A Prescriptive Addiction: How I Became a Descriptivist when I Became an Editor

 Note: Since I am on vacation and don't really want to write a new blog post, but I still want to do a new post every Sunday, I am here posting a paper I wrote this past term. It had a length requirement, but not many other requirements. I tried to have fun with it, and I hope you like reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

I have long known that I want to be an editor. I knew as early as high school that being an editor would be a good career choice for me. Prior to taking editing classes, I actually didn’t know much about what editors do. But coming through the editing program at Brigham Young University has educated me about what it is that editors do. 

I initially wanted to be an editor because I was very much a prescriptive grammarian, that is, someone who applies traditional grammatical rules and accepts them as absolutely necessary. Fortunately, before I actually did any editing, I was converted to descriptivism, which is concerned with why people are saying something a particular way, rather than being concerned with what people “should” say. Are there conflicts between being an editor and being a descriptive grammarian? Perhaps. But I think that being aware of descriptivism has made me a better editor. Let me discuss my prescriptive past, my conversion to descriptivism, and how I apply both of those principles to editing.

A prescriptive teenager

Throughout my junior high and high school years (and even in elementary school), I was quite concerned with speaking “proper” English. When I learned a new grammatical rule, I would do my best to apply it, seldom questioning where the rule came from. In the public school system, these rules were always taught as being essential and as being absolutely right. And who doesn’t want to be right?

So I learned these rules. And I loved them. I would even learn new grammar rules for fun. I was that annoying friend (or enemy) who would always correct you. Whom, I would say, not who. To where are you going, I would say, not Where are you going to. If someone called me a grammar Nazi, not only would I admit it, I would accept the title gleefully. 

I was pretty good at all this grammar stuff. I shined especially bright in eleventh grade, the year we learned the most grammar. During the school year, I was chosen as the student of the month from the English department. I consistently had the highest scores on the grammar tests out of all of the Honors English class periods. When it was time for our first grammar test, I heard people from other periods talking about how difficult it had been. There were fifty points, and these students were amazed when people got scores in the high thirties. My period was one of the last ones, so I heard how difficult it was before I took it. I was a little nervous to take it, having heard others express their difficulties with it. But when I took it, I got forty-seven points. That was the highest score of all five periods. I think during the entire school year, there was only one test on which I did not get the highest score, and even then my score was pretty high. Since our teacher took the point total out of the highest score, students would always hope that no one got a really high score, and when they found out that I had not yet taken the test, they were disappointed. It seems that it was known in all of the eleventh grade that I consistently got the highest scores on the grammar tests, and that didn’t bode well for everyone else’s grades. 

Of course, it wasn’t in just the eleventh-grade English class that I excelled grammatically. I scored a perfect score of 36 on the English portion of the ACT—which, if I remember correctly, was fairly prescriptive. I became the proofreader for my school’s newspaper my senior year. That, however, was perhaps more of an embarrassment. It was highly publicized that I was the proofreader, but I rarely had time to proofread other articles (they always got finished too late), and our teacher (who had no business teaching that class in the first place) knew nothing about grammar but thought she did. (I can remember one time when she “edited” my paper by deleting the second comma surrounding an appositive phrase. She thought she was making it right, but in fact she was making it wrong. I took her edits back and conveniently ignored most or all of them.) That meant that our newspaper was full of typos and grammatical problems. I worried that people would think I didn’t know what I was talking about, even though I was supposed to be the grammar guru. (I even wrote an article about using “proper” grammar, using TV shows and movies as examples. It was one of the most prescriptive things I’ve ever written. It also illustrated how strange and backward I was, since I referenced such obscure movies as Munster, Go Home! and A Boy Named Charlie Brown.) I “corrected” people’s grammar all over the place, and continued to do so until I entered college.

A descriptive adult

When I registered for college at age 21, I declared myself as an English major. I wanted to be an editor, and I had always learned grammar in my English classes. But then I discovered that there was an English language (ELang) major, and I knew that that was the major for me. After all, I don’t care much for literary analysis, and writing isn’t my primary area of focus. I knew that I wanted to be an editor, and I saw that there was an editing minor housed in the English language major, so I realized that the ELang major was probably what I wanted. I was excited at the prospects of learning even more grammatical rules. All those grammatical questions I had had would be answered, and I would be the biggest grammar Nazi in the county! (No, that's not a typo; I did mean to say county and not country.)

