Category Archives: editing

Whither English?

Posted on March 8, 2025 | 1 comment

Once again this week I guested into the editing class my friend teaches online at a local university. And this time, along with the usual questions about specific points of usage, one student asked what I think will change in English usage, and what changes editors should resist.

Which is a really interesting question! Predicting language change is fun and occasionally one gets it right, but there are always innovations that you just can’t predict – and social and technological changes, too. When you look at how things have changed in the past, it gives some sense of the usual forces of change. As I said in one presentation on the topic (more than a decade ago now), we tend to change language for four general reasons:

  • to make life easier
  • to feel better
  • to control
  • things slip

Fads that become accepted are common. The shifts in the pronunciation of the letter r – and their shifts in social status (for example, the advent of r-dropping in England, its adoption in America as a sign of higher status, its shift over time towards more of a working-class signifier in America but not in England) – are emblematic of this, as I wrote about in an article for the BBC. A lot of it has to do with signifying various kinds of social group belonging.

On the other hand, sometimes changes are invented and propagated – such as the ideas that you can’t split an infinitive (I’ve written about this more than once) and can’t end a sentence with a preposition, and the prescribed distinction between less and fewer. A few of these “rules” have become undisputed standard English now (such as the proscriptions of double negatives and double superlatives); others (such as the ones I just mentioned) are often waved around as rules but aren’t universally accepted, and serve mainly to license social aggression (as I wrote about in another BBC article). I did a whole presentation on when “errors” aren’t some years ago, and a bit more recently on when to use “bad” English.

None of which yet answers the question. Let’s see… 

  • I think that social media will continue to be a good vector for the rapid spread of new usages and references (everything is citational, after all), but of course I can’t predict which ones. 
  • I think that punctuation will get to be used more and more variably for subtle significations (after all, the presence or absence of a period at the end of a message can convey tone, sometimes importantly). 
  • I think emoji will keep getting used, including as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, not just interjections, but how far into formal writing they will spread I don’t know. 
  • I think capitalization will continue to be basically haywire, because it’s weird and complicated in English anyway (here’s something I ghostwrote for PerfectIt’s blog about it).
  • I’ve noticed what seems to be a shift (yet another!) in the pronunciation of r among younger people, at least partly under the influence of pop singers who are avoiding the retroflex sound in favour of something closer to a mid-high mid-front vowel. I’m not sure where that’s going, but keep an eye on it.
  • I suspect we will, at length, start using they-all or something similar to convey that we’re speaking of a group of people, rather than a single person of unspecified or neutral gender. I am very much on board with singular they – if you have an hour, watch this presentation I gave on gender in language, including the vaunted history of singular they and the deliberate reactionary imposition of the idea that he is the natural generic default. But singular they can bring the complication that we aren’t always sure of the number of people signified. When we started using you for all second persons rather than distinguishing between singular thou and plural you, various people in various places innovated y’all, youse, yiz, yinz, and so on. So why not the same with they?
  • And, because identity is important to people, especially when threatened, and because language is a key means of conveying that identity, I think Canadian usages and in particular Canadian spellings (centre, colour, you know), which have been slipping a bit in general Canadian usage, will come to be increasingly emphasized in response to threats to Canadian sovereignty. That’s not a change so much as a revitalization. But keep an eye out for innovation of Canadian signifiers too!

And as to the question of what changes to accept and what to resist, as I said in my “when does wrong become right” presentation, there are five questions we should ask when evaluating a change:

  1. What is the change? Really? (Sometimes the “change” is the original form and the “traditional” usage was invented and propagated more recently.)
  2. Where did it come from? When?
  3. Where is it used? By whom?
  4. Who is your text for? (Usages that annoy one audience may charm another.)
  5. What are the gains and losses – what does the change add in expressive value and clarity, and what does it take away?

Oh, and I am definitely in favour of being pragmatic to the point of deviousness in our choices. As Machiavelli said, “consider the results.”

