I have devoted a dozen years to this #CityImages Blog writing the wrongs along with decades of producing journalism content.
According to published reports, the English language, and others can sometime be irrational, irregular, and anarchic. You can choose either to embrace that or to rail against it, but be assured that the former is more fun and less taxing.
Possibly you had it drilled into your head that sentences cannot begin with “And” or “But.” But of course, they can, as others, have been demonstrating for centuries. And if you happen to know what an infinitive is, you have probably been taught not to split it, though I would urge you to boldly split the living daylights out of the next one you run into. And you’ve almost certainly been taught that you must not end a sentence with a preposition — a bit of arrant Latin-based pedantry up with which Winston Churchill, according to legend (by which I mean the story is not provably true), would not put.
Although there’s nothing wrong per se in beginning a sentence with “And” or “But,” it may not always be the best, strongest choice to do that in four consecutive sentences, as I just did a few lines ago. Also, one might just as easily say “intrinsically,” which is a lovely word, as “per se,” which is a lovely phrase but not quite English. And perhaps don’t use the word “just” more than once per paragraph.
The “very”s and “quite”s and “rather”s and “actually”s in which some of us bury our writing like so many packing peanuts. Because once you’ve stripped those away, I insist, you’ll find yourself looking at sentences that are bolder in their spareness.
And perhaps be less eager to grab up the latest bit of jargony business peak — is it not enough to orient new employees? Must we onboard them, and is that not prohibited anyway by the Geneva Conventions?
When asked to weigh in on an array of language peeves and crotchets: “Is it okay to use ‘literally’ to mean ‘figuratively’?” “What about ‘begs the question’?” “What do I do about supermarket signs that read ‘Ten Items or Less’?”
But that’s not why I do what I do. I’m not the grammar police. My chief interest is to help writers express themselves, to help them make their writing the best possible version of itself that it can be.
Are people less interested in good writing than they used to be? Anything but, I reply to myself. People — at least the self-selecting group who place themselves in my sight, or who read articles about copy editing — seem to me to be increasingly, acutely interested in good writing.
To engage in what is known in another venue as subtweeting: We’ve found ourselves in a world in which, to some, spelling doesn’t count, punctuation doesn’t matter, words are Capitalized at Whim and lies are passed off, in haranguing repetition, as truth.