Before I tell you about that very interesting article about lichens from The Atlantic and what I would have done to improve it, I first want to acknowledge that everything I write or edit could also benefit from someone else's editing and/or copy-editing.
At my previous full-time-with-benefits gig, pre–Huge Hound, my main job was overseeing a group of copy editors, but I also edited (as opposed to copy-edited) pieces by wine and spirits expert Elin McCoy. Whenever I'd route my edit of one of Elin's stories to a copy-editing colleague for her/his review, I always hoped it would come back with nothing corrected or questioned, but, of course, there were always at least a couple things that needed improving or fixing. Producing stories that are worth reading takes a lot of effort, and the more brains and pairs of eyes that are being utilized, the better the stories usually are.
I clicked on "How a Guy From a Montana Trailer Park Overturned 150 Years of Biology" because it was one of the suggested stories at the bottom of Christopher Orr's review of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Tony and I had watched that movie on Netflix Saturday night, and I went in search of reviews on Rotten Tomatoes on Sunday morning. I agreed with a good deal of what MTV's Amy Nicholson wrote in this review, which took the movie to task for emphasizing fan service at the expense of new ideas.
By the way, I didn't see any of the original-trilogy movies in theaters. My parents didn't make it a habit to take my older sister and me to science-fiction movies because sci-fi wasn't their bag, though I do remember catching E.T. in the theater with my mother when I was in 8th grade. If I remember correctly, I actually saw The Empire Strikes Back before I saw Star Wars, at my Aunt Lorene's house in Bridgeton on a Sunday evening. Unlike the Hawleys, my aunt sprang for HBO. I also saw only the first film in the second trilogy because I thought The Phantom Menace was so poorly directed. I couldn't get over how awful such usually terrific actors as Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor came across in that movie, and I had to conclude it was George Lucas's fault.
Now back to our lichen story:
He was raised in a Montana trailer park, and home-schooled by what he now describes as a “fundamentalist cult.” At a young age, he fell in love with science, but had no way of feeding that love.
I see no need for a comma after either "park" or "science." There's no change in subject and no obvious reason to pause there. *shrugs*
His missing qualifications were still a problem, but one that the University of Gottingen decided to overlook.
There's a bit of a pause after "problem," so I can kinda sorta see a comma there, but I probably wouldn't have bothered with one. That's the end of my comma quibbles. And I swear all of the remaining points I'm going to bring up will be more interesting. 😄
You’ve seen lichens before, but unlike Spribille, you may have ignored them. They grow on logs, cling to bark, smother stones. At first glance, they look messy and undeserving of attention. On closer inspection, they are astonishingly beautiful. They can look like flecks of peeling paint, or coralline branches, or dustings of powder, or lettuce-like fronds, or wriggling worms, or cups that a pixie might drink from. They’re also extremely tough. They grow in the most inhospitable parts of the planet, where no plant or animal can survive.
That paragraph is a beautiful, imaginative collection of sentences, so kudos to the writer, Ed Yong, and his editor(s). And extra props for using the new-to-me word coralline.
The first time I read this passage, I didn't have a problem with the multiple ors, but they bother me more now, on closer inspection. And I take exception to the last two sentences because: 1) I think of lichens, not inaccurately, as fragile organisms that are susceptible to air pollution, so I believe the "extremely tough" description needs to be qualified. And 2) I'm really curious to learn what's meant by these inhospitable places "where no plant or animal can survive." I immediately thought of lichens' ability to grow on bare rocks, but that's not a "part of the planet." I next thought of the Arctic tundra. Although it's not terribly hospitable, with a growing season of two months or less, some plants and animals do live there. A couple concrete examples of these harsh parts of the globe would be helpful.
The backlash only collapsed when Schwendener and others, with good microscopes and careful hands, managed to tease the two partners apart.