1 Comment

Posted in editing, language and linguistics

Tagged , , , ,

If you were to use the subjunctive…

Posted on March 4, 2025 | 2 comments

It’s March fourth. Happy Grammar Day! Today is a day when certain people who like to loudly declare their love for grammar put extra energy and volume into promulgating their favourite rules. Which is kind of a giveaway about their motivations: It’s not grammar itself that they love (since “bad grammar” is also grammar, adhering to a coherent underlying set of rules, just not the rules that they prefer), it’s security in an imposed order. It’s authority, as long as they get to be the authority. It’s like if someone were to say “I love flowers!” but simply could not stand the disorder of a meadow of wild flowers and had to have the tidy order of a strictly planted garden, with no flower out of place.

But there is an important difference here: Many neat grammar rules do have an organic basis in the language, and the imposed rule is intended to keep usage from drifting away from that. (This is not true of all grammar rules, mind you; for example, we know exactly when the strict distinction between less and fewer was invented, and we do not in fact owe allegiance to its inventor.)

But usage does drift. For most English speakers, for example, whom is effectively a foreign word; they have no natural feel for its usage, and so they use it in places where it’s inappropriate according to the rules they’re attempting to preserve. So a bit of freshening up on the established rules, for those who want to follow them, is not unreasonable. And – to get to my subject for this Grammar Day – for many English speakers, the subjunctive is also a strange thing that, even if they use it sometimes, they don’t altogether “get.”

Which isn’t that big a problem in most contexts. But if you were to use the subjunctive, you would need to know not just how to use it but when to use it. And the available guidelines for it are sometimes so detailed as to be confusing. Wikipedia, for example, says, “Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality, such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, obligation, or action, that has not yet occurred.”

Part of the problem is that these do not all require the subjunctive, but they are things it can be used for. Another part is that people get confused about what’s real versus unreal and what you can and can’t use the subjunctive for. So – as it is Grammar Day (or, if you are reading this on another day, imagine it were Grammar Day) – let me give you the quick and easy way of thinking about the subjunctive mood: It can be thought of simply as a hypothetical mood. Note that I say “mood” – it’s not a tense; it’s a perspective that can be applied to any tense, just like the indicative mood (which is the usual mood, talking about things that definitely do or don’t exist). 

And this is where some people get confused, because hypotheses operate differently in the past and present than they do in the future. When we’re talking about things in the past or the present, something that’s hypothetical hasn’t happened and isn’t happening, whereas something that’s indicative has happened or is happening. To use Wikipedia’s term, in the present and the past, the unreal is known to be unreal. But when we talk about the future, it’s all hypothetical; none of it has happened yet, even when we’re using the indicative. None of it is real yet. Which means that the effect of the subjunctive in the future is not the same as in the present and the past. 

Let’s look at some examples:

Past:

Subjunctive: “If you had helped me, I would have been grateful.” (You didn’t, and I wasn’t.)
Indicative: “If you helped me, I was grateful.” (You might have helped me; I just can’t remember. If you did, I was grateful.)

Present:

Subjunctive: “If you were helping me, I would be grateful.” (You aren’t, and I’m not.)
Indicative: “If you are helping me, I am grateful.” (I’m not sure if you’re helping me; if you are, I’m grateful.)

Future:

Subjunctive: “If you were to help me, I would be grateful.” (I’m proposing that you help me, but I’m doing so indirectly, so as to make it clear that it is not expected but merely possible at your discretion.)
Indicative: “If you help me, I will be grateful.” (Just a straightforward conditional, laying out a possible course of action and a consequence of it.)

You can see that both ways of speaking of the future are possible, and both refer to the same case, but one is using the hypothetical framing to put in more distance so as to disavow any air of expectation or transaction – in other words, it’s being more passive and polite – whereas the other is simple and direct.

And this is where we see that choices of grammar are not just about what is technically correct; they are also about negotiations between people. Everything we say, we say to produce an effect, and part of that effect is a negotiation of status and expectations between us and the person(s) we’re speaking to. (Unsolicited corrections of other people’s grammar are an exemplary case and their intended effect is left as an exercise to the reader.) In the case of my example, “If you were to help me, I would be grateful,” the subjunctive is used to make a suggestion or implied request, or wish – none of which, by the way, asserts or implies that the thing is outside the realm of possibility; it simply uses the hypothetical framing to emphasize that it is not a certainty, and it does that so as not to impose or make a claim on the other person.

