Though - Through - Thorough

A podcast for English learners!  Improve your listening skills, practice your pronunciation, learn new vocabulary!     
 
This episode, I'm chatting with Laurence!   We chatted about the difference between copy editing and proofreading, the importance of being consistent in your writing, and UK v US spellings...

Pronunciation tip = words with an '-OUGH' spelling in English can have very different sounds....     

Presenter = Sam @_emaileng (Twitter, IG), @emaileng (TikTok)     

Music = "Baby Bloodheart" by Mara Carlyle  @MaraCarlyle    www.maracarlyle.bandcamp.com     

Artwork = Penny Rossano  @pennyrossanomusicart (IG)   www.pennyrossanoillustrations.com      

Transcript

EPISODE 20 = THOUGH – THROUGH – THOROUGH

Hello!  And welcome to Chat ENG – a podcast where people chat about how they learn and use English.  My name is Sam, I’m a CELTA teacher and a performer, and I have a particular interest in pronunciation and expression.   

In each episode, non-native and native speakers will chat about their experiences with English, share their advice and, at the end, I’ll give some pronunciation tips for you to take away and practice.  

So – ready?  Let’s get Chat ENG! 

This episode, I’m chatting with Laurence.  Laurence is originally from the UK, and currently lives and works in Wales.  He’s an opera singer and, as you will hear, he is also a copy editor and proofreader.  As we’re in different countries, we were online and so, as usual, there were little delays here and there, and words disappeared, but, luckily, you won’t hear anything we’re not used to!

We chatted about the difference between copy editing and proofreading, the importance of being consistent in your writing, and UK v US spellings, but I started by asking Laurence to tell me a little bit about himself…

INTERVIEW

L: My name is Laurence. I normally do opera singing, but the last few years I’ve developed a little side career in proofreading and copy editing.  I did an English degree back when I was a normal kind of student age, and I’ve always enjoyed, kind of, the written word and everything to do with the written word, and friends have always asked me just to check anything they’ve written just to make sure it’s sort of grammatically correct, and I’ve always enjoy doing that as like a little hobby, and I thought just a few years ago why don’t I try and make that a little more official, so you can do courses online with the Society for Editors and Proofreaders, because you need that sort of structure to do a reasonable job, it’s not really just checking stuff.  Since then, I’ve gradually built up a little bit of work, it was pretty slow at first, so..and it’s gradually getting a bit busier and it’s really enjoyable and it’s a great thing to do alongside the opera singing as well. 

S: Oh fantastic! How would you describe your English?

L: My English is I’d say… the way I speak English is definitely Received Pronunciation, so I don’t have, like, a regional accent or anything like that, so I would say I speak English in quite a posh way. In terms of written English, I mean I’ve done a fair bit of kind of fiction and non-fiction writing in the past, so I would say I’m a reasonably fluent writer and I’m always keen on adding more vocabulary and learning new words because it’s never too late to do that, so could do better but reasonably happy with the way I write at the moment.  

S: So ok - as a proofreader then, what would you say is your main purpose? 

L: So I’m a proofreader and a copy editor, and they’re quite different.  So the proofreader comes in right at the end of the publishing process, literally before the book goes to print, just basically looking for simple errors: spelling errors, punctuation errors, layout errors -  there might be an extra line, there might be two paragraphs where there should be one paragraph stuff like that, wrong font used somewhere in the document that sort of stuff, so right before it eventually goes to print. A copy editor is much earlier in the process, it tends to come straight from the author, so there is much more of a remit to actually read a sentence and think “oh, that sounds a bit clunky… I think they could’ve written that better”. And it involves often liaising with the editor at a publisher or with the author themselves to work out a better way of writing.  It can also deal with kind of the structure of the piece of work as a whole to make sure it’s got an internal consistency, so not just reading it line by line but looking at the thing as a whole and making sure it hangs together as a work.  So, the work I normally do now is really kind of a combination of both, so I’m told “can you provide this book?” and it’s often more of a case of actually copy editing, and you’ve got more of a remit to actually do a little bit of re-writing.

S: So during this sort of process of copyediting, do you see similar problems with the things you read, or is each book, each piece of work, very, very different?

L: Each book is different, I mean I recently edited an autobiography, and he’d very much written it as kind of a real stream of consciousness, so it was just “and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened”, each paragraph was kind of one sentence long, it was kind of thrilling but wouldn’t really have worked into book form, so it was just a question of kind of calming the whole tone of it down, making sure the paragraphs were longer.  The other end of the spectrum, I do a fair bit of kind of work on academic texts, so they very much come to me more as a finished article and it’s a question of maintaining internal consistency, so it sounds rather a duller sort of procedure but it’s making sure they, for example, so you’ve got to decide in any sort of publication really whether you’re going to write out numbers as numbers, or spell them as numerals, and if you’re going to do that whether you write them up to 100 and then use numerals, or whether you just use numerals from 1 all the way, because if it’s inconsistent, it just… people will notice (yup), it doesn’t look right in a book, so they differ hugely.  And I’ve also done a little bit of work on kind of foreign translations, and this - basically a brochure - someone had translated it into English but in a very sort of rough way, so it was going through this brochure and just changing it from not necessarily incorrect English, but into kind of more smooth flowing, kind of idiomatic English that would read like proper English to an English reader.

