Watch Out for the PUGS Monster

 

By Martin Wiles

 

Stop! Wait! Don’t leave yet (at least not without sharing the post). I know. You’ve been editing for fifty years. No one could teach you anything about PUGS. But an old saying comes to mind: Familiarity breeds contempt. And which one of us, after reading the Bible in its entirety, would say, “Well, I can check that off my bucket list. Don’t need to do that again.”

And yes, I know several forms of editing abound: substantive (developmental), line editing, copyediting, proofreading. You may be tempted to pass this post by because you do one of the types that doesn’t necessarily focus on PUGS. But then again, how can we do any type of editing and fail to notice this monster that often lurks in manuscripts?

And yes, I know we now have apps and other tools to help us detect PUGS. Microsoft Editor, Grammarly, etc. But like our friend AI, these should be an editor’s tools, not replace our knowledge and education.

I love editing, and I love my job as a middle school English teacher, both of which give me daily interaction with PUGS. No, I may not notice that Charlotte’s eyes are green in Chapter 2 and blue in Chapter 10 in a novel, but I do know that the PUGS villain can lurk in the manuscript in which Charlotte lives.

With that said, on the first day of school this year, I wrote the acronym on my whiteboard, where it will live until the end of the school year. And every time my students write a paragraph or essay, I will remind them or their peer editors to check for PUGS.

Every good story has an antagonist, and the antagonist in any type of writing is the PUGS monster.

P is for Punctuation.

Our modern marvel tech devices are unduly affecting our ability to do this. In my thirteen years of teaching English, I’ve seen this art take a nosedive. Eventually, this will show up more in manuscripts presented to editors and agents. Knowing about punctuation and knowing how and when to use it correctly are two different things.

U is for Usage.

We communicate with words, but the wrong words affect the message. Editing tools often miss this one. Example: I went to the store too buy milk. Thankfully, Microsoft Editor and Grammarly caught it.

G is for Grammar.

This includes everything related to the eight parts of speech: verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. Putting them together correctly to create a variety of sentences flows from this knowledge. When schools stop teaching it, communication (and writing) suffers. Take a day and listen to people talk—even people in the public eye or who are reading teleprompters.

S is for Spelling

This, too, is suffering because apps automatically correct our mistakes. But how many of us have had it replace our word with a totally incorrect word? Sometimes an embarrassing word.

My wife once sent some goodies to my peer teachers (I called the goodies “things”). When my wife asked if they enjoyed them, I texted, “They loved them things” (I know, bad grammar). But when she responded with “What” and a few question marks, I noticed that autocorrect had sent “They loved them thongs.” And with that, I’ll close. Point made.

Photo courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net and farconville.

Martin Wiles is an author, pastor, English teacher, and freelance editor who resides in Greenwood, South Carolina. He is the administrator/assistant editor for VineWords: Devotions and More and the Managing Editor for Christian Devotions. He is the founder/editor of the internationally recognized devotion site, Love Lines from God (www.lovelinesfromgod.com). His most recent book, Don’t Just Live … Really Live, is available on Amazon. He has also been published in numerous publications. He is the husband of one, the father of two, and the grandfather of seven.