One more thing, though: All of this is just if you use the subjunctive. You don’t, in fact, have to; there is a version of English that simply doesn’t use distinct forms for the subjunctive. In it, you never say “if I were you”; it’s “if I was you,” even though I have never been you. This version is more common and more accepted in England than in North America, but it’s available everywhere… though it does have a less literary air to it, and it allows the occasional ambiguity, though that’s usually resolved in the next clause with the choice of tense. For example:

Subjunctive user speaking hypothetically: “If I were finished, I would stop writing.”

Subjunctive non-user speaking hypothetically: “If I was finished, I would stop writing.”

Subjunctive user or non-user using indicative: “If I was finished, then obviously I stopped writing.”

2 Comments

Posted in editing, language and linguistics

Tagged , ,

Facts follow feelings

Posted on November 8, 2024 | 1 comment

Originally published on The Editors’ Weekly, the blog of Editors Canada

I was 14 years old when I found out what it feels like to hit a wall in a car that’s moving at 8 kilometers per hour. That might not sound very fast — it didn’t to me — but let me tell you, it felt plenty hard. If I hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt I would have catapulted right over the front of the demonstrator and into my onlooking classmates.

Yes, it wasn’t an accident. It was a thing called The Convincer that was being taken around to high schools. It cranked a car seat up a short ramp and let it go down again to an abrupt stop at the bottom. Sounds like a carnival ride, eh? You get in, buckle up, crank up, it lets go … and BAM. And when they tell you what a crash at higher speeds is like after that, you listen.

That was an early lesson for me in structural editing of general nonfiction. In fact, it taught me something about structure that my English teachers didn’t.

You remember how you’re taught in school to write an essay? Start with the thesis statement, expand the theory and reasoning, then add examples to illustrate. This is easy for teachers to grade. It’s also a generally boring way to write.

Sorry, but it is. There are times that you need to write that way, but that’s mainly when you have a captive audience who are reading impatiently to get the most information in the least time. If you’re trying to grab a reader’s attention, get them to keep reading and get them to care about and remember what you’re telling them, you need to follow the advice that I give every author I work with: Feelings first. 

Facts follow feelings. People take an interest in facts when they have strong feelings associated with them. People also remember abstract ideas better when they have clear images and examples to associate them with. 

This means start with stories, analogies and characters. If you start with the abstract and then play out examples, it’s better than not having examples at all, but the reader is having to keep a lot of abstract ideas in the air for a while until they have something concrete to attach them to. They may have forgotten some of the details by the time you give them reasons to feel things about them. If what you’re telling the reader is important, it needs to answer the questions “Why should I care about this?,” “Why should I keep reading?” and “How does this relate to my world?”

This is most important — and at the same time easiest to do — when you have a book-length manuscript. Then you can have stories that draw the reader in and give them suspense and resolution. You have enough room that you don’t have to just say “Do not put wine in your water carbonator,” you can tell the story about the guys who tried to make sparkling red wine: the moment they detached the bottle from the carbonator it fired a blood-coloured geyser that left a permanent stain on their ceiling and clothes. 

But even when you don’t have a lot of space, you can still grab readers by the feelings. I’m put in mind of warnings on transformer boxes. Some just say “Danger.” I saw one that had a cartoon on it of a bird squawking “No!” at a kid who was about to open it. But then there was another that had the text “Do not touch. Not only will this kill you, it will hurt the whole time you are dying.” You tell me which sticks with you.

1 Comment

Posted in editing, writing

Tagged , , , , ,

Harris, possessive, declined

Posted on August 18, 2024 | Leave a comment

So which is it: Harris’ or Harris’s? Neither: it’s τῆς Χάρεως. Or maybe Harro. Or, hmm…

There has been some confusion and consternation lately about the possessive form of the surname of the vice president of the USA, who is also the Democratic candidate for the presidency. Many people, remembering what they were taught in school,* insist it must be Harris’. For the record, if you are adhering to the Associated Press style, that is correct in the singular; if you are adhering to any other major guide (as most people do), the singular possessive is Harris’s. The plural possessive, according to every authority, is Harrises’. But I want to talk about what this paradigm manifests in particular about modern English. And I want to have some fun.

