My current nonfiction read is Jon Katz's Talking to Animals: How You Can Understand Animals and They Can Understand You. I like what I've read so far, but I haven't gotten too far into it. That's mostly because I'm more in fiction mode right now and so am spending more time with Steve Martin's An Object of Beauty, a book recommended by my husband, Tony.
The second chapter of Talking discusses using visualization techniques to develop a closer relationship with a companion animal. Here are some fixes I would have made if I'd been tasked with editing that chapter:
On page 41: "I had never had a dog like that or really heard anyone speak about that kind of relationship with a dog beyond Lucky, but I was very young, and she had not lived long." Katz is referring to the relationship between Caroline, an artist and poet who lives in the same town as him, and her yellow Labrador retriever, whose name is Jade. We learned about Lucky in the previous chapter. He was a puppy the author adopted from his school's janitor when he was a young boy. Katz told the bittersweet story of wanting this dog so much, struggling (with a bully and a somewhat reluctant parent) to make the adoption happen, taking him home, and ultimately not having him in his life for very long. I don't know what the antecedent of she in that sentence would be other than Lucky, and since Lucky was male, that should be "he had not lived long." I'm thinking the she may have mistakenly ended up there because of the multiple references in the previous paragraphs to Jade, who's female.
And because I think less isn't always more, I also believe that passage would read better with a few more words and split into a couple of sentences: "I had never heard anyone speak about that kind of relationship with a dog, and I had yet to have my own such relationship. Lucky didn't count because I'd been so young and he hadn't lived for very long."
On pages 42 to 43: "During [walks with my Lab, Julius] I would often speak aloud of new characters, story ideas, and plots twists." That should be plot, singular.
On page 45: "At the time, I knew little about dogs, I avoided the growing shelves of dog books in the bookstore, I thought the dog love I saw often seemed excessive, overly emotional." That's a doozy of a run-on sentence. I would put a yet before I avoided and a period after bookstore.
On page 47: "In our world, a good dog is a dog who abandons most of the natural behaviors of a dog—having sex a lot, digging holes in yards, running off after strange smells, eating revolting things, fighting with other dogs, chewing up garbage, pillows, and table legs, stealing food off counters." Because of the multiple chewable things that are separated by commas, some semicolons are in order throughout the part of the sentence that follows the dash: "having sex a lot; digging holes in yards; running off after strange smells; eating revolting things; fighting with other dogs; chewing up garbage, pillows, and table legs; and stealing food off counters." And because I'm generally not a fan of asyndeton—and particularly not in a sentence like this one that's already got so much going on—I added the and before stealing.
On page 48: I have no problem, however, with the asyndeton in this sentence: "Most important, I said, you need to begin imagining how you want this dog to be with you—calm, quiet, responsive." Later in that paragraph: "He'd always had big, easygoing dogs, never a dog quite like this." A dash would do a better job than the comma after dogs of setting off the final thought.
On page 52: "Red watched closely." That sentence shows up in the seventh paragraph of a story about the difficult labor of Katz's rescue sheep, Ma. Up to that point, Katz had given us no indication that any other animal besides Ma was in the barn with him. And he hadn't mentioned Red at all since the list of animals he'd been able to have a "wondrous dialogue" with over the years that appeared in the book's introduction, on page 5. I would have found a way to bring up the dog's presence before this point in the narrative.
On page 53: "Two years after Julius came into my life, I went back to the breeder in Ramsay and brought Stanley home. He was a Lab from the same place I got Julius." Even if I hadn't read the account earlier in this chapter of how Katz came to purchase a yellow Labrador retriever named Julius from a breeder in Ramsay, New Jersey, I think that second sentence would still seem overly repetitious.
And, finally, on page 54: "These might have been difficult things for city dogs to adjust to, but they were not farm dogs." Earlier in this chapter, Katz established he had been living in the "beautiful suburban town of Montclair," New Jersey, when he'd bought both Julius and Stanley. Then, five paragraphs before the one in which the above sentence appears, he wrote about packing up the dogs and moving for a year to "a cabin on the top of a hill in the Upstate New York town of Jackson." It was a wilderness-type experience, with deep woods to explore and howling coyotes to be wary of. So, given that he moved from the suburbs to a cabin in the woods, what is the purpose of that sentence? Julius and Stanley were neither city dogs nor farm dogs. I don't know what Katz is trying to say there.
I would also lowercase the U in Upstate because that adjective isn't capitalized in my dictionary of choice and I think it's too broad of an area (everything in the state of New York except New York City and its suburbs) to be considered a proper region.
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This is the cover of the Oct. 4 edition of the South Florida Gay News, a tabloid newspaper that (as you no doubt would have guessed, even if you're not in the publication's prime demographic) covers LGBT issues and is distributed in the south(east)ern part of Florida:
There's one big problem and, I would argue, one lesser issue in the main headline. Do you see the same things I'm seeing? (I also would make it "PAGES 7, 13" instead of PAGE.)
First, the lesser issue: I think LGBTs should be used when speaking of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender. LGBT, to me, is, first and foremost, an adjective describing these people, who are my people. Adding the s transforms that adjective into a plural noun.
The bigger problem is that my people have banded, not banned, together to help the (U.S.) citizens of Puerto Rico in their time of need, so the verb should be BAND.