opener from World War II, reserved for the most special of letters, to open the page-size package.

Out slid a letter, a form, and It.

I received an email a few days ago from a publishing company saying that they liked my resume and cover letter, and that they were mailing a copyediting test as the next step in the application process.

Those white pages full of black ink determine my fate as an editor.  Needless to say (though I’m saying it anyway), I was wide-eyed and wonderstruck.

My head filled with doubts:  What stylebook do they use?  I never memorized Chicago Style—I only sort of know AP!  They’ll see through me in an instant:  I’ll say bachelors instead of bachelor’s degree and they’ll chuck my application on the spot.

So, I asked my favorite barista to craft some inspiration-in-a-cup (which tasted a lot like a white-chocolate-vanilla latte with dashes of dark chocolate and hazelnut), shut the apartment door, and began by writing my name.

Remember the little games from your childhood where you have two pictures and you have to circle the five differences?

The conclusion of the test was to mark the differences between the live copy (the proof) and the dead copy (the manuscript).  It was like circle-the-differences for grown-ups!

I’ve been a grammar pedant since high school—I was “that one” who corrected my friends’ grammar on MSN chat—then in college I learned that you can make a living at it.  I’ve had a good sense since then that editing is the field for me, but this test was confirmation.

I smiled; I chuckled; I marked compound predicates and listed five prepositions and fixed commas—and I loved it.

I remembered doing similar exercises in junior-high grammar class, being bored with the material I already knew, and thinking, “I’ll never need to do this in real life.

Sorry, Mrs. Garland.

I’m so in the right field.

I began complaining of the chill in, oh, October maybe? and on into November.  It didn’t help that this winter couldn’t decide if it wanted to get cold or not:  there would be a brilliantly nice day, then a bitterly cold day, then a day that started out nice and then BAM!—hit you in the face with a frigid wind halfway through the day, when you were a long walk away from the warm coat nestled cozily in your apartment.

When December struck, I knew my complaints and excuses were thin at best:  December in western Pennsylvania isn’t known for its sunny skies and balmy temperatures.  It kind of comes with the package.

But the weather really outdid itself this week:  not only was it cold, but it also rained for two days.  Rain, in January.  The steady, miserable kind that turns the whole world grey and soaks your socks through your shoes.

My philosophy is, if it’s going to be cold, it may as well at least snow.  I’m a little past the days of snow days and two-hour delays, but a world redecorated is worth a few shivers.

This morning, I woke up to an inch of fluffy white powder, with more gently wafting from the sky.  It was beautiful, and despite myself, I rejoiced.

The world was a softer place:  every sound muffled, every contour blurred, every scent tinged with the freshness of new snow.  Even the busy cars on Route 18 revered the silence.

Of course, by two o’clock the spell was breaking.  The pristine coating over campus was turning into a Pepsi-colored slushie faster than the gently drifting snow could cover it up; the throw rugs in all the buildings were more puddle than sponge; and every step down the hill to convocation was a strategic maneuver against death by embarrassment.

The wind picked up, and the snow in the air whipped my eyes and face.  I took shelter in the Student Center and remained there most of the day.

I confess:  by the end of the day, I was complaining of the cold again.  I’ve always lived where it got cold in the winter, and I’ve always complained of it.

But if I’m honest with myself, I couldn’t spend the rest of my life away from snow, from cold, from warm scarves and good hot chocolate after a chilly romp.

My good friend recently moved to Guatemala with her husband, and she frequently reminds me that their home is a mild 70 degrees year-round, or that she’s wearing flipflops in January.

And I grumble and make faces, and give her the rise she’s looking for, and check the price of plane tickets to go visit—but she can keep her eternal spring.

Today, it snowed.

Oh boy!—I exclaimed to my roommates—I found a typo in my textbook!  I love when that happens.

Humans make mistakes, even professional editors at big-time publishing houses, and I enjoy gloating about finding them.

Half an hour later, I had found five, from ending a sentence with a comma to leaving out letters to reversing word order.  Wow—I thought to myself—This is sad.  Who published this?

As it turns out, the book is self-printed by the software company that the author founded.

That explains it.

There’s all the difference in the world between self-“publishing” (better labeled “self-printing”) and being published by a professional publishing house:  not only will a publishing house market your book, but more important to me personally, they edit it.

Writers of all kinds often underestimate the value of an editor, I think.  I know because I’m prone to the same pitfall:  I know grammar backwards and forwards; I’m conscientious—I don’t need anyone’s eyes but my own.

This text is proof that that is simply not true.  I don’t know what sort of editorial process it may have gone through before going to press, but apparently not a sufficient one.

I like to think that a professional house would have weeded out not only the grammatical errors, but the stylistic faux pas like the author’s happy-go-lucky exclamation points.

I must give credit where it’s due:  the writing itself is clear and engaging; the author presents basic HTML and web design in terms that an unfamiliar reader like me understands.  The design of the book—cover, interior layout, typesetting—is quite good, not surprising from a design company.

It’s a little dated (2007—AltaVista was on equal footing with Yahoo! and Google Chrome didn’t exist yet), but I recommend the text, My Website is Better Than Yours, for the electronically impaired like me. It’s out of print now, but available used in hard copy or for free electronically here.