The thing about modern English is that we view proper nouns (names that get capital letters) as internally unassailable. The only alterations they can have are additions of apostrophes and s or es for possessives and plurals and plural possessives. We make jokes, sure, for instance calling the Winklevoss twins “the Winklevii,”† but that just manifests the other thing we do: treat plurals as the one signifier for non-English-origin common nouns. We know that the “proper” plural of radius, for instance, is radii. If a word has been borrowed into English, a certain kind of person will make a point of using a plural from the original language: “Oh, no, you don’t mean inukshuks. You mean inukshuit.” (This also leads to silly mistakes like octopi.) And that’s it. We have no concept of any other possible alteration to a noun.

But speakers of many other languages do. It’s common enough among languages to have changes to nouns, not just common nouns but proper nouns, to indicate not just plural and possessive (called “genitive” by linguists and philologists) but also nominative versus accusative (we do this with pronouns: he versus him, for instance) and even dative (indirect object) and ablative (the reverse of dative: taking away rather than giving) – and, in some languages, a lot more. Linguists generally call these various noun forms “inflections” (the noun equivalent of conjugations, which are what verbs do).

For fun, I worked out what the full inflectional paradigm would be for Harris if it were a Latin noun. When speaking of Latin, one typically calls this “declension”; you say this is how Harris is declined, because of the image of going down a list of forms on paper (not because of students saying “I prefer not to,” though that surely has happened). And as it happens, Harris in form looks like a noun of the third declension in Latin. So here’s how that goes (note that I’m listing the cases in the order linguists list them in, which is different from the order students of Latin learned to recite them in school):

nominative singular Harris
accusative singular Harrem
genitive singular Harris
dative singular Harrī
ablative singular Harre

nominative plural Harrēs
accusative plural Harrēs
genitive plural Harrium
dative plural Harribus
ablative plural Harribus

Meaning that instead of Harris’s you would write Harris; instead of Harrises’ you would write Harrium; and, for that matter, instead of to the Harrises you would write Harribus (Latin doesn’t use definite articles as English does). And if Harris is not the subject but the direct object, it’s Harrem. (The vocative form, which you use when addressing the person, is in this case the same as the nominative. Note also that the macrons on ī and ē indicating long vowels are a modern scholarly device; they wrote long and short identically in ancient Rome.)

I posted this on Bluesky (which is a site you can go to now instead of Twitter) and it got some responses, including how it would be in Finnish – due to length limitations on posts, @uimonen.bsky.social provided just most of the singulars:

nominative Harris
genitive Harriksen
accusative (i.e., partitive) Harrista
inessive Harriksessa
illative Harrikseen
elative Harriksesta
adessive Harriksella
allative Harrikselle
ablative Harrikselta
essive Harriksena
translative Harrikseksi
abessive Harriksetta
comitative Harriksineni

A thing to think about here is that whereas the Latin declension is really for humour, the Finnish inflectional paradigm could actually be used by actual speakers today in Finland (though when I look at the Finnish Wikipedia article on her, for instance, the paradigm is different: the genitive is Harrisista, for instance. Why? Well, it’s not a Finnish name, for one thing, and, as we will see, that tends to matter). There are no modern daily speakers of Latin, and most descendants of Latin – French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese – have declined to keep the declensions. 

