Beware of Grammar Snobs
We're all familiar with the maxim "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." This applies just as much in editing as anywhere else. When you over-edit, you risk introducing new mistakes, stripping the piece of its author's voice, and giving yourself a headache.
A lot of people out there think the rules of usage they remember from the 9th grade are the definitive way to write in English. Thus they might make unnecessary changes that actually hurt the document. I recently posted an ad for my services on Craigslist, and some kind soul had the courtesy to e-mail me and suggest that I meant to use "don't" where I said "won't." This change actually would've caused the sentence in question to contain a disagreement of tense between two clauses, thus introducing an error that wouldn't have existed before. I gave this person my courteous thanks and left the ad as it was.
There's a certain breed of people out there who, perhaps under the influence of books like Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, see themselves as defenders of correct English, and take delight in finding violations of whatever arbitrary "rules" they've absorbed most recently. Beware of these people! The aim of editing is internal consistency; as long as an author follows their own precedents, there's no need for nit-picking.
I won't deny that there's a certain standard of English usage that we should stick to - you can't get away with spelling errors or disagreements in tense just because you do things that way consistently - but people need to loosen up a little bit. Just because a writer doesn't do things the way you would, doesn't mean they're wrong, it just means we need to be respectful of their style and extra careful about making changes.
A lot of people out there think the rules of usage they remember from the 9th grade are the definitive way to write in English. Thus they might make unnecessary changes that actually hurt the document. I recently posted an ad for my services on Craigslist, and some kind soul had the courtesy to e-mail me and suggest that I meant to use "don't" where I said "won't." This change actually would've caused the sentence in question to contain a disagreement of tense between two clauses, thus introducing an error that wouldn't have existed before. I gave this person my courteous thanks and left the ad as it was.
There's a certain breed of people out there who, perhaps under the influence of books like Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, see themselves as defenders of correct English, and take delight in finding violations of whatever arbitrary "rules" they've absorbed most recently. Beware of these people! The aim of editing is internal consistency; as long as an author follows their own precedents, there's no need for nit-picking.
I won't deny that there's a certain standard of English usage that we should stick to - you can't get away with spelling errors or disagreements in tense just because you do things that way consistently - but people need to loosen up a little bit. Just because a writer doesn't do things the way you would, doesn't mean they're wrong, it just means we need to be respectful of their style and extra careful about making changes.
posted by Kevin at
2:41 PM
2 Comments:
Hello sir, today a supervisor corrected a graduate clinician's SOAP notes (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP_note)- she had written "can not," which he corrected to "cannot."
Is there a rule for this? Is "can not" never appropriate? Please help.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. "Cannot" and "can not" mean exactly the same thing. There's no subtle shade of meaning, no divergent history of usage, nothing. Perhaps the esteemed professor, and other people who do this kind of thing, feels the need to exercise authority in order to satiate unsatisfactorily repressed feelings of irrelevance or incompetence. Perhaps as an editor I should not impute this kind of motive to another person's editing, considering what it might imply about myself.
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