By Michelle Corbin
(originally published in 2013, republished with permission in 2019)
After reading a grammar textbook, I have been pondering how well technical editors need to know grammar. How much grammar must they know to edit the information, but also how much must they know to help their writers improve their writing ability?
As a technical editor, I view myself differently than other editors. When most people hear that you work as an editor, they immediately think that you are a grammar expert and that you constantly correct grammar errors everywhere you go. From a publishing perspective, this role is the copy editor, the editor who reviews text for spelling, grammar, punctuation, and adherance to a style guide. (This blog post, “Editor, Editor, Everywhere an Editor,” presents a nice summary of the different types of editors in a publishing industry.) Taking a technical communication perspective, I downplay the importance of this copy editing role, and try to identify a distinct technical editor role. I still do some copy editing as part of my technical editing, but it is only a part of the editing task, not the entire task. Thus, I think this leads me to the belief that technical editors do not need to be grammarians.
By taking a step away from just the language, or just the grammar, technical editors really focus on the content of the communication. To help writers communicate their content effectively, technical editors must know their audience, even more so than copy editors. Knowing the audience certainly helps copy editors do their job, but they can do much of their job regardless of knowing the technical subject matter or the audience.
Grammatical sentences certainly communicate better than ungrammatical ones, but to what degree and to what end? If a split infinitive or missing comma or misused semicolon appears in a document, but the audience still understands the content and can complete their task, is it that important to remove every grammatical error from the document? If a technical editor wants to remove a grammatical error, is it important for the editor to know the rules or terminology of grammar in order to suggest a change (make an edit) about a comma or semicolon?
Perhaps a rudimentary understanding of grammar and syntax can help us read style guides or usage guides, and this basic knowledge can help us “edit by what sounds right.” After all, it worked for Mark Twain, who said this about grammar rules in his own autobiography: “I am almost sure by witness of my ear, but cannot be positive, for I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules. A generation ago I knew the rules–knew them by heart, word for word, though not their meanings”. But do we need to use standard grammar terms to communicate the changes needed? Oxford Dictionaries used to call their list of grammar terms “Jargon buster” in the Better Writing area of their site (now it is just an A to Z list of grammar terms that they say “can be confusing or hard to remember”); I inferred from their original label that the OED editors considered this to be jargon for the writers who came to their site seeking understanding.
While part of my job is to help my writers produce high quality content, the other part of my job is to coach my writers to be better writers. If I can teach them some of the rules to follow, they won’t make the same mistakes over and over again for me to mark up. I find myself translating the grammar terms into simpler terms or giving examples of the revisions to try to demonstrate that the change makes it better.
As an example of using grammar terms to teach a writer about writing better sentences, consider this scenario. In mentoring a new writer, I was looking at the help topics for our grammar checker with the writer. These help topics used precise grammar terms to explain why something was being flagged as an error; however, the help topic used jargon (the grammar terms) instead of explaining things more directly. The writer could not figure out an appropriate change to make and asked me to help. I read the original sentence, then read the help topic for the flagged error, which included examples of correct and incorrect sentences. From there, I was able to suggest a specific revision to the original sentence and explain why the change was necessary, avoiding the grammar terms that were tripping up the writer.
As technical editors, we need to understand some grammar, but we do not need to be experts in grammar. As Rosalind from Shakespeare’s As You Like it suggests, you really can have too much of a good thing. A basic knowledge of grammar is good for technical editors; but too much grammar will distract technical editors from the real value that they bring as arbiters of quality.
Thank you for Michelle’s insightful article.
I would argue that while for writers grammar can be (to quote Joan Didion) “the piano they play by ear,” this won’t do for editors. Editors should not only know how to read the notes, they should be able to compose the music.
That is, any editors who will be reading the words and working with those words.
In the realm of publishing, I’m supposing that it is possible for developmental editors to get by without a solid understanding of how the language works. Such editors are instead more typically working with larger structures: Does the work in question follow the conventions of the genre? Or if it breaks them, does it do so in an interesting, deliberate, and creative way? Does the overall structure of the discussion, the argument, the narrative cohere? Do the parts support the whole? Is the organization logical and consistent? And so on.
An editor working solely with larger structures of the piece is often not reading and parsing individual sentences. That editor is not approaching the work the way that the audience will, from the ground up, reading the words and making sense of them.
But for any editor who will be down in the weeds, reading the words, how can you (as editor) expect to respond to those words unless you understand whether they are arrayed in the most effective way for the messages that are being presented? And how can you know that unless you understand how the language works? That is, unless you understand its grammar?
I’m not talking about split infinitives (which have been native to English since the language was recognizably English, and the prohibition against which has been discussed almost ad infinitum over the last thirty years or more). I’m not talking about commas, although well-placed commas can certainly assist meaning and ill-placed ones hinder it. No, I’m talking about the way in which any given sentence is itself arrayed. The way it presents the information it presents. The way in which it makes sense, or doesn’t. Some of that sense (or lack of it) will have to do with diction. Some will have to do with whether any pertinent information is missing or whether any included information is extraneous. But a good deal of it will have to do with pure syntax: how the words are arranged. And that is grammar.
The more clearly an editor understands how and why a particular sentence goes wrong, the more easily — and with greater assurance — can she fix it. The more clearly, too, can she explain this fix to the writer or any other stakeholder. And when she understands that how and why, when she works directly to fix this how and why, the more so too is she editing: not revising to particular and individual preferences, but fixing a demonstrable problem (or demonstrable misstep or infelicity) with a demonstrable solution.
Most ideally, if an editor cannot explain the fix she proposes, she ought not to be suggesting it.
Grammar is not a little thing. It is not a set of pesky and picky little rules that we all struggle to remember and a whole lot of us tend to get wrong. No, it’s a big thing. It is the entire system of a given language. It is the foundation of that language. It’s the bones and it’s also the flesh on those bones. In many ways, the grammar of the language _is_ the language itself. How can any editor not want to know as much about this as possible? How can she not want to know as much she can about how sentences go wrong and how they can be set right? About how they communicate well or poorly?
Any editor, that is, who works with the words. And as tech editors, we always work with the words. We tech editors do the work of what is in other environments typically done by two or three different editors. I don’t mean in volume — though, who knows?, maybe that too, given the deadlines we routinely work by. No, I mean in terms of the type of review provided, the type of edit. One tech editor typically handles it all, from developmental to line to copy editing, down to the final check and proof.
And that means that we very much need to be able to work with the words.
As to the *language* of grammar — well, really, there are several languages, each particular to the system that sets out to transcribe what the natural language is doing into concepts that we can analyze and discuss — that too has its uses. As with any technical language, the language of grammar (whichever language, whichever grammar, you happen to be familiar with and trained in) is meant to encapsulate concepts, facilitate discussion, and provide a foundation to build upon.
And as with any technical language, the terms can appear to outsiders as mere jargon, gobbledygook without much meaning. To someone not familiar with the terminology, you’d want to translate the concepts into plain English, to try to explain a particular problem and its fix as much as possible without recourse to the specialized vocabulary. Or at least, not too much of it.
An editor familiar with the technical language of one or more grammars (as in, descriptions of the system by which a natural language works) can do this, can act as a bridge. An editor so familiar with this technical language can also, yes, read style and usage guides, not to mention full-blown grammar texts, should deeper investigation into a particular point ever be called for. An editor so familiar is also more equipped to write or edit the in-house style guide.
An editor familiar with the technical language of one or more grammars — and naturally, too, the application of those foundational concepts of encoding and decoding meaning in a given natural language — has more tools in her toolbox. She can work more deeply, more versatilely in a range of environments.