On my skillset checklist, I would put line editing somewhere between mountain rappelling and embroidery.
I don’t know if it’s my ADHD or a lack of formal training, but in my 20-plus years in the business, I have given many a copy editor heartburn with my loosey-goosey treatment of em dashes, serial commas, and capitalization.
But as I’ve matured as a writer, I’ve gotten a little geeky about grammar. I recently picked up a weathered copy of E.B White’s classic Elements of Style and read it for fun. I regularly listen to the Grammar Girl podcast and even had host Mignon Fogarty on an episode of Write About Now.
And I’m not alone in my grammar enthusiasm. Lynn Truss’s Eats Shoots & Leaves, which lamented the state of punctuation in Great Britain, was an international best seller. And 2019’s Dreyer’s English by Random House copy chief and Twitter grammar cop Benjamin Dreyer was also a big hit. I was fortunate to have Benjamin on the podcast in 2019. You can listen to that episode here.
Add to the cannon of style bibles Carol Fisher Saller’s The Subversive Copy Editor. She wrote the book for aspiring copyeditors, but it’s eminently readable for anyone interested in how sentences are put together. Carol is a long-time editor for the Chicago Manual of Style, the venerable guide used by countless publications and learning institutions. It was probably used by some of the magazines I’ve worked for, but I used it to fuel a nice winter fire back in those days.
Subversive Copy Editor sounds like an oxymoron. Aren’t copy editors supposed to be gatekeepers of order and conservatism? Carol doesn’t see it that way. She believes that many of the hard-and-fast rules that have been embedded in our brains by militant English teachers and later copy editors are either myths—or at the very least flexible.
Here is a sampling.
Myth #1: Never end a sentence with a preposition.
This is a classic grammar rule. I mean, Grammarly spanks me every time I try to plop an “of” or “about” at the end of a sentence. But according to Carol, this rule is complete bullshit and nothing to be afraid of. “It’s just a made-up thing that some guy a hundred years ago put in his own grammar book that went viral in the way things could go viral and has been taught for generations,” she said, in what appears to be a run-on sentence.
Myth #2: Not all rules about capitalization are written in STONE.
Should words like “President” always be capitalized? What about job titles? Uncle or aunt? These are the questions that turn me to the bottle. We all know that things like days, months, and proper nouns, and “I” should be capitalized (unless you’re my son sending me a text). But there are no hard-and-fast rules about other types of words. “It all depends on what style book you use,” says Carol. Different style books have different opinions on things like that. They just make arbitrary decisions.” So if you’re unsure, choose a style book such as the aforementioned Chicago Manual of Style or the AP Style Book.
Myth #3: Never start a sentence with And or But.
But this rule really miffs me. I love sand starting sentence with And, no buts and ifs about it. But the style police are militant about this. And they’re always having me substitute those words with something else like “However” or “Therefore”, which I hate (by the way, was that comma supposed to come before or after the apostrophe?). Carol says ands and buts are ok (or is that “okay”?). “If you look at Dickens, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, they will start sentences with fragments.”
Myth #4: To split an infinitive is to badly write
For those in need of a refresher course, a split infinitive is when you put at adverb or another word between “to” and the verb. So, for example, “To boldly go” or “to secretly admire.” The Grammar Gestapo would have you hanged for this. But Carol says it’s ok to split with an infinitive once in a while, and she blames the same guy who made up the preposition rule with this one. “He thought that proper formal English would follow the rules of Latin grammar,” she says. “In Latin, you can’t put an adverb in the middle of an infinitive, so you shouldn’t do it in English either.” This guy was wrong.
What are some other grammar myths that drive you nuts?
To learn more about grammar myths and how to work with copy editors so that they can see the light, listen to my entire interview with Carol Fisher Saller here.