But another classical language is spoken today: Greek. Here’s the Classical Greek inflectional paradigm for Χάρις, which is how Harris is rendered in modern Greek and might as well be in the ancient kind as well – I’ve assumed the same third declension as for πόλῐς (polis, ‘city’), and feminine gender (the inflection would be different for a man named Χάρις); note also that it’s normal with Greek to include the definite article, which is used far more even than in English:

nominative singular ἡ Χάρῐς (hē Haris)
accusative singular τὴν Χάρῐν (tḕn Harin)
genitive singular τῆς Χάρεως (tês Hareōs)
dative singular τῇ Χάρει (têi Harei)
vocative singular Χάρῐ (Hari)

nominative dual τὼ Χάρει (tṑ Harei)
accusative dual τὼ Χάρει (tṑ Harei)
genitive dual τοῖν Χάρέοιν (toîn Hareoin)
dative dual τοῖν Χάρέοιν (toîn Hareoin)
vocative dual Χάρει (Harei)

nominative plural αἱ Χάρεις (hai Hareis)
accusative plural τᾱ̀ς Χάρεις (tā̀s Hareis)
genitive plural τῶν Χάρεων (tôn Hareōn)
dative plural ταῖς Χάρεσῐ/ταῖς Χάρεσῐν (taîs Haresi/taîs Haresin)
vocative plural Χάρεις (Hareis)

Yes, that’s right: there’s also the dual – which is nice if you’re referring to the Harrises as a couple (except, of course, Kamala Harris’s husband is Doug Emhoff, so never mind). So the family of Harrises, set in English, would, going by this, be not Harrii or Harroi or whatever but Hareis. And so on.

So does this work in modern Greek? Ah, well, I’m sorry to tell you that, while Modern Greek has declensions (just a little simpler than the classical ones), names from other languages are treated as indeclinable. So when you look at articles about Kamala Harris, it’s always Χάρις. Sorry.

But there are other languages that also decline names. Most, however, decline to do so for foreign names – after all, even if the name looks like a word from their language, they know it’s not. Lithuanian names, for instance, tend to end in -is in the nominative masculine, and replace that for different noun cases; Vytautas Landsbergis, for instance, when he is the indirect object (dative case) rather than the subject of a verb, is Vytautui Landsbergiui. And for “Landsbergis’s” it’s Landsbergo. But Harris isn’t a Lithuanian name, and what’s more, Kamala Harris is not a man and so wouldn’t be inflected according to the masculine paradigm.

On the other hand, Lithuania’s neighbours in Latvia have an answer to that. Latvian makes the nominative of her name Harisa, because Latvian feminine names and in -a as a rule, and because rr isn’t a thing in Latvian (you will also see Herisa, but there’s a stronger case for Harisa). And so if she’s the direct object, she’s Harisu; the indirect object, Harisai; and the possessive for her name is Harisas.

This is all lots of fun, of course, but Harris is, in truth, an English name. But we don’t have to leave England to find a full inflecting paradigm for it. We can just go back in time – Old English had a full system of inflections. The Old English inflections for her name would be:

nom sg Harris
acc sg Harris
gen sg Harrises
dat sg Harrise

nom pl Harrisas
acc pl Harrisas
gen pl Harrisa
dat pl Harrisum

So if you give a book to the Harrises, “þu giefst þa boc þam Harrisum” (for those who don’t know, þ is how we used to write the sound we now write as th). 

That’s not nearly as entertaining as treating the -is as a suffix, alas. But it also has two problems: first, the name Harris only appeared in Middle English, so inflecting it Old English style is as contrived as declining it Latin style; second, in Middle English, the name actually does contain a suffix: Harris is the genitive form of Harry. Names formed from genitives are quite common in English, since the genitive used to be used more broadly: if you lived near the field, you were called Fields; by the brook, Brooks; if you were of the family of Stephen, you were Stephens; and if of the family of Harry, you were Harris. And yes, Harry is a nickname for Henry, but so it goes. Toms and Jacks are also family names.

But you can see the problem here: How can you have the genitive of a name that is already in the genitive? Along with which is the fact that it’s Middle English, not Old English. In Middle English, the inflections of Harry would be (with spelling variations):

nom sg Harry
acc sg Harry
gen sg Harris
dat sg Harre

nom pl Harres
acc pl Harres
gen pl Harre/Harrene
dat pl Harre/Harres

But that just means that if there’s a Harry and another Harry and they jointly have something, then it’s Harre thing or Harrene thing. If it’s the thing of the family of Harry, you can’t really do a double genitive unless you treat the first one as just part of the name: Harrisis in the singular and Harrise or Harrisene in the plural. 

