[Marxism] authored versus written - an abomination for me

[Brian Shannon <brian_shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

"A professor of history at UW-Madison has authored a book available  
this month that explores evidence of a 50-year legacy of U.S.  
government-sponsored forms of psychological torture."

Has anyone written about this abomination?
_______

From an internet definition of "authored"
The verb author, which had been out of use for a long period, has  
been rejuvenated in recent years with the sense “to assume  
responsibility for the content of a published text.” As such it is  
not quite synonymous with the verb write; one can write, but not  
author, a love letter or an unpublished manuscript, and the writer  
who ghostwrites a book for a celebrity cannot be said to have  
“authored” the creation. The sentence He has authored a dozen books  
on the subject was unacceptable to 74 percent of the Usage Panel,  
probably because it implies that having a book published is worthy of  
special lexical distinction, a notion that sits poorly with  
conventional literary sensibilities and seems to smack of press  
agentry. The sentence The Senator authored a bill limiting uses of  
desert lands in California was similarly rejected by 64 percent of  
the Panel, though here the usage is common journalistic practice and  
is perhaps justified by the observation that we do not expect that  
legislators will actually write the bills to which they attach their  
names.•The use of author as a verb in computer-related contexts is  
well established and unexceptionable.
_____________

Perhaps it's from The King's English or Fowler's Modern English Usage  
which express a preference for words of Germanic origin to those of  
Latin, but this usage irritates me tremendously. [Hello Merry Maisel  
if you are a lurker.]

First of all, a writer who types or rekeyboards another work is a  
copyist, not a writer. One who ghost-writes for another is also an  
author or a writer. Certainly the celebrity doesn't assume  
responsibility for what is written. In fact, several have pointed out  
that they didn't "write" that.

A Senator does not author a bill, he sponsors it or in some cases may  
be said to write it (overlooking that it is probably an assistant).

Despite the assertion that the use of author is "common journalistic  
practice" and that it is "well-established and unexceptionable" in  
computer related contexts, even here one could better use write,  
originated, or created.

I may be a purist, however, my own writing is filled with errors.  
Even when I check it out thoroughly, upon rereading I discover  
spelling errors and most often errors of syntax. I start to write to  
one person, then switch to referring to the same person in the third  
person. Correcting on screen creates even more errors.

I once asked SWP author and editor Les Evans why he was able to write  
so quickly without corrections and with so few mistakes. He told me  
that he first thought it through in his head. Not me, I'm always  
slipping and sliding.

_____________

From a note that I sent to Andrew Pollack last year:

Often, the biggest mistake is the very last step, when you think  
everything has been taken care of.

Pathfinder once rushed out a pamphlet on the Caribbean. When it was  
printed, it was discovered that the cover read: Carribbean or  
Carribean. They had to throw out the whole run.

When walking from the Photocomp Press type room through the print  
shop (this is when we were all together off Union Square), I glanced  
at a plate that was about to go on press for The Militant. The  
captions and pictures were wrong. The plate covered two separated  
Militant pages. The origin of the mistake was that text was  
photographed separately from photographs (screening of the photo was  
required). The photos were identical in size and position on each of  
the pages, so the stripper had grabbed the right size photo without  
realizing that its content was completely wrong. Were I not a  
photographer, I might have passed by the plates without a glance.  
Lesson: there is always a rush at the end. The presses are waiting!  
The delivery is waiting! Captions and headlines are the greatest  
sources of errors.

There was a similar mistake in one of the Trotsky Writings books.  
Trained by Merry Maisel, we were pretty good copyeditors and  
proofreaders, although I none us came up to her standards. We  
copyedited, proofread once, then proofread again by reading out loud  
to another proofreader. One of us then again closely read the final  
galleys. Finally came the "blues." This was a reproduction of the  
final book pages, just before the book went on press. We found errors  
even at this stage.

The last stage was indexing from pages, from a second set of the  
"blues." There might still be a mistake that the "blues" proofreader  
hadn't caught!

The earliest printings of some volumes were not indexed. I did the  
index on one of the reprints and discovered that a paragraph made no  
sense compared to what came before. We went back to the original  
Militant or magazine article. We discovered that the person who  
originally stripped up the pages (pages were then pasted up by hand  
from photographic galleys) had switched a paragraph. Both paragraphs,  
like the photo example above, were identical in size (like the photo  
situation above) and without careful examination would not have  
appeared inappropriately placed. It was only caught because I had to  
index both small and large themes as well as names and places.

Brian Shannon


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