Imagine my surprise when I took my first ELang class, Introduction to English Language, and learned that those rules I had accepted as absolute truths weren’t as absolute or correct as I had believed. I learned about the ideas of descriptivism and prescriptivism, and I began to realize that I was a prescriptivist but that descriptivism was less judgmental and more logical. I remember one particular class in which someone asked if funner was a word. My prescriptive heart said, “No, funner is most definitely not a word.” But then our professor, an educated man with a PhD, said, “I would say it is.” That was a dagger to my prescriptive heart. That introductory class made me question and reevaluate all the rules I had learned growing up.

My grammatical heart transplant was completed the following year when I took Modern American Usage from Dr. Royal Skousen, a strong descriptivist. He taught us about several descriptive rules, where they came from, and why they are silly. He said that the rules that the prescriptive grammarians (usually from the 1700s) had made up caused frustration for millions (people who had to learn to apply them) and caused delight for thousands (the prescriptivists, like my former self). I realized how foolish it was to apply a rule that some pedant had made up hundreds of years ago, rules that weren’t even grounded in reality. Most of them were based on Latin. Why should I follow the rules of a language I don’t even speak? 

Being a descriptivist has given me great freedoms. I now put prepositions wherever I want to, since I know where that rule comes from. I no longer try to carefully avoid splitting infinitives. It was me that was one of the biggest advocates of the predicate nominative, but now I don’t care. And I use conjunctions however I want to. Being a descriptivist is much funner than being a prescriptivist.

Problems with prescriptivism

The problem with prescriptivism is that it doesn’t seem to take into account the idea of register or formality. Prescriptivism says there is one right way, and it is always the right way. But that is wrong. I remember seeing a blurb in an informal newspaper in which the writer was lamenting the use of fail as a noun. One of her examples was a soccer player missing the goal and saying something like, “That was such an epic fail!” She said that fail was an example of undignified speech, and she insisted on always using dignified speech, even in a soccer game. I suppose she expects soccer players to trade their mid-thigh shorts for black pleated slacks, too. 

Looking back, I must say that I am absolutely shocked that I had never heard of the idea of prescriptivism vs. descriptivism until I was in college. I heard terms like standard and nonstandard in my high school English classes, but they never told us what those really meant. I was under the impression that standard meant “correct.” That’s what the textbook made it seem like. The public school system is shamelessly promoting prescriptivism.

What scares me even more is that there are people who went through the prescriptive public school, but they never got another opinion, and they will go through life applying these prescriptive rules to the detriment of both themselves and those around them. I had no idea of descriptivism until my ELang classes. People who major in math or history or, most terrifying, English and who never touch linguistics will continue to make people feel dumb about themselves. I think prescriptivism is really just a way for people to brag about how much smarter they are. And then other people are sucked into the trap of thinking there is only one “correct” way of speaking.

I remember one day when I heard my roommate answer his phone. The person on the other end asked for him, and he said, “This is he.” I asked him later if he naturally said “This is he” instead of “This is him,” or whether he had been trained to say it that way. He told me that when he was ten years old, he had said “This is him” on the phone and his mom yelled at him, saying “This is he!” Well, Mrs. Roommate-Mom, and anyone else who insists on that, do you even know where that rule comes from? Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time in England, smart people learned Latin. They loved Latin, even though it was a dead language. This linguistic necrophilia led scholars to study Latin more than they studied English—but eventually they did turn around and start studying English. The problem was that they applied the rules of Latin to English, even though English is a Germanic language and Latin is a Latinate language. They knew that in Latin you would say something like “It is I” instead of “It is me,” so they said that you should use the nominative form in the predicate position. Never mind that in French, which is also a Latinate language and which had a more direct influence on English, you would say “C’est moi,” which is closer to “It’s me” than it is to “It is I.” So insisting on using the predicative nominative, as it is called, is based on a cockamamy rule that has no basis in intuitive English structure. 

It only seems logical that if you are going to follow a rule, you should know why it exists. When it comes to grammatical rules, when you learn a lot of them, you will learn how foolish they are and you will no longer want to follow them. If I were to travel back in time and meet my former self, the younger me would probably correct me on my “improper” use of who or my “incorrect” use of the predicate accusative. But now that I have an even greater knowledge of the English language, I would be able to get in a linguistic argument with the younger me—and I would win. Prescriptivists think they are so educated. But we descriptivists know even more.

The linguistic dress code

Now, you may wonder, How can you be an editor if you’re such a descriptivist? As a descriptivist, doesn’t that mean you accept anything that a native speaker of English says to be grammatical? And isn’t the whole point of editing to “correct” people’s writing? Now, I will admit that at times I find my identity as an editor at odds with my identity as a descriptivist. But I try to find a good balance between the two.

