Rules and Rulers

Copy editors are rule followers. Titles of books have to be in italics. Spans of numbers have to be concatenated with an en dash rather than a hyphen. And as I recently told a client, it sadly does not matter how he likes to spell a word because we have to use the spelling in Merriam-Webster’s.

Yet there is play within these rules. Sentence adverbs don’t always have to be followed by a comma. Contractions are increasingly accepted in formal writing. There’s actually nothing wrong with starting a sentence with a conjunction. I often write copyeditor though it is “less common” than copy editor.

In Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares about Words, Anne Curzon argues that writers should worry less about rules because many of them aren’t rules at all. Instead, they are the opinions of someone writing about good usage.

Admittedly, some rules support or create clarity. Additionally, some good rules fail as the English language changes. For example, we’ve always used “they” as a singular in spoken language; now we are adding it to accepted usage in written language. But Curzon argues that we need to approach rules with awareness, curiosity, and caution.

I love the idea that even though I can’t be as free as I might like—after all, I must always work to publishers’ standards—I should be thoughtful in applying a rule. Is it one that I truly need to enforce or may I take a bit of liberty with it?