Conversation Starter: In Response to the Claim That Technical Editors Need Not Be “Grammarians”

(Editor’s Note: Michelle Corbin’s article, “Technical Editors Do Not Need To Be Grammarians,” started a very interesting conversation about technical editing and grammar.
The following lengthy comment was posted to the original article; to make it easier to continue this fascinating discussion, I’ve turned it into a standalone post.
Please feel free to continue discussing this – send your comments to editor@stc-techedit.org.

By Odile Sullivan-Tarazi

Perhaps it comes down to what you mean by “grammar.”

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, perhaps it is possible for developmental editors to get by without a solid understanding of how the language works. Such editors are 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. Building up the structures of thought that the writer intends, and then following the writer down that path.

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 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 roundly and repeatedly debunked). 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 that 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 as 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 — and to work with them well.