Professional writers/editors (and other prescriptivists)

In My Humble Opinion
1

What errors that you would never, ever allow out in public on your watch do you make in private?

I was just looking at an email I wrote the other day, in which I said that someone should contact a member of group X “and ask them to front for them” – i.e., I used “them” as a singular for a person of unknown gender not once but twice in a seven-word phrase. The correct version would be “ask him or her to front for him or her,” which is ugly as hell and would have gotten rewritten … if I had noticed I’d done the dreaded “them as singular” move.

If you are of the nitpicky persuasion – do you ever find yourself engaging in a bit of incorrect grammar that you really do know better than? [um, “than which you really do know better?” :wink: ]

Please note: Descriptivists, start your own thread if you want to argue “if people do it it’s not wrong” – that’s a separate issue. This thread is for people who maintain a strong sense of correct and incorrect usage.

2

One of my associates with a doctorate in linguistics just drafted a letter for my signature, as an editor of a university press, that included this: “We have not yet heard from anyone [elsewhere in the university] that they are eager to…” and I suggested that we fix the agreement error (in “anyone/they”) and she told me that I was being unnecessarily prescriptivist.

I’d change it to “We have not yet heard from anyone eager to…” but she told me that change alters the meaning of the sentence, suggesting that we HAVE heard from others (which we haven’t) but on different topics. So I’m changing it to “We have not heard from any faculty members elsewhere in the university who are eager to…”

But I do “anyone/ they” myself routinely in conversation.

3

I give singular “them” a pass because I think it fills an unmet need for an English gender-neutral pronoun. I also like “y’all” for this reason, though that’s much less widely acceptable. I use both in my personal writing all the time, but of course would never let them out professionally.

I have no problem with prepositions ending sentences in any forum; the prescription against it has no real authority and is basically a folk artifact. Wait – one forum I’d disallow: anything sold for use by English teachers, who get all het up about it despite its inauthenticity. Gotta play your market.

–emmaliminal, professional prescriptivist (currently unemployed), married to an academic descriptivist

4

This is the kind of thing I’m itching to bring up in this thread, not so much the “everyone does it so it’s okay” linguistic card. What one considers correct and incorrect may not be what another considers so, and some things have a lot more evidence for being acceptable (beyond mere popularity) than usually gets acknowledged.

I mean, I’m just waiting for someone to post, “I split infinitives. :o”

But that’s all I’ll say in contention, and I’ll bow out otherwise, as I make no mistakes or errors in my personal writing that I wouldn’t tolerate at my job.

ETA: Oh wait, yes I do. I’ll leave off periods in chats sometimes. The presence or lack of a period actually has meaning in instant messaging, and it can change the entire tone of a sentence. But I use chats at work and leave them off there, too, so go figure.

5

Yeah, I don’t really have a problem ending a sentence with a preposition. (I freakin’ hate starting one with a conjunction, however – though I realize I’m doomed to be crushed under the juggernaut of descriptivism on that one.)

I also am okay with the “misuse” of hopefully, since there really is no elegant substitute for it.

6

I not only split infinitives, I like to regularly split infinitives.:smiley:

It’s not really grammar as much as style, but I’m far more careful about active vs. passive voice in my professional life. I passionately believe that passive voice should be avoided in most professional writing.

:smack:On this board, not so much.

7

Who vs. that, although I do it more when I’m talking than in my casual writing.

8

Yet you use the passive voice here, and it’s hard to see how it could be avoided, except with something like,
“I passionately believe that you should avoid the passive voice in most professional writing.”

9

I believe kunilou used the headsmack emoticon to point out that self-contradiction.

10

It can certainly be said that the contradiction has been noted.

11

Hmm…I suppose that I’m a professional prescriptivist, given the amount of time I spend teaching kids how to write using standard conventions. However, I regularly break these conventions in my non-work life without compunction, and I don’t really see any contradiction. Isn’t it just a change in register? Or are you asking folks who are not just professionally, but morally, prescriptivists?

12

Nothing so profound – I just had an “ouch, I know better than that” moment.

13

Fair enough. I really think I’m a prescriptivist only in my professional life: I’ve never had an “ouch, I know better than that” moment in my non-work life, I think.

14

It’s extremely rare for anyone to end a sentence with a preposition, anyway.

Usually what people think are prepositions are actually particles of the verb*. There’s no rule – correct or fanciful – that prohibits that.

