Tricky Edits Column for December 2024

Tricky Edits

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson

A 75% Rule Jus’ Ain’t Good Enough

Carolyn’s Revised Poem for the “I before E Rule”

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the multi award-winning
Third Edition of The Frugal Editor

I before E,
Except after C,
Or when sounded as "A,"
As in neighbor and weigh, 
makes the sound of long “E” or “A”,
and the original i. e. poet James Stuart Laurie
author of Manual of English Spelling (1866)
would be surprised today,
to learn it’s a game scientific, tech, 
Proper names, and foreign words
rarely obey,
and fancy words like juicier
that become “fancier” and “juiciest” 
also refuse to play.

I think you can see that no amount of rhyming is going to be a foolproof guide. So, realistically, apart from nurturing your instinct for a photographic memory and subscribing to daily editing aids like Word Genius, your best bet is letting Word’s auto spell checker help or Googling an online dictionary.

PS: Consider some of these recalcitrant exceptions: seismology, hacienda, leisure and neither, and weigh and vein. 

More About #TheFrugalEditor:

Once a month Carolyn Howard-Johnson shares something writer-related she hopes might save some author from embarrassment (or make the task of writing more fun or creative.) The third edition of The Frugal Editor from Modern History Press includes a chapter on some of the words most misused by the very people whose business it is to know them. It is the second multi award-winning book in her multi HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers. Find it on Amazon’s new buy-page offered in paper, hard cover, or as an e-book. (The availability of that new page for book series is another of her #FrugalBookPromoterTips which she liberally posts across Twitter when she isn’t editing a book of her own!) The Frugal Editor has been fully updated including a chapter on how backmatter can be extended to help readers and nudge book sales.