It does remind us of one key fact, though: the genitive (possessive) in English didn’t have an apostrophe until just a few centuries ago, when the apostrophe was added on the basis of the mistaken supposition that the possessive was a contraction (imagining “Harry’s book” as short for “Harry his book”). That’s right: this detail that confuses so many people, and that provokes the ire of a certain set, is founded on nothing other than a historically baseless reinterpretation.

Mind you, a Latin inflectional paradigm that gives us Harrium librī for “the Harrises’ books” is also a historically baseless reinterpretation. But at least we know that. And it’s fun, and no one is getting upset.

…

* First: High-school teachers are not subject matter experts. Not even high-school English teachers. Not even the ones who “beat it into you.” Second, many people do not accurately remember what their teachers tried to teach them.

† Which is truly over the top, because even if it were Winklevus it would just be Winklevi – the -ii ending is only for plurals of -ius nouns – and it’s not, it’s not even Winklevos, which would pluralize to Winklevoi. But, yes, the point is it’s a joke, so it goes to the lengths of caricature.

Leave a comment

Posted in editing, fun, language and linguistics

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

The Truth About English

Posted on June 13, 2024 | 6 comments

Most of what you were taught about language in school is wrong, and what’s right mostly isn’t right for the reasons you thought.

I’ve been giving presentations about the deeper details of this fact for nearly two decades. Up to now, you had to either be there in the room when I gave the presentation, or watch the video of it on my blog, or in just a couple of cases read the text of it on my blog. Now I’ve brought together eight of my best presentations about the English language’s history, grammar, and more, revised and in a format suitable for consuming at leisure in the environment of your choice. Presenting my new book, The Truth About English: Lessons You Never Got in School. It includes:

  1. A Language in Motion
  2. When Does Wrong Become Right?
  3. When to Use Bad English
  4. Smash All teh Rulez
  5. What Flavour of English Do You Want?
  6. Sounding Like the “Right Sort”
  7. The Secret Set of Extra-Tasty Words
  8. A Hidden Gender?

It’s available now on Lulu.com: https://www.lulu.com/shop/james-harbeck/the-truth-about-english/paperback/product-57ggk44.html?page=1&pageSize=4

It will also be available soon on Amazon.com. However, Amazon takes a big cut of the price. In fact, I could set the price lower if it weren’t on Amazon, but I can’t have a lower price on Lulu than on Amazon (alas), and it’s worth it for visibility to have it on Amazon. But I will have copies for sale in person at a discount if you happen to see me at a conference or similar event… along with copies of my other books such as 12 Gifts for Writers.

6 Comments

Posted in editing, language and linguistics, writing

Tagged ,

Love, Desire, and Tension: Structural Editing of Nonfiction

Posted on June 19, 2023 | Leave a comment

Here’s the video of my presentation at the Editors Canada conference in Toronto, June 17, 2023. This is an updated version of the presentation of the same name I gave at the ACES conference in San Antonio in 2022.

Leave a comment

Posted in editing

Tagged , , , , ,

Sounding Like the “Right Sort”

Posted on March 26, 2023 | 1 comment

I was in Columbus for the annual ACES conference for the last few days. I gave a presentation on how we use vocabulary and grammar to filter audiences in and out – often in subtle ways. Here it is!

1 Comment

Posted in editing, language and linguistics

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”

Posted on September 5, 2022 | 1 comment

Originally published on The Editors’ Weekly, the national blog of Editors Canada

What’s missing from this sample text?

A set of subjects, n = 180, were surveyed using a predetermined questionnaire. Statistical analysis of the responses revealed a statistically significant pattern of association of low-frequency polysyllabic lexemes with greater intellectual value.

It’s not short on words, nor on syllables per word, nor on grammatical complexity. It’s an imposing and impressive display. But who chose and surveyed the subjects? Who predetermined the questions? Who conducted the statistical analysis?

It’s like the Great and Powerful Oz. You’re supposed to pay no attention to whoever’s behind the curtain, making it happen.