Oh!  And I learned what HTML stands for (thank you Jordan and my textbook):  Hypertext Markup Language.  It’s the text codes behind most of what you see on a webpage.

Cool activity for the day:  right-click on a given webpage, select “View Page Source” (in Chrome) or the equivalent for your browser to see the HTML code.

It felt … conflicted.

On the one hand, I’m a senior; this is my eighth time doing this.  By now I know my professors; I know most of the students on our small campus; I know how to do this.

On the other hand, I felt like a freshman again, my shoulders tense and my knees in a carefully controlled tremble, when I entered my first class:  Principles of Multimedia, a class on HTML.

Not only is the class in the only building on campus I’ve never been in before, with a professor I haven’t had before, but it’s also outside my field of experience.

When I got back to the apartment, Sarah asked me what HTML stood for.  I have no idea, I told her; I’ll let you know when I find out.

My junior-high computer teacher had us dabble in HTML.  I made a mock-up of a website called “Saratopia” (I hadn’t read Thomas More yet).  It had a hot pink background and a scrolling marquee of faerie-land-Lisa-Frank-mutant-hybrid pictures.

I remember using <__> to open a code and </__> to close it. All the bits in the middle … not so much.

Don’t misunderstand:  this class is going to be awesome.  Knowing how to optimize multimedia is vital to being a viable job candidate in the modern digital age.  Moreover, the final project is assembling an electronic portfolio, which I need to do—and this class will teach me to make it spectacular.

And I think it’s a healthy experience for me:  I haven’t had a class that I was properly terrified of in a while.  It’s appropriate that in my last semester, when supposedly I’ve got the system figured out, a class like this rocks my sense of know-it-all.

It keeps me humble—and keeps me striving.

Onward and upward!

Sure.  Yes.  Holden Caulfield is an icon of his time and Salinger captured him brilliantly.

It doesn’t mean I have to like the book.

Holden Caulfield is a vacuous bum who needs a good shaking.  But wait!—you say—that’s the point!  The book holds a mirror to a stagnant and self-absorbed generation!

Caulfield can be a cesspool if he likes, so long as he stops being redundant and wordy.  The narrative has more fluff than a freshman composition paper.

If I had been Salinger’s editor, the book would have lost a third of its word count.

“He started walking around the room, very slow and all, the way he always did, picking up your personal stuff off your desk and chiffonier.  He always picked up your personal stuff and looked at it.”

The second sentence is completely redundant.  Let’s try another:

“He kept standing there.”  Okay, good:  like a proper modernist, he’s showing and not telling what sort of person Ackley is.  “He was exactly the kind of a guy who wouldn’t get out of our light when you asked him to.”  Oh.  Nevermind.

And then there are the fluff phrases:  the “I’m not kidding’s” and the “It really did’s,” like this little gem:

“The whole lobby was empty.  It smelled like fifty million dead cigars.  It really did.”

Did it really?  William Strunk just rolled over in his grave, screaming, “Omit needless words!  Do not overstate!”

Art is subjective.  It probably speaks in Salinger’s favor that I disliked Catcher in the Rye while it’s my friend Janie’s favorite novel.  I see why it’s a literary classic; I just didn’t enjoy reading it.

Both of us have been around the editing block before, in student publications positions, tutoring writing, and peer-critiquing classmates’ work; so between the two of us we’ve seen nearly every misuse, disuse, and downright abuse of punctuation and grammar there is.

When I was editor-in-chief of the campus literary magazine, for instance, one clever submitter decided that proper capitalization, punctuation, and spelling were hardly necessary in a submission email.

My editing professor spent a full week detailing the proper use of the comma my sophomore year.  At the time I yawned, even groaned:  that was the first time I brought a book to read through class (Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan—it’s quite good).  Now I think maybe he should have spent two.

My most recent punctuation woe, however, is the ellipsis … Isn’t it great how it lets you just trail … off … dramatically …

I’ve seen all of Star Trek Original Series; even William Shatner wasn’t that bad.

And if you’re going to abuse punctuation, at least abuse it properly.  Some writers I’ve seen apparently weren’t sure if their ellipsis was appropriate (it wasn’t) so they decapitated it to a sad little two dots, a grotesque Frankenstein not sure if he’s finished his sentence yet.

Heart wrenching.

If any ellipsis abusers are reading this, first of all, shame on you—what did the ellipsis ever do to you?  Second, ellipses are like garlic.  Good only when used in tasteful amounts, otherwise no one will kiss you for the rest of the day.

On an unrelated note, I’m a great fan of clever acronyms.  The United Methodist church in my school’s neighborhood is CHUM; the Presbyterian church down the way is CHRP; and I attend an Anglican fellowship called CHAF (not to be confused with Psalm 1).

Care and Keeping of Your Comma, conspicuously, lacks a clever acronym.  CKOYC.  I’ve been pronouncing it something like “koi-k.”

Pronounce it however you like, so long as you read it.

This is where I’ll be voicing my frustrations and delights (probably mostly frustrations) with editing, as well as keeping a journal of the amusing, pleasing, irritating, and otherwise noteworthy events in my life.

And if you leave intentional typos in the comments just to tick me off, I’ll—I’ll be very annoyed.