The Joys of Editing

Is it Takeoff or Take Off?

I edit with my browser minimized. That way I can pull up Google Search and check the spelling on words immediately.~

The latest check was for take off. I am editing the father-and-son Zuker team’s memoir of Ray Zuker. He was an Army Air Corps pilot during WWII. Naturally, there are frequent references to flying the plane and taking off on a runway with trees at the end of it.

What I found out is that takeoff is the noun for the process of taking off in an airplane. But take off is the phrasal verb for doing so.

So, I quickly did a Word Find and Replace to locate the term take off so I could make all corrections consistently accross entire manuscript. A quick read of the sentence should be sufficient to replace any improper use of the two terms, right?

Not that simple. What I discovered is that in speaking, which is what a memoir is very closely related to, the author often uses the prepositions he is comfortably used to in actual speech. Some prepositions seem best used with nouns, some with verbs.

Furthermore, a man who flew in WWII but wrote his memoirs in 1987-8 will not always make the noun/verb distinction in prepositions. So does the term describing the plane lifting off the ground act like a verb or a noun? Should a better preposition be used? What prepositional phrase best matches the way the author speaks? Will a pilot talk that way, or will I change the voice too drastically?

Oh well, I will let the co-author, his son Fred, decide on the final wording of the sentence. I suppose I had better write a comment in the tracking of the passage to alert him that the sentence might be a bit awkward. I will ask him if he has any suggestions.

Look for the publication of this book The Dark Angel Turns Away to be published by the first week of March 2019 as a Kindle ebook.

New info: publication has been delayed. It is now May and the book is just about ready for publication. My apologies to those of you who are waiting to read this gem of a memoir. Family commitments and other issues have delayed me in getting the book posted to Amazon.

The good news is that an entire chapter has been added in the interim that describes what happened to the Lady Lightnin‘ during her combat lifespan.~~Val