It's easy and inevitable as an editor to get bogged down in the grammatical mayhem of other people's work. When you're hardwired to know and insist on perfect English usage—even on social media—then reviewing material written by those more loosely aligned becomes a battlefield on which editors brandish their anal-retentive blades and bloody the pages until no errant comma is left standing. We feed off the pride of victory that follows an intense battle, which is what keeps us venturing from one project to the next, but the battles themselves are tedious things.
For my part, I can't decide whether having an editor's brain is a gift or a curse. I was born with mine; I would guess that's true for most. We all go through the same assembly line as children, being taught the ABCs and how to write our names. (When I was three years old, I spelled my name "M-O-O" and I was darn proud.) Then we learn to read and how to construct simple sentences. We learn about parts of speech. We learn about spelling, punctuation, composition, and it all builds on each other. Some of us lose our way earlier than others. Some of us find our way earlier than others. I'm part of that second group, the finders, and for that reason I can't compose a Facebook post without second-guessing the crap out of every word in it.
If you're part of the first group (no, I won't call it the "losers") then I kind of envy your freedom. You can write and write and write, plumbing the depths of your imagination as it flows out of your fingertips onto the pages, never having to pause to consider the quality of your grammar. That's what we in the writing biz call "creative flow." If you have an editor's brain, that flow is seriously hampered by the ever-present need for perfection. I have been practicing most of my adult life to silence that need when I write.
Try turning off the part of your brain that tells you when to use the toilet. Yeah. It's that hard.
That's why editors do what we do so well. As editors, we get to take advantage of the Great Urge to Correct while giving our limping, hyperventilating imaginations a rest. And you pay us to do it!
I told a client recently that editing a manuscript was like learning a new dialect. Did you know that you have a writing dialect? Sometime during your formative years, you made a subconscious decision to interpret the laws of grammar in your very own way, adhering to some and discarding others. The more time that passes, the more this interpretation becomes ingrained in your mind as a habit. Eventually, you will have unleashed your individual writing dialect on the reading/writing/editing/publishing community.
Dialect is different from "voice," although they can often coincide. Voice is the way a writer expresses himself or herself through word choices, while dialect encompasses not just language but the idiosyncrasies of habitually misplaced punctuation, favored sentence structures, personal buzzwords, and the like. A good editor will come to identify this dialect within the first thousand words or so and learn to look for it throughout the written work.
What niggles at me with these dialects is how I will correct the same mistake over and over again, perhaps hundreds or thousands of times in a piece, because its author is not learning to fix the mistakes as I correct them. It would hardly be fair of me to say, "This is where the comma belongs. Now go back and redo the entire manuscript like this." That would make me a language professor, not an editor.
Oh, how sweet life would be if there were a software program that could search for repeating mistakes and fix them all automatically! We're not talking about your average spellchecker, folks. Not even Grammarly is set up to handle such a monumental task. But, there it is, the silver lining of the perfectionist's rain cloud—job security.
So, while I'm slashing giant holes in your manuscript, take comfort in our symbiotic relationship. You need me to fix the sloppy mess that you can't see (because of your dialect), and I need you to keep cranking out grammatical felonies on which to cut my painfully neurotic teeth so that my own creativity sees a little yard time. We're a match made in publishing heaven.
Now, hand me my scimitar.
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