How China's Censorship Affects What You Read

There was some discussion at and around the Frankfurt book fair not long ago about China's censorship policies. If you think this is only about freedom of thought and expression for the people of China, think again. The Chinese policies may well have a direct impact on what we read in the United States.

Although most American black-and-white books (including most novels and narrative nonfiction, as well as some illustrated titles) are manufactured domestically, most full-color books from large publishers are printed in China (as are some one-color titles). Color printing is vastly cheaper in China than it is in the U.S. (The alternative is printing domestically but raising the cover price significantly in order to make the book profitable.) But Chinese printers (even those owned by U.S. companies) cannot print anything that the Chinese government finds objectionable. The list of what is forbidden is long and convoluted; some major items on it include anything to do with Taiwan or Tibet (including maps that depict those places as something other than "China"); mention of the Dalai Lama, the Tiananmen Square protests, or anything alluding to Chinese censorship; nudity and other sexual content; and more.

American publishers don't want to be censored, but when the Chinese manufacturer balks at content for a book, a decision must be made. Keeping the content that China won't print means finding somewhere else to print the book. Depending on the nature of the content at issue, another manufacturer in that part of the world, e.g., Singapore, might take it on at comparable cost (although not always; China has volume). Or perhaps not. Then the question is whether the content is so important to the book that the publisher is willing to pay the cost of printing it in the United States--and will that additional cost shift the balance on this book from profitable to unprofitable?

Style and Substance

Every publisher has its own house style. Most trade book publishers base their style on the Chicago Manual of Style. (I would like to believe that the fact I graduated from CMS's birthplace and home, the University of Chicago, makes me more expert in its content than other people. I would be fooling myself.)

"Style" goes beyond the rules of (American) English grammar. (And as an aside, what I mean here by style is a little different from what you as a reader might refer to as an author's style, which is his or her tone and voice as a writer.) It takes in anything one might have to make consistent decisions about, e.g., what to capitalize, what to abbreviate, when to use numerals and when to spell numbers out, or how to cite references to source material. The rules CMS sets out aren't arbitrary; they serve a purpose in producing clear, readable books. Similarly, the rules a publisher sets out in its house style serve the needs of that publisher's books. For example, although CMS calls for spelling out numbers up to a hundred as well as larger round numbers, publishers of craft books or cookbooks are likely to make it their style to use numerals throughout because of the quantities and measurements that are integral to their books.

A Change of Direction

When I set up this blog, I thought I would write about issues of grammar, usage, and punctuation, and started to draft posts on those subjects. But as I did, I realized that there are plenty of places online for you to get that, and I lost interest. What I've never lost interest in is all the things (and language issues are among them) that go into making books. So the focus of this blog is hereby broadened to include all things of interest to me as a managing editor at a nonfiction book publisher. Some will be big-picture, future-of-publishing things. Some will be nitty-gritty, how-books-get-made things. Some will be about how to use a comma. That's why God gave us tags. You can find the ones that interest you and ignore the ones that don't.

You should be forewarned that many of my posts will be long. I am by nature an essayist, so if you're looking for the internet equivalent of sound bites, you're in the wrong place. If you want thoughtful discussion of what and why, stick around--and join the conversation. Please do so thoughtfully--if you can't back up your opinions with thoughtful argument and in a civil tone, you'll get the boot. You don't have to agree with me (not much of a discussion if everyone agrees), but you must behave yourself. My house, my rules.

The Grammopticon welcomes you.

What's a Grammopticon, Anyway? (And Why You Might Care)

The Grammopticon is the all-seeing, all-knowing source for answers to your questions (including the ones you should have asked, but didn't) of grammar, punctuation, usage, and sentence structure.

(Actually, it's a made-up word, from "grammar" and "panopticon." So don't try to use it in Scrabble. Which you probably couldn't anyway, unless there was a particularly serendipitous collection of letters already on the board.)

Why should you care about this stuff? People understand what you mean, right?

Written language is a set of tools that give us the ability to communicate efficiently and with precision. When used well, punctuation conveys additional meaning (which saves you words--and explanations when you're misunderstood). When used not so well, punctuation can keep the Supreme Court busy for a couple hundred years. Let's take a look at the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Okay, what exactly does that say? No one is really quite certain (though various judges and others have claimed to be at various times) whether this is about state militias or individually-owned weapons. The founders could have used a good editor.

Let's take the amendment apart:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,

That part seems to make sense. The founders were in favor of having a militia, as long as it's well regulated. Fair enough. As a reader, I expect "a well regulated Militia" to be the subject of the sentence, because it has that nice modifying clause. Now let's look at the other half:

the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

That last comma is unnecessary (maybe it's just an ink splotch on the original document), but remove that and you have a perfectly clear statement saying that people have the right to bear arms. Subject ("the right of the people to keep and bear Arms"), predicate ("shall not be infringed").

The problem comes when the two parts are stuck together. The sentence appears to have two different subjects. It feels like something is missing. And as a result, the meaning--the authors' intent--is not clear.

You'd probably like to convey your meaning more clearly than the founders did theirs in the Second Amendment. The Grammopticon is here to help.