Huh?
If you clicked to read this based solely on the title, I’m impressed. You passed the dorkdom test, congratulations!
Mnemonic (alternate spelling = pneumonic) devices. They’re the things that helped you remember stuff in school. Teachers invented them for their students trying to be all cute and helpful. Two that have stuck with me over the years are “Every Good Boy Does Fine” and “All Cows Eat Grass.” (Thank you, Mrs. Cottrell from Jackson Avenue Elementary School.) You probably already know these two (or some variation thereof), but I’ll arrange them like so (below) to jog your memory if you haven’t dialed in yet.
Every
All
Good
Cows
Boy
Eat
Does
Grass
Fine
Ok yeah, it’s your basic music staff where the left column represents the “lined” notes and the right the “spaces.” These two phrases help you remember all the names of the music notes and their placement on the staff so you can be a champ at reading music. By the way, does the term “sight reading” still give anyone else palpitations? Man, that made me nervous as a kid! If they had just called it “let’s try learning a brand new piece of music” rather than making it a death test where every wrong squeak (clarinet) was a #fail… I digress.
We’ve got the mnemonic device part down, so that leaves us to dig into “alliterative.” Send your brain-gopher back to the English class files and look for the word “alliteration.” Got it? It’s that thing authors and poets do to make things sound snazzy or lyrical. Alliteration = the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words. Or, if you want to go back to grade school again, it was the thing tongue twisters were made of. Peter Piper and Sally… he picked a peck of pickled peppers and she sold sea shells by the sea shore. Crazy kids.
Putting this all together, we’ve got ourselves a word/phrase that helps us remember stuff, that all starts with the same letter—unlike our “Every Good Boy Does Fine” example. And because mnemonic devices are helpful and already cheesy, you can imagine that alliterative mnemonic devices are a giant parmesan wheel with Cheese Wiz dribbled on top (i.e., extra cheesy).
Thankfully, we’ve arrived at the crux of this cheese blob of a Bob post. Copyeditors have a core alliterative mnemonic device that guides their work. According to Amy Einsohn, “a copyeditor’s chief concerns are comprised of 4 Cs.”* (Yes, holy alliteration). It’s a good thing you’re all buckled in because this is about to rock your world (said dripping with sarcastic Cheese Wiz). The 4 Cs are:
Clarity,
Coherency,
Consistency, and
Correctness.
The bottom line . . . is there one? Yes, albeit long overdue and a bit of a stretch… here it it:
Partnering with Ink Well on your work (be it an article, book, product description(s), video script, grant application, etc.), will ensure that your final product is crystal clear, rational and well-reasoned, internally consistent, and accurate. Sound good? I think so.
A copyeditor’s chief concerns are clarity, coherency, consistency and correctness. With a side of cheese. Cheese is always free.
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* The Copyeditor’s Handbook, 4th ed., by Amy Einsohn and Marilyn Schwartz, University of California Press, 2019.