The Fallible Editor

Here’s another little gem from the 1906 Chicago Manual of Style:

Editors are fallible, and should be made to live up to their own rules. (p.100)

This one makes me squirm a little—or a lot. It comes from the “Hints to Proofreaders” section and is part of a reminder that the proofreader should not assume the edited copy is correct. Editors make mistakes, and it’s ultimately up to the proofreader to catch those mistakes before they find their way into print.

I’m okay with that. I do try to be perfect when I edit, but at the end of the day I know that, no matter how careful and thorough I try to be, I’m going to miss some things. There’s just no getting around it. Recognizing my own fallibility is a healthy thing, I think. It keeps an editor honest and humble.

So I’ve come to terms with the fallibility issue; it’s the “should be made to live up to their own rules” part that’s got me shifting nervously on my balance-ball chair. I know that bit of advice is, strictly speaking, referring to editors who are editing, but I can’t help stretching the context a bit.

Here’s the thing: I know that, in my own writing, I don’t always live up to the rules I enforce in others’ writing. Sometimes I get excited by a particular thought and get a little loosey-goosey with punctuation, spelling, word choice—whatever. I always figure I’ll clean it up before anyone else sees it. But I don’t always clean it up. Because sometimes I don’t want to. If I’ve been punctuating by ear and have put commas in odd places and used too many em dashes that maybe should oughtta be semicolons and I’ve written “maybe should oughtta be” when part of me thinks it sounds stupid and I don’t know how to spell “oughtta” and I know certain readers will think, “Ooooh, that’s so wrong”—and let’s not even talk about run-on sentences that go on and on without even a hint of a subject or verb …

And what about paragraphs? Is it okay to have random one- or two-word paragraphs?

Sure.

Why not?

I’m coming around to my point now, and my point is this: Rules of style and grammar aren’t meant to be a straitjacket. They’re meant to make written communication understandable so it will actually communicate something. You won’t be sentenced to eternal damnation if you consciously break a rule now and then (gosh, I hope I’m right about this). However, if you carelessly break rule after rule in your dissertation, your committee will make your life hell. Context—don’t forget your context. I’m much more careful in Adventures in Editing than I am in my short stories or bad poetry, for example.

So I guess I do live up to my own rules after all. Mostly.

Still fallible, though.