As I was decompressing in front of my TV Saturday night—a long way from my weekday copyediting mode—I never expected to be exposed to grammar. But I was—twice. The first time, I was watching Jeopardy!  One of the game categories was Grammar, and amazingly all five questions were easily and quickly answered, including one on the proper form of a noun or pronoun to use in front of a gerund and another asking contestants to complete the correlative conjunction not only/but _____.

Considering how often I find myself correcting these very same constructions in texts we are about to publish, I was amazed at the contestants’ knowledge (at least two of them participated in answering the category of five questions). So for those of you not up on this topic, a noun or pronoun in front of a gerund should be possessive. Most of us have no question about the correct form when using pronouns; it’s the nouns that trip us up. So if in doubt, a good test is to substitute a pronoun for a noun to see what sounds right to your ear.            

            We appreciate your taking the time to write.
            James’s running off at the mouth was not appreciated by his mother.
            The cat’s pouncing on the bed awakened her.
            He disliked Susan’s ruffling his hair whenever she passed by.

As for the correlative conjunction not only/but also, I suspect that I insert also, or its equivalent, more times than not while copyediting text. Here are some examples from recent articles in National Geographic, though I don't remember which ones were right to begin with:   

            . . . shapes not only Indonesia’s landscape but also its beliefs
            . . . head-to-head not only with the authorities but also with his boss
            . . . not only for waterfowl but also for woodcock, snipe, and doves
            . . . ensures not only ecosystem integrity but also social viability

After Jeopardy! I flipped around the channels for a while, resting briefly on a PBS channel showing Bob Dylan performing in the 1960s. No grammar there, but it was, nostalgic, and powerful, to see Joan Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary on stage with Dylan, singing “Blowing in the Wind” and to remember all the angst and emotions of those Vietnam years. I can take Dylan only in small doses and soon flipped to another station and watched the 1947 film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

That’s where the second grammar lesson of the evening happened, as Mrs. Muir, a young widow played by Gene Tierney, corrects the ghost of swashbuckling Captain Daniel Gregg (a young Rex Harrison): “different from, not different than,” she tells him. I wondered, would anyone today, in 2008, know what she was talking about? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Just lean back and enjoy the movie, I told myself.

Shuja, a reader of this blog and the editor of a student-run publication, asks what unique methods and safeguards NGM has to ensure its excellent quality.

I don’t think we have any methods unique to the Geographic. Rather, we do what serious editors everywhere do: We read, read, and read. Sometimes the same copy editor reads all proofs of the same story. Other times copy editors switch off on reading proofs. In the final stages, our articles go through a proofreader. And throughout the process many other eyes—among them the editor in chief, the managing editor, the text editor and researcher for each article—read and reread what is to be published. That’s why it’s almost inexplicable when something slips past all these keen eyes.

In addition to reading and rereading, we also count on our knowledge and experience. We care about proper word usage, and we like to debate correct grammar and punctuation and puzzle out strange constructions (though, I have to admit, none of us is terribly skilled any more at diagramming sentences).

Sometimes, despite our knowledge, the brain just shorts out and misses something that it should know. Just today, a copy editor corrected a sentence that two others of us had read right over: She changed “One out of four Chinese are migrants” to “One out of four Chinese is a migrant.” One can argue that the meaning of this construction implies more than a single person and therefore a plural verb is justified (“notational agreement” is the term used in Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage), but our normal style at National Geographic is to follow the construction of the sentence and use a singular verb with the subject one.

How do we stay together, maintaining consistency with so many staff commenting on copy? Perhaps our most important tool is the National Geographic Style Manual, an in-house guide to editorial style now available to the public electronically. A committee of editors from throughout the National Geographic Society—representing print, television, and electronic media—meets monthly to discuss issues and keep the manual up-to-date, which enables us to maintain consistency among all our many publications and products.

On the NGM staff we have a Copydesk Director, whose responsibility is to ensure uniformity throughout the magazine. This position was established last year—taking the copy editing function out of the research division where it had resided for eons—committing the magazine to an even more intensive scrutiny before it’s sent to the printer. And speaking of the printer, there have been times when someone at the printing plant has spotted a typo.

So, you see, Shuja, it takes a whole editorial village to reach our standards. When on rare occasions we falter, our loyal readers are quick to let us know. Their high expectations encourage us to work harder. Good luck to you in your striving to print an “impeccable issue, devoid of mistakes.”