Editors get a bad rap. When I meet someone new and mention that I’m an editor, I’m likely to get a suspicious look, as though I’m part of a conspiracy to make English too difficult to leave to amateurs. I’ll hear comments about undecipherable, rigid rules, followed by a stream of excuses or complaints (or a mixture thereof).

Few of the rules contained in this book are inviolable. — The Chicago Manual of Style

Of course, there exist bureaucratic editors, on a mission to ensure that no one who breaks a rule be allowed to live in peace. Most of us, though, subscribe to a different ethic. We are here to make writing clearer, and we use the rules to serve that end.

Toward Consistency and Clarity

Rules

The rules of English were not written by a committee. They developed naturally, and they are complex. A style manual, such as the The Chicago Manual of Style, AP Stylebook, or even The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, is simply a book in which someone, or some group, has tried to collect those rules for reference. I think of it more as an encyclopedia or a dictionary than as a list of commandments. It is descriptive, rather than prescriptive.

Describing English Usage

The manual’s usefulness, then, is in describing how English is typically used. It is not a law-book, but rather a guide. Only when something is awkward or unclear to we resort to checking the rules.

But did I really say “how English is typically used”? I did, but I don’t mean the way it is used at your local mall. I mean the way it is used by the whole community of English speakers, from New York to Idaho, to Australia, England, and South Africa. From philosophers, both dead and alive, to rappers, and the people at your local mall.

To be understood by all literate English speakers (with an adequate vocabulary) is the writer’s goal, and the editor helps to reach that goal. Correct English is the English that makes that possible.

Remember to always split infinitives.

Well, ok, not always. But often. Whenever it works.

We have this handed-down wisdom that says an infinitive, a verb of the “to form” — to walk, to amble, to mosey — must always be preserved intact. Rules like this cripple writing. Even the esteemed editors of the Chicago Manual of Style agree with me.

In this day and age, it seems, an injunction against splitting infinitives is one of those shibboleths whose only reason for survival is to give increased meaning to the lives of those who can both identify by name a discrete grammatical, syntactic, or orthographic entity and notice when that entity has been somehow besmirched. — Chicago Manual Q&A

Concern yourself first with clarity and a pleasing sound. We do need grammar rules, but only when they help us achieve those things. When they get in the way, they should be ignored.

"There are two kinds of editors. One sticks in that wherever it will fit. The other kind takes it out. They’re both wrong." — P. T. O’Connor

Woe is I is subtitled “The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English,” and I can’t describe it better than that. O’Connor solves many of the stranger mysteries of English (“He resents me going” or “He resents my going”?) without resorting to the vocabulary of a high-school English teacher.

The last chapter, “Saying is Believing,” is a witty guide to making your writing clear.
These thirteen points, starting with “say what you have to say,” and “stop when you’ve said it,” give the writer concrete ways to improve his writing. These ten short pages are enough, on their own, to make the book worth reading and taking to heart.