Growing up in a minuscule town in eastern Kentucky, I was a good student, a teacher’s pet, and a bookworm.

Being a good student meant always having the right answer, and in English class, where I excelled, the right answer was always formal written English. I absorbed the dangerous belief that formal written English is “correct” English, all other forms being inferior at best, or downright wrong.

Consequently, I came to talk like a book and developed into a terrible language snob during adolescence and early adulthood, the worst kind of prescriptivist. It took some time for me to discover — through wide reading, through acquaintance with other editors in ACES: The Society for Editing, and through blogging exchanges with linguists and lexicographers — that language snobbery is no more noble, moral, or excusable than snobbery based on ancestry, place of birth, IQ score, wealth, physical beauty, or wardrobe.

This means I have had to revise, or even reverse, what I have told students in my editing class at Loyola University Maryland, but unlearning is an inescapable part of learning.

Over nearly forty years as an editor at newspapers, first The Cincinnati Enquirer and currently The Baltimore Sun, I have come to understand that my task is not to enforce a handful of superstitions and shibboleths, but to assist the writer in accomplishing their purpose. (Yes, singular their. Get over it.)

Accomplishing that purpose means making judgments rather than enforcing rules or rigidly adhering to a house style. The judgments involve balancing a set of interests: what is appropriate for the writer, appropriate for the subject, appropriate for the occasion, appropriate for the publication — and appropriate for the reader, the party most commonly overlooked.

That’s the job.

 

John Early McIntyre has been a professional editor for nearly 40 years, more than 31 of them at The Baltimore Sun, where he has headed the copy desk. John earned an undergraduate degree in English from Michigan State University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a master’s degree in English from Syracuse University, where he was a university fellow. John has taught copyediting at Loyola University Maryland since 1995. A charter member of the ACES: The Society for Editing, he served two terms as its president. John has presented workshops on writing and editing at conferences and publications in the United States and Canada.

 

NAIWE’s Grammar Expert John E. McIntyre has not gone around the bend. Let me explain.

Usually someone talking about “correct” English imagines that one form of English, the dialect we identify as standard English or standard formal English, is the one, true English, all variants being inferior, wrong, and ignorant.

People who rattle on about “correct” English, often expressing a belief that the language is in decline and ignorance on the rise, want either to exert social prestige over you or to lure you into sharing their misguided sense of superiority. There will be mouthing of “dumbing down” and “the common herd.” Do not play their game.

In my own work as an editor, I have found it much more effective to talk about appropriate English. What form of English is the best match for the subject, the genre, the publication, the occasion, the writer, and the reader? (D’you remember the reader?) All the Englishes have a place at the table, and your task is to find the ones that best suit your purposes.

Standard formal English is the language of law, government, business, and academia. If you are writing in those areas, you will have to display a grasp of its conventions. Lapses in grammar and usage will undermine your credibility. (Mind you, not all the things that people think of as rules in standard English are genuine rules. For reference, my book, Bad Advice: The Most Unreliable Counsel Available on Grammar, Usage, and Writing.)

To be more broadly successful in writing you will also need to master what linguists call code switching. You already know how it works in speech: You don’t talk to your grandmother the same way you talk to friends in a bar; you don’t talk to your supervisor quite the same way you talk to a subordinate or to your peers. You adjust vocabulary and syntax to match the occasion and the people.

Those of you who write fiction already understand this modulation as you give voice to your narrators and characters, like this one: “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.” But the guardians of “correct” English at the Concord, Massachusetts, public library expelled The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at the time of its publication as “the veriest trash.”

Sufficiently adept writers discover the possibilities of code switching within a text, as you can see in a passage from H.L. Mencken’s opinion of the Warren Harding inaugural address: “He writes the worst English I have even encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

But always keep in mind what Flannery O’Connor said about what one can do and cannot do in writing: “You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.”

Let me recommend to you two books to enlarge your sense of language and its possibilities. You will profit from reading Don’t Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language by David Shariatmadari and Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch.