What you’re seeing is the effect of a language ideology, the ideology of objectivity – an underlying belief in the association between detachment and authority. It’s a belief that humans are messy, subjective bags of feelings, and that to achieve real, authoritative, reliable, unquestionable truth, you remove people: these facts were not worked out by fallible humans; they were just… revealed. It’s one reason so much academic writing is so hard to read.

It’s not the only reason, of course. There are other ideologies at play too. The effects of one of them are described in the example text above (not quoted from a real study, however): the ideology of mental effort. We know that complex ideas take extra mental effort, and so we assume that greater mental effort is an indicator of greater intellectual value.

Complex syntax is equated with complex thought, and, as the example says, long and uncommon words are associated with rare and rarefied ideas. If something is easy to read, how impressive can it be, really? And, more to the point, if you make the reader sweat to figure out what you’re saying, they might not notice that what you’re saying is really fairly trivial. Once again, watch the Great and Powerful Oz, and don’t look behind the curtain!

This is not to say that everyone who writes that way is consciously trying to be the Great and Powerful Oz. Most authors, academic or otherwise, write in a way that’s considered appropriate for the type of text, and questioning why it’s “appropriate” might itself seem inappropriate – isn’t it obvious that in a research paper you don’t say “really fun,” you say “highly enjoyable”? We seldom stop to look at what’s driving our assumptions about the intellectual value of the way we phrase things. The real “man behind the curtain” is language ideology itself.

But there is no language use without language ideology: we believe that certain qualities go with certain kinds of language. It’s part of how we understand language in its context of usage. And our ideas about language are always ideas about the people we envision using that language. We don’t all agree all the time; there can be competing ideologies, for instance, about whether colloquial speech is a mark of unintelligence or of honesty. But we never come to language without baseline assumptions about what it says about the people who use it – even if it’s language that pretends they’re not there at all.

And from time to time, we can all benefit from pulling back the curtain.

1 Comment

Posted in editing, language and linguistics, writing

Tagged , , ,

Love, Desire, and Tension: Structural Editing of Nonfiction

Posted on April 9, 2022 | Leave a comment

Here’s the presentation I gave at the 2022 ACES conference in San Antonio, Texas, in which I talk about how nonfiction is driven by feelings, and how to work with them to make the structure as effective as possible.

Leave a comment

Posted in editing

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Rules and laws

Posted on March 4, 2022 | 1 comment

For Grammar Day, I want to talk briefly about laws and rules, and the fact that some people who should know better get them confused.

Let’s start with laws of nature. Say someone holds a rock in front of them and lets go of it. It flies upward instead of falling. Do you say, “No, you’re doing it wrong – the rock is supposed to fall down”?

Then there’s criminal law. Let’s say that instead of dropping the rock, they throw it through a store window. You might say “Hey!”; a cop who is nearby might arrest them – or they might get away with it.

That’s sort of like the rules of sport. Say the person is playing football, and they throw a rock instead of a football – or maybe they just throw a football the wrong way. The player will get a penalty – if the referee sees it.

But how about the rules of grammar? Let’s say someone writes a sentence: “Person the throw rock football and window at.” Your reaction on reading it is probably something like “Huh? That doesn’t even make sense.”

So let’s say instead that the sentence is “Smashing a window, the person throwed rock and football.” If you’re like a lot of people, you’ll readily utter a correction of one or more errors, even if no one asked you to. You may also say something about the intellect of the writer.

The law of gravity, like any law of nature, doesn’t need anyone to enforce it. If you see a law of nature being broken, you’re wrong: either the law isn’t really being broken (it’s an illusion, or some other law is relevant) or the law as you know it is inaccurate or incomplete and your understanding needs to be revised.

Civil and criminal laws do need enforcement, because they’re human creations. Some of us may believe that laws are there to enforce laws of nature (or of God), but really at most we’ve just appointed ourselves to try and keep people behaving in accordance with our ideas of those laws, which is an us thing. Civil and criminal laws are like the rules of sports, but with broader application and stronger enforcement mechanisms.