S:  So this in particular I find very interesting, because we obviously live in a world of the direct translation - you can go online, put in a paragraph and it’ll be translated for you. Do you read things and you think “ah, ok this has been through a machine” or is it just… it’s difficult, I don’t know, people.. it’s hard to translate naturally. 

L: It is. I don’t think it had been through a machine, I think someone -  a human - had worked on it, but it just… none of it was necessarily wrong. I suppose a couple of examples was - I got the impression the translator probably felt that they’d used, for example, the word “large” a few too many times, and they’d maybe looked in a thesaurus and thought “we need to find a different word for this”, and they described the tower at one point as being “voluminous”

S: Oh crumbs!

L: And I just thought “that doesn’t sound quite right. Why doesn’t it sound right?”, and, you know, I look stuff up because I know it kind of vaguely means “big”.  Apparently it normally refers to clothes (yes!), someone’s wearing a lot of clothes, kind of “a voluminous dress”, something like that.  So, and actually in the end, I think I just corrected it to “4 times as large”, which kind of referred to another bit of this brochure. So often I find, like, foreign translators complicate things too much, they think they’re being correctly English by using possibly a rarer word like “voluminous”, but in the end there be better off just sticking to a more simplistic method and just, again, using “large” or “big”.

S: I absolutely agree, I mean I teach that “a simple message is a clear message”

L: That’s right. Absolutely. Yeah.

S: Have you come across anything where you’re like “oh, I’m really not sure”, you know, is there any sort of grammatical point or punctuation point you think “I’m not sure about this”?

L: Most punctuation points are fairly clear, I mean the biggest problem I find with any text really is consistency in punctuation - for example, some people use double quotation marks, some people you single quotation marks, and they change them throughout a piece of written work, and the thing is - just use the same all the way through.  So consistency errors is by far the most common.  So, in terms of punctuation, I don’t have to look much up.  It’s often facts I look up, because you don’t always have to go back to the author and say “are you sure this is correct?”. If I’m unsure about something, I’ll google it and check.  So it’s… factual stuff is so easy to check these days, and I might use a couple of sources online to make sure it’s correct ... yeah there's a lot of... a lot of checking goes on -  spelling, for example, for foreign names, just making sure that's right. Use of, you know, foreign letters - for example, in German 'u's with umlauts, that sort of thing - is there an umlaut on that or is there not?   The quote about English being the easiest language to learn but the hard is to perfect - I think that's really true because we don't have umlauts or acute accents, grave accents, things like that. And also we don't have genders as much as other languages, we don't have as many cases as other languages - they do exist but then they're kind of not as obvious. (Hmm.) So I guess it's hard to know, you know, not having learned English as a foreign language myself. But, initially, it must be easy to pick up the basics....but then because there are so many kind of spelling and pronunciation inconsistencies in English, it must be really tough to then actually end up sounding like a native English speaker. (Hmm.) it must be really hard. I mean, an example I always use is - I used to live in Milton Keynes and there are three areas of Milton Keynes and they're called Broughton, Loughton, and Woughton and they're all spelt 'ough', all three of them are pronounced differently and they're within like, you know, three miles of each other. So it's things like that must be incredibly difficult. 

S: I guess your kind of work really allows you to explore English from a different perspective, not just as a native speaker, but, you know, from all different angles.  Is there anything you've come across that's been particularly interesting? 

L: I think in terms of punctuation rather than English language because that's what I was, I  suppose, less...least certain about when I first started doing proofreading.  It's, I mean, quite dull, dry sounding things like when to use kind of colons and semicolons is always something I've (It's tricky, though) sort of guessed at, and it's really interesting actually doing some research and finding out exactly when you can use them, and they're often interchangeable.   And even discovering on the keyboard, you know, things that I'd never used before, like there's a particularly long dash that you have to press about six keys on the keyboard to get that Americans tend to use to separate, for example, dates (oh!) and it's called an 'em dash' - you see it sometimes in old text, for example, in like a Dickens novel or something like that, you'll see "Lord S— visited the club that afternoon" and they'll be a long line after the S because it's possibly based on a real character but he doesn't really want to say that. So that's been a discovery of my... kind of a journey of discovery on my Mac keyboard really is finding out how to produce these symbols I didn't know existed!

S: No...! I... so 6 times?!  I have a no idea where I'd find that on my keyboard!