 

John Early McIntyre was a professional editor for more than 40 years, 34 of them at The Baltimore Sun, from which he recently retired. John earned an undergraduate degree in English from Michigan State University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a master’s degree in English from Syracuse University, where he was a university fellow. John taught editing at Loyola University Maryland for 25 years. A charter member of ACES: The Society for Editing, he served two terms as its president. John has presented workshops on writing and editing at conferences and publications in the United States and Canada. He is the author of two small but trenchant books, The Old Editor Says: Maxims on Writing and Editing, and Bad Advice: The Most Unreliable Counsel Available on Grammar, Usage, and Writing.

You will have to pick up after yourself.

Writers find themselves increasingly on their own. Because proper editing is time-consuming and expensive, publications and publishers have significantly diminished — or outright eliminated — editing staffs. Those who remain are overworked. As a practical matter, your self-editing might turn out to be the only significant editing you get.

All this said, it is still the case that a writer is not necessarily the best judge of their own work. You have a sense in your head of what you meant to say, but a reader may come to a completely different understanding. Adopting the approach of an editor for your own work can give you some protection.

To do that, you have to understand that there are several kinds of editors, and you will need to know how to function as each one.

You will start as your own developmental editor, thinking through possible approaches to your subject and deciding which will be most effective. You’ll work out the focus, the main thing that you want your text to say, and what components you’ll need to carry that out. You may well go through a series of drafts. Read your draft aloud; that will highlight awkwardness and infelicities.

(Here’s a tip: Unless you are desperately pressed by a deadline, you need to walk away from your text between drafts. Have a coffee. Have a smoke. Go for a walk. If you can leave it for a day or two, all the better. It will look different when you come back to it, and you will see more clearly what needs to be done.)

Once you have a draft that you think is ready, you will become your own line editor. You will ask whether that text had the focus you imagined it had; does it say one single clear thing? Can you say in one sentence what your main point is? If not, perhaps you’re unclear on what your main point is. You will look at the structure to see whether it is adequate to the purpose, and you will question whether the organization within that structure makes any sense and can be easily followed. You’ll also check to see that everything is properly sourced and attributed.

(Here’s a tip: If you didn’t work from an outline at the developmental stage, make one now. Not the I. A. 1. a. outline from high school. Make a list of the subtopics under your main topic, paragraph by paragraph if necessary. Do all the parts contribute? Are they arranged in an order that makes it easy for the reader to follow? Would it be better to rearrange the order?)

At the next stage you will be your own copy editor. You will check for factual accuracy throughout. You will establish that the spelling, punctuation, grammar, and usage throughout are reliable and in an appropriate register. Don’t be shy about making use of a dictionary, Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern English Usage, and Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. If there is a house style to which you are meant to conform, conform to it.

(Here’s a tip: If there is some fact — name, date, whatever — that you think you know, look it up. If there’s a point of grammar or usage that you think you have under control, look it up. Proper editors know that they don’t know everything and are forever looking things up. They don’t trust their own memories, so neither should you.)

You’re nearly there, ready to be your own proofreader. Read over your text, word by word; doing it aloud may help you focus. Look for repeated words (the the), dropped words, garble, inconsistencies in typography, any other blemishes.

(Here’s a tip. Run the spell-check as the last thing you do before submitting the text. It will flag common misspellings, typographical errors, and inconsistencies in the spelling of names. But do not trust it too much. It will not help you with the wrong word correctly spelled, and English is crawling with homonyms. You will need to know whether you mean to say premier or premiere, because your spell-check won’t help you.)

And one final caution. There will be errors. There will be things you overlooked, embarrassing things. That you can produce an error-free text is an illusion, and someone will always be ready to point out the deficiencies in yours. This is how editors learn humility. So will you.

 

John Early McIntyre has been a professional editor for nearly 40 years, more than 32 of them at The Baltimore Sun, where he has headed the copy desk. John earned an undergraduate degree in English from Michigan State University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a master’s degree in English from Syracuse University, where he was a university fellow. John has taught copyediting at Loyola University Maryland since 1995. A charter member of the ACES: The Society for Editing, he served two terms as its president. John has presented workshops on writing and editing at conferences and publications in the United States and Canada.