And rules of grammar? Ones like in the last example, such as that it’s “threw,” not “throwed,” that you shouldn’t use dangling participles, and that you should be careful with definite and indefinite articles, are also like the rules of sports: in published texts, editors typically serve as referees, following specified style rules; in a broader social context, enforcement is mostly not formalized. The rules may have a certain tidiness, but that tidiness is not a natural law, nor is it inevitable – any editor who works with multiple house styles knows that.

But what about more basic rules of grammatical conmprehensibility, such as the ones broken by “Person the throw rock football and window at”? Those, too, are human creations – just at the level of social norms that we rarely stop even to inspect. Using the rules of some other languages, that weird sentence would be entirely coherent. English puts the definite article (“the”) before the noun, but Scandinavian languages tack it onto the end of the noun as a suffix. English can be very fussy with verb conjugations (“throw,” “throws,” “threw”), especially irregular ones, but other languages are less so, and some – such as Mandarin Chinese – don’t conjugate at all. English requires indefinite articles (“a rock,” “a football”), but Gaelic doesn’t, and Slavic languages don’t use definite or indefinite articles. And English expects “and” to go between the things it combines, but in Latin its equivalent can be tacked onto the second item, as in “Senatus Populusque Romanus” – literally “Senate People-and Roman” (in English, “the Senate and People of Rome”).

So, in short, the rules of grammar, even the most apparently essential rules, are not inevitable. Grammar, even the most fundamental grammar, is not a natural law; it is like the rules of a sport. The way you say a thing is not the one logical, inevitable, natural way to say it, even if – within the variety of the language you’re speaking – it’s the only “proper” way to say it. Even the idea that a double negative equals a positive, which seems plainly logical to modern English speakers, seems otherwise to speakers of languages such as Spanish or Italian, where a negative requires agreement (e.g., “No vale nada” and “Non vale niente”: “It’s not worth nothing”). After all, it can’t be a negative statement if it’s positive in some places. Logic!

But some people, even some otherwise well educated people, seem unaware of this. Editors and linguists are wearily used to people priggishly “correcting” them with simplistic grammar rules and ideas that they recall from school, as though those rules were basic truths like natural law. I’ve seen it even from people who have graduate-level educations and clearly ought to know better.

And why does it matter? I’ve written before about how this kind of dogmatic position is used to license social aggression (see What do we care about, really and Why all English speakers worry about slipping up), but the boorishness of grammar snobs is not the biggest thing. The idea that there is one correct, natural, logical grammar gives cover for not just class discrimination but also racism (because different social groups use different varieties of the language) and even sexism (in particular ideas about such things as pronouns and grammatical gender – I’ve given talks on this several times; a video of one time is at A Hidden Gender?). 

A person who understands the socially decided nature of grammar rules can understand that someone who’s using a kind of English that’s not “proper” is not inferior, and that different varieties of English are grammatically coherent even if they’re different from the schoolbook standard. Knowing this also broadens a person’s expressive repertoire.

Does all this mean that grammar is a free-for-all, or that there’s no point in teaching it? Of course it doesn’t mean that. We teach people about the rules of sports and the rule of law. We also teach people about dress codes – there are certain things you just don’t wear in certain places and occasions, not for any matter of intrinsic suitability (sweatshirts are no less functionally suited to formal occasions than tuxedos), but just because of the social implications they have come to have. Likewise, if you use a library, you learn how the books are arranged on the shelves, and it’s a tidy, systematic, enforceable order, but it’s not an inevitable one: the choice of Dewey versus Library of Congress, just for instance, will give quite different orderings. 

Tidiness can be good, and consistent, well-defined rules can be useful. I make a nice bit of money every year tidying up text. But rigidity and narrow-mindedness are bad. And believing that the simple rules you learned in your simple youth are the only true rules is a mistake that will limit your effectiveness – and, on the larger level, can limit others, and our effectiveness and potential as a society. Learn rules – as many different sets as possible – and use them judiciously.

Oh, and have fun.

1 Comment

Posted in editing, language and linguistics

Tagged , , , , ,