Published September 15, 2024

If I say that I try to edit for the first half of the 21st century, not for the first half of the 20th century, what is your reaction? If I say that I strive to edit for readers who are alive and not for mentors and teachers who aren’t, how does that strike you? Do you recoil or snarl? If I urge you not to treat language like that new couch your parents bought, never taking the plastic cover off and never letting anyone sit on it, would you understand what I am saying?

There are many ways the prescriptivist vs. descriptivist conversation can go, but you will likely find me mostly agreeing with those who say prescriptivism is an attempt to control or kill a living language. Also, I love asking questions, so I have more!

Do you know what a zombie rule is? Or what my friend and editing inspiration James Fraleigh calls moldy usage chestnuts? Do you restrict the use of words to the first definition listed and refuse to recognize all others? If so, who or what are you protecting? Are you saving the world from the “wrong” way to use a word?

We all bring our baggage into this. We all have our pet peeves and “rules,” but are they based on anything other than what some grumpy editor told someone 50, 60 or 70 years ago and it became gospel? If you are going to come strong to the mic with a rule, at least have something sturdier than “that’s what I was taught when I started out.”

Forget about right vs. wrong

More and more I try to let go of the idea of right vs. wrong and choose what’s best for the reader. That means knowing your audience, and after many years of newspaper and website writing and editing, I’m confident I do.

When I started writing professionally, some remnants remained from the style of the ’30s and ’40s. They died hard, but they died. I don’t often see the local football team referred to as, say, the Riverdale “eleven” anymore, as once was customary. Or distance runners called “harriers” or “thinclads,” basketball players called “cagers,” or football players called “gridders.” Yes, I am going to extremes here, but I think if journalism isn’t careful and continues to treat style and language as something we should serve instead of having it serve us and our readers, we might one day wake up and realize our writing sounds the way “the local nine” sounded to me as a child when I read about a baseball team.

Do you let your writers sit on the couch? Or is the protective plastic still on it? Do you cut yourself (and your readers) off from much of the music and fun of the language in service of following so-called rules? Do you suck the life out of stories, hearing the voice of your first editor saying, “There’s no such thing as (a thing there very much is)”? My question is, “Why?”

There is a story I want to tell you from Sheldon B. Kopp’s book “If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!” A stranger wandered into a field where people were trying to reap wheat, and they ran away, fearful, after spotting a “monster.” The stranger knew it to be a watermelon. He cut it and ate from it while they watched, horrified. They chased him away, fearing for their safety. Later, another stranger happened by, and he agreed that the “monster” must be dangerous. Over time, he earned their trust and convinced them it was fine to eat watermelon.

Zombie rules

It took me a long time to unlearn zombie rules I’d been taught in newsrooms and in school. The moldy usage chestnuts stuck around far too long. Thanks to more than a decade of attending editing conferences and online chats, and interacting with some of the top editors in North America (such as Crystal Shelley, Jill Campbell, Karen Yin, Erin Brenner and many more), I learned to let go of so much prescriptivism. When I see the full title of “Dr. Strangelove,” I sometimes read it as “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Descriptivism.”

The best part is that after decades of professional writing and editing, I am still learning! And I always will be. But I still encounter editors who are like soldiers on some island, fighting a war (on usage) they haven’t heard is over.

It’s okay to let language stretch and breathe. It has always done so anyway without asking for our permission. It’s okay to stretch and breathe with it, okay to sit on the couch. It’s okay to eat the watermelon.

Just maybe not on the couch.

A version of this post first appeared on LinkedIn. Editing tips here are mine unless noted.