L: I'm exaggerating slightly I have to say! You press 3 - 2 keys plus the dash key to get it. 

S: There you go!  So on this journey then, Laurence - what about your own English? Is there anything that you think now that you would like to improve in the way of grammar or pronunciation or punctuation? 

L: I think it's vocabulary for me. I mean, there are so many unused words in the English language that I'd love to know, to be able to use - to be able to use in everyday speech, and I'd quite like to be able to use a word now, for example, that people would have to then look up - but I can't think of one at the moment! ... you know, just to keep these kind of words alive. So I've always kind of tried to kind of, you know, have an ambition of to like learn a new word a day, and I've never done it, it's always been a thought in my mind "I must learn a new word a day!" and then I can use that, you know, in my copy editing the next day, or whatever, or use it in everyday conversation, and it's never really happened, because sometimes, I'm concerned, I've got a reasonable amount of vocabulary to use, but it could be so much wider, because there's so many words in the English language and their meanings are. So nuanced to be like, for example, the 'voluminous' word I mentioned earlier, you know, I mean refers specifically to clothes, which is fantastic! And there must be so many other words like that, that've got similar, very nuanced meanings, which I'd love to be able to use. So I think I'd like, without the use of a thesaurus, to be able to, you know, have other words at my disposal whenever I need them. 

S: All right - last question then, Laurence. What about advice then for writers, when learners are writing English - any particular top tips?  

L: I think keep it simple. I think that's the best advice I'd give, you know, don't necessarily use the thesaurus or whatever to find a different word, because it's probably going to be the slightly wrong word, I mean not utterly incorrect but a slightly wrong word. So keep things simple, use those simple words... gradually, when you're learning English, you'll build up vocabulary anyway, and you'll have more words at your disposal.  Keep sentences short, actually - don't be afraid to, you know, delete an 'and' and put a full stop in its place to start a new sentence. So, I think initially simple vocabulary, simple-ish short sentences, and then build from there, and just enjoy the process of learning! 

Oh, and actually one final thing - one of the other problems I come across is American spellings, actually. Sometimes I have to proof read a book and it says "use American English". but sometimes you get combinations of both - you know, "color" spelt without a 'u' and things like that... "gray" with an 'a' instead of an 'e'. 

S: So, what's your feeling on that, then? 

L: I feel if it's published in England...in Britain, rather, it should definitely be in UK English, if it's published in America, American English is absolutely fine but there's a time and place for both versions. I don't think American English is wrong and, in fact, some people think, like, "ize" endings, for example, in a word like "sympathize", for example, are American and are wrong, but they're actually applied to both versions of English, and the "ize" ending is actually older, but it is equally as relevant. So each has their place, but certainly in the UK, I think UK English is definitely the one to use. 

S: Quite right! I agree. I agree completely!  

(Music)

My advice is follow Laurence’s writing advice - be consistent, keep it simple, and don’t be afraid of shorter sentences.  The aim is always to be as clear as possible. And it’s not necessarily wrong to use US spellings in the UK, or UK spellings in the US, just keep to one or the other throughout your work!

So, this episode’s pronunciation tip is around the different sounds words with the letters ‘ough’ have.  Laurence gave me a really good example of 3 places in Milton Keynes in the UK – Loughton ( lɑʊ’tn ), Broughton ( brɔː’tn ) and Woughton ( wʊf’tn ) – all with ‘ough’ spellings but all pronounced differently.  When looking at these types of words, learners think at first that there is a common sound…but then discover that there are many different sounds!  We know that words like ‘rough’ and ‘tough’ are the same, an / ʌ / sound, but then the word ‘cough’ is an / o / sound… and then it gets trickier!  So let me show you how adding one letter to an ‘ough’ word can completely change its sound: 

First: Though – an / əʊ /sound. We use this word to show contrast in a statement:

Try this sentence =  “Though the job is very difficult, it’s a fun place to work!” 

Next: Let’s add the letter ‘r’ to ‘though’ to make the word ‘through’ – from an / əʊ /sound to an / uː / sound.  This means to go directly from one end or point to the other.

Try this sentence = “Don’t drive through the city centre – it’s too busy.”

Finally:  Let’s add the letter ‘o’ to ‘through’ to make the word ‘thorough’ – from an / uː / sound to an / ʌ / (x2) sound.  This means in detail or carefully, so nothing is missed. 

 Try this sentence = “The student’s research was very thorough”.

Bonus sentence:  To practice the three sounds, try this sentence = 

“Though they went through the thorough plan, there still found mistakes…”

Over to you to practice!

So there we are!  The transcript of this episode is available to read on the podcast’s webpage, so take a look!    Join me next time for more pronunciation and grammar tips, more advice and, most importantly, more chatting!   

My thanks again to Laurence and, for her music, a massive thanks to the wonderful Mara Carlyle.   Bye for now!