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Fools, Heretics and Fiction

There was a live-streamed debate at church today, involving two prominent scientists, one a "heretic" who accepts evolution, and one a "fool" who doesn't - they're the authors of The Fool and the Heretic, a book I really must read!

These two men described how, on first meeting, they were each quite sure they'd correctly defined the other. But then they talked, prayed, ate dinner and talked some more. Gradually they realized that, while each believed the other's position to pose a threat to Christianity, they could still respect each other's intelligence AND each other's faith, and they could be friends.

In novels, characters often hold differing opinions. Sometimes those opinions agree with the author's; sometimes they don't. The author's job, at the start, is to keep their own opinions separate from the characters' - just because you believe all creationists are fools, you don't have to make them all look foolish in your book. A second task is to make sure the characters, even those you don't agree with, are self-consistent.  Just because you believe all scientists are heretics, you don't have to make them anti- all things good (including good math and science).

Then the editor's job is to spot when characters fail to be true to themselves, protect the author from preachiness or accidental heresy, and make sure the potential publisher's rules are obeyed. (Just because you think publishers appreciate debate doesn't mean they want real debatables in their fictional characters.)

The best part of the editor's job is reading such fun books and meeting such fascinating characters, be they fools or heretics. I really must read that book!

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The importance of commas

I saw a blogpost entitled "Can a Comma Be Antisemitic?" So of course, I had to read it. You can find the original post at  https://weekly.israelbiblecenter.com/can-a-comma-be-antisemitic/ . And it's fascinating. The question is: What's the difference between "The Jews, who persecuted the Lord, drove us out" and "The Jews who persecuted the Lord drove us out." Or equivalently, what's the difference between "We have to throw out apples, which are wormy" and "We have to throw out apples which are wormy"? The article explains how the comma makes all the difference between a restrictive and a nonrestrictive clause. In the first (apple) case, all apples are wormy and must be thrown out. In the second, we restrict ourselves to discarding wormy apples - a much more sensible idea. (And in 1 Thessalonians 2:14-15, those commas really might be misplaced.) In the Bible, commas matter! In writing,  commas matter!

The joys of Word or the joy of words?

When Word red-underlines things like we'll, they'd, hadn't etc., you might be excused for thinking the program's gone crazy. And you might be right. The problem, if you happen to be running spellcheck (or even trying to read without distraction), is to figure out which particular kind of crazy. After all, those red underlines do kind of draw the eye, distracting from the joy of the author's words. So what's an editor to do? As usual, the first answer is to try Google. Then try asking the same question 300 different ways. And finally, fix it. Which means I've now learned how to tell Word that certain words are not English (and that others are), and how to make Word make all the wrongly flagged Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish words revert to English (US) - or even English (UK) or English (Australian) if desired. So here's how it's done: Open your document. Go to one of those wrongly flagged words, and rig