To "e" or not to "e"

[jmc_bks]

Tis the question.

The American spelling of judgment has only one "e".  The British spelling is "judgement".  I had a very strict CivPro instructor who insisted that the "proper" American spelling be used...except for those students who were British; they got a pass.  He felt that the American version of spelling that had been taught in schools was appropriate for American students; using the "e", using the "u" in words like colour and favourite was pretentious.  And he graded down for misspelling, typos, wonky formatting...and that was all before hitting the citation style or substance. 

Personally, I don't care which spelling an author uses, as long as the usage is consistent.  Judgement should have the "e" every time it appears or never, and not alternate randomly between the spellings.  And if the British spelling floats the authors boat, please use it all the way through, not just for selected words.  

IMO.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I don't like seeing British spellings in American books just because they kind of pop out at you and can be distracting. But you're absolutely right--consistency is the main thing. When a new manuscript is copyedited, the editor creates a style sheet as she goes through it. Every time she makes a decision (judgment vs. judgement, gray vs. grey, internal thoughts in roman/italics), she puts it on the sheet so that (hopefully) the style stays the same throughout. And with fiction, they put all proper names on it too. So secondary character John does not become Jon later in the book.

-Jennie

[jmc-bks.livejournal.com]

I don't generally distinguish American books w/ British spelling, because I'm never sure what the author's background is. I just noticed the "judgement" in a recent re-read of an American published book by an American author; that was the only British spelling (and it occured twice), so it caught my attention.

[eackerman.livejournal.com]

My first job at a newspaper was writing up the obits, and the news of record taken from daily proceedings at the courthouse.

After about three days on the job the city editor called me in, looked at me with his one good eye (the other was glass) and said, "If you ever spell judgment with an 'e' again, you're fired."

And I can say with assurance that I have never spelled judgment with an "e" again.

[jmc-bks.livejournal.com]

There's motivation for correct spelling!

[jperceval.livejournal.com]

We do this with interviews at my office. If it's a Brit *writing* for us, we'll keep the Brit spellings. If it's an interview we've done, we use American spellings.

[jmc-bks.livejournal.com]

That policy makes perfect sense to me :)

[jayamei.livejournal.com]

I grew up in Sri Lanka where we had American teachers and textbooks AND British teachers and textbooks. So I used to have British spellings for some words, American for others. I didn't even realize this for certain words (like realize/realise). It's really confusing. I find it unfair when someone calls me on this and acts like a jerk about it. I just have to use a spellchecker.

[jmc-bks.livejournal.com]

Do you get a lot of the red squiggly lines when typing in Word or Word Perfect? Is it set to BrE or AmE? Or do you just turn spellchecker off? Feel free to ignore, I'm just being nosey.

Knowing that your education mixed the two, seeing BrE and AmE spellings mixed together wouldn't bother me. But if you were being published, I would expect that an editor would force a choice in the text for the sake of simplicity -- one or the other?

[jayamei.livejournal.com]

Actually, my spelling isn't too bad. I just mess up every so often. And I'm sure my grammar isn't great. I've been slowly getting Americanized. I moved here 13 years ago. Now I know to use "z" instead of "s" and I've always written words with "or" instead of "our". The extra "e"s that need to be dropped, I have to check that every so often. And I now write the date Month/Day/Year instead of Day/Month/Year (which makes more sense, but oh well...).

[jmc-bks.livejournal.com]

DD/MM/YYYY does make more sense, I agree :)