Carol Fisher Saller, author of one of my fav editing books, The Subversive Copy Editor, was the keynote speaker at Editors Canada’s first international conference in June.
She spoke about assertionists, those pesky grammar sticklers who insist on blindly following grammar rules. She wondered what was bugging these copy editors, and she suggested that assertionists bemoan what they see as declining writing standards, enabled perhaps by technology (RU4real?! (Okay, I made that up. I never text in short form—must be the assertionist in me!)).
She rightly pointed out that rules should serve us; we shouldn’t be servants to them.
I wholeheartedly agree.
But I have my own theory why some assertionist copy editors exist: They’re afraid of being judged by other copy editors. They fear colleagues will peruse their work and not readily see why they made the style decisions they did. Unbreakable rules act like a security blanket, protecting them from the cold eye of editorial criticism.
But that’s just a theory—one perhaps most readily applied to those copy editors working in traditional media, not the wilds of the Internet.
Yes, a copy edit should ensure correctness, consistency, accuracy, and completeness. But if it does so at the expense of the reader’s experience, who does that serve?