I prefer "collapsed only when" to "only collapsed when," and I would have made that change if I'd been the editor or copy editor. The altered wording recognizes the more-correct placement of the adverb only—modifying when rather than collapsed—and it still reads fine. Sometimes moving an only (or a just) to its more-correct location causes a sentence to seem stilted and not like how people really talk/write. For instance, I wouldn't change "I'm only going to tell you this once" to "I'm going to tell you this only once," even though the latter is really what's meant. The former sentence is basically an idiom, and I've got better things to do with my time than fight for the second sentence's superiority.
Schwendener wrongly thought that the fungus had “enslaved” the alga, but others showed that the two cooperate.
My previous employer discouraged its writers and editors from using the word but. I use but regularly in my own writing, but I take issue with its inclusion in the sentence above. The wrongly already told us the idea of the fungus enslaving the alga is inaccurate, so the supposedly alternative (as signaled by the but) idea that follows (it's really a cooperative arrangement) in no way contradicts the first part of the sentence. I would either 1) delete wrongly or 2) put a semicolon after alga and lose the but.
Two Germans, Albert Frank and Anton de Bary, provided the perfect one—symbiosis, from the Greek for ‘together’ and ‘living’.
Why is it so important to note that those two dudes were German, so much so that it's the only characteristic used to describe them? And why is that stubby description more important (based on its placement first in the sentence) than these distinguished scientists' names? I would have started the sentence "Albert Frank and Anton de Bary, two German scientists who studied both plants and fungi, provided... ," and I would have turned the single quote marks into double quote marks and put the final double quote mark after the period, where it belongs. Actually, scratch that part about the quote marks. I would have put together and living in italics, as I've been doing throughout this post when I've used words as words. My go-to example of using a word as a word—that also uses a letter as a letter—is "Banana has three a's."
When we think about the microbes that influence the health of humans and other animals, the algae that provide coral reefs with energy, the mitochondria that power our cells, the gut bacteria that allow cows to digest their food, or the probiotic products that line supermarket shelves—all of that can be traced to the birth of the symbiosis as a concept.
The the before symbiosis isn't wanted.
Whenever they artificially united the fungus and the alga, the two partners would never fully recreate their natural structures.
I'm a fan of hyphenating the word that means to create again to distinguish it from the word we associate with exercise or playing a game out on the blacktop behind the elementary school after lunch.
He has shown that largest and most species-rich group of lichens are not alliances between two organisms, as every scientist since Schwendener has claimed.
A the is needed before largest. And I would have made it "has shown that the lichens in the largest and most species-rich group are... ." Otherwise it definitely reads like subject-verb disagreement to me, with the group calling for an is, not an are.
To find out, Spribille analyzed which genes the two lichens were activating. ... But when Spribille removed all the basidiomycete genes from his data, everything that related to the presence of vulpinic acid also disappeared.
How does one determine which genes the lichens were activating? And what does the writer mean by activating? And how does our friendly scientist remove genes from his data? I don't follow. Maybe you do.
Throughout his career, Spribille had collected some 45,000 samples of lichens.
Holy shit! That's a lot of lichens.
Unless you know what you’re looking for, there’s no reason why you’d think there are two fungi there, rather than one—which is why no one realised for 150 years.
Where did that British spelling of realized materialize from? The American spelling is used six paragraphs earlier.
Lichens are alluring targets for ‘bioprospectors’, who scour nature for substances that might be medically useful to us. And new basidiomycetes are part of an entirely new group, separated from their closest known relatives by 200 million years ago.
There's another unwanted set of single quotes. And the last sentence should have either the by or the ago, not both. My assumption is that "an entirely new group that separated from its closest known relatives 200 million years ago" is the way to go, but I would have conferred with the writer before making that change.
That’s a theme that resonates throughout the history of symbiosis research—it takes an alliance of researchers to uncover nature’s most intimate partnerships.
And my last nitpick: I would replace the em dash with a colon because this is a textbook example of what a colon is used for: indicating an explanation or an expansion of what precedes that punctuation mark. And since it appears the style of this publication is to not capitalize the first letter in the first word of a complete sentence that follows a colon, I would retain the lowercase i in it.
