Copy Editing Rules

I wish I had seen the original when it first ran on the Des Moines Register website:

An article in the Des Moines Register by one Larry Ballard announced the other day that legislators were pondering a tax to be levied on lapses in grammar: "The tax would be levied on bad grammar in signs, advertisements, etc. It would target typos, misspellings, strange punctuation and dangling participles (they are nowhere near as painful as they sound) and would be enforced anywhere English is used."

That's the lede into The Baltimore Sun John McIntyre's take on editors as grammar cops. Seems to me that he is well-suited to lead raids, being the Sun's assistant managing editor for the copy desk, a past president of the American Copy Editors Society, and an adjunct instructor in journalism at Loyola College in Maryland.

A few years ago, I'll admit that I tried to cast myself in a policing role. Ever vigilant (or was that vigilante?) I spotted mistakes and pithily pointed them out to their owners. Nit-picking run amok. Eventually I realized that I really could not see the forest for the trees. The cliche; is true. I'd lost the meaning of messages by putting the focus on individual words and punctuation. This does not make for a good fiction editor at all.

Since that time, common sense finally knocked into my mind, I've relented and try to ignore the chatter of the interior editor and read for enjoyment and understanding. That is, unless I'm editing nonfiction, where grammar and syntax matter most.