Basically, complaining about it means you don’t really know your prescriptivism, either.

*Some English verbs are more than one word. Consider “put.” It means “to place.” No, “put up.” That means “to preserve for the winter.” Next, there’s “put up with,” which means “to tolerate.” Note that the words that change the meaning of the verb are what could be mistaken for prepositions.

15

My spelling is really very poor. I catch most errors before I post anything, but every now and then a real clunker gets past me. When I was young, all I could remember about certain words was the fact that they had some kind of trick to spelling that I could never remember, hence all the exams (where I couldn’t use a dictionary) that featured words like ‘charachter’, ‘coulour’, ‘wierd’, etc.

Redundancy - it drives me insane to read something where the same word is used twice in a sentence, and yet, it’s something I do when I’m in a hurry. (The first version of the above read ‘…where the same word is used twice in the same sentence…’. Pace, Gaudere!)

I don’t make this mistake very often in my writing, but in speech I misuse the subject and object pronouns when combining more than one, i. e. ‘They gave the keys to him and I’ instead of 'him and me. That, too, is a common error that grates on my nerves, and yet, I make it myself.

Beginning sentences or clauses with conjuctions - guilty as charged, Your Honour.

So why, if I make all these mistakes, do I still consider myself to be a prescriptivist? That’s an interesting question that I’m not sure I can answer in only a few words.

The language is so beautiful and subtle as it stands that, until I have completely mastered it, I don’t feel I have the right to change it. So many of the changes to English that have happened strike me as a product of sloppy thinking rather than representing a democratic contribution to the improvement of general discourse. Finally, I want beauty and imagery in my language, not false efficiency. Business-speak, in particular, with its grating neologisms such as ‘liaise’, ‘impact’ (as a verb), ‘presently’ (used as a synonym for ‘currently’), etc., etc., just makes me want to smack someone with the Complete Poems of e. e. cummings. (“If you’re going to make up words, at least make up beautiful ones like ‘rainfaint’, ‘windthin’ ‘falsefair friends’!”)

If I may ask, why do some of the rest of you consider yourselves prescriptivists?

16

In informal writing, I have no problem using comma splices for mood and tone. When editing, however, I kill them with fire.

17

Really? Comma splices set my teeth on edge no matter where I find them. I’ve been seeing them more and more in published prose (I read mostly science fiction and don’t know if the trend is confined to that genre, though). Can you describe what they contribute to mood and tone for you? Is it that semicolons feel too formal?

To address your question, Le Ministre de l’au-delà, the most honest answer (for me) is probably that I like it like that. But, then, I might not really be a prescriptivist by nature – I work as an editor, so I sort of have to be one… I guess what I want is language that only calls attention to itself when it chooses to do so, and not just from sloppiness or ignorance. I care about clear communication; prescriptivist English does a good job of it and seems like the best place to start from in many cases. I also love wordplay, which works best if participants know what they’re playing with.

Oh, hey, sentence fragments. I have no problem with sentence fragments in almost any writing, though I take them out if I’m editing something formal. I used to work on language arts textbooks, and the explanations they give of what is wrong with sentence fragments are pretty nonsensical.

18

I’m not a prescriptivist, and I’m not fond of Samuel R. Delany, but he had one on of his character’s say this:* I’m only interested in chaos to the point that it can be contained within ritual.*

(Quote is approximate.)

19

Yeah; occasionally if I’m just going for a comic one-line response to a message board post or whatever, I’ll leave in a comma splice. I am hard-pressed to come up with any recent examples, though, so I guess I don’t do this as much as I thought I did.

20

This – except I do have the soul of a prescriptivist. I can’t help it, I’m a Capricorn.

I love, love, love prose that communicates clearly without drawing undue attention to itself. I get really picky about things like number agreement between nouns and verbs, and parallel construction [“this is for three reasons, X, Y, and Z” – you better have three verbs there, or three clauses that all work correctly with a single verb, 'cause if not, it needs to be fixed ], and pronoun referents, and suchlike. Why? Because if you do it right, it’s crystal clear what you’re trying to say, and if you don’t, it’s murky or confusing.

(At work, I’m in the middle of what’s supposed to be a proofreading pass, but it’s turning into a copy-edit because the original author doesn’t write as well as she thinks she does, so she sets up these elaborate constructions and then fucks up the details of number agreement, parallel construction, and pronoun referents, and it is irritating as hell. People, please, don’t write above your level of competence.)