When I edit things, I do find myself fairly permissive. I’m more likely to create a style sheet that permits certain forms rather than changing them. In fact, if I see an instance of they used with a singular referent, I will flag it—not because I want to change it, but because I don’t want it to be changed. I don’t want anyone else “fixing” they into the clunky he or she, and I’m doing my best to make sure that singular they becomes standard. (I think it’s on its way there already.) 

When I was a high-schooler, I wanted to be an editor because I thought that it was the editor’s job to make sure that all the grammar and writing were “correct.” But now that I have studied editing and have had experience as an intern, I see editing differently. Editing is not about making writing “correct”; it is about making it clear. If an author creates an ambiguity, it is my responsibility to get rid of the ambiguity so that the readers will understand. If an author creates a sentence that is so convoluted and complicated that it can’t be understood, it is my job to recast the sentence to make it clearer. It is no fun when you have to read a sentence multiple times to understand it. My job is to make writing as easy to understand as possible. 

However, there are times when I have to edit things not to make the writing clear but because convention calls for it. For example, I could not care less whether a number range uses a hyphen or an en dash. I think hyphens are perfectly clear to show a range of numbers, and I think the only people who will notice hyphens where there “should” be en dashes are people who have learned about them—namely, other editors. But despite my apathy toward en dashes, I know that it is my job as an editor to fix them, simply because of convention, so I do. (I can recall a Thanksgiving Eve visit to a furniture store in which I noticed that the store’s hours had hyphens instead of en dashes. That made me realize how editorially minded I am.) 

Changing things simply because convention calls for it makes me feel like a prescriptivist. And that bugs me. But I have come to think of it as enforcing a dress code.

In society, we have expectations about clothing. We expect people to wear shiny leather shoes to church, colorful sneakers to the grocery store, and flip-flops to the beach. It’s not that any one of those shoes is necessarily better than the others, it’s just that there are societal norms that we follow. (And yes, I know I just used a comma splice.) There can be definite consequences for violating these societal norms, whether they are fair or not. You might get kicked out of the five-star restaurant for wearing your dirty overalls, but if you showed up at the local barn-raising ceremony wearing a tuxedo, they would probably tell you to go home and change. 

This is the way I think of language and editing. I need to apply conventions to certain writings, not because the conventions are “right” or necessary, but because they are expected in different settings. A tie may be a pointless piece of cloth, but it is expected in formal settings. Using whom instead of who in a given sentence may not make the sentence any clearer, but it is expected in a formal setting. If I am editing something really formal, I may need to apply prescriptive rules. (And there’s where my prescriptive education comes in.) However, if I am editing something that is more lighthearted, I can break as many prescriptive rules as I want. 

Now, I must admit that there are some rules that have a place because they aid clarity. Punctuation is a good example. There are some rules about commas that I really don’t care about, but generally punctuation really helps understanding. Consider the YouTube singing sensation Jan Terri. When she announced that she was working on a new album, someone asked her if she was going to have songs as great as her masterpieces “Get Down Goblin” and “Excuse My Christmas.” Her response was, “no new songs.” What she meant was, “No, new songs.” But because she omitted the comma, she actually said the opposite of what she meant. 

But that’s where an education in both prescriptivism and descriptivism is helpful. I know what rules and guidelines actually help writing, and I know what rules are pure nonsense and can even hinder writing. (Have you ever seen someone purposely avoid putting a preposition at the end of a sentence? Yuck!) I also hope that I can spread my knowledge of descriptivism. I can discuss it with other editors and authors who may be unaware of the concept of descriptivism. And if I allow certain forms that go against the prescriptive rules, I will be able to make them become more standardized and less stigmatized. And if any prescriptivists judge our organization because we put prepositions at the end of sentences, phooey on them! 

The End

I have known that I wanted to be an editor since I was in high school. But if I had been an editor straight out of high school, I would have been a terrible editor. I would have applied all sorts of nonsensical rules. I would have insisted on no split infinitives, no sentence-final prepositions, no predicate accusative forms, and so on. I think in many cases I would have made the writing worse (although some writing is so bad it can't possibly be made worse). But now I actually know what editing is all about. I know that language is something dynamic and powerful. We can communicate all sorts of amazing, beautiful ideas with our language. And it is my responsibility to make sure that those brilliant ideas are communicated to the world. It is quite the heavy responsibility.

But I feel I am up to the challenge.