Hmm..

[ksmith]

Bit of crankiness on cranky_editors today. Can't point to examples, however, because they all seem to have disappeared.

I will say that there are days when that list is worth the price of admission, even though I sometimes feel as though I have a target on my back as I read it.

Comments

[deannahoak.livejournal.com]

What was going on? I actually unsubscribed from that list just yesterday, because I got so sick of the prescriptivist, frequently incorrect BS on it. :-)

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Someone posted a headline from one of the news services that contained a misspelled word, and commented on same. Someone else in the group apparently fell on a punctuation error that the poster made. Poster cancelled that message, then posted that this was the second time they had been chided for making errors in posts, it had reached the point where they feared posting in the group, and wasn't this a group for editors to pick on other people, not each other?

Someone posted a comment to that post that read, essentially, 'we're editors, that's what we do, you sound like a whiner, and if you can't stand the heat, etc.'

Soon after, *that* post disappeared.

So stuff posted on the list is sometimes incorrect? Huh. Grammar? Punctuation? Procedural stuff?

[deannahoak.livejournal.com]

I've seen one person post complaining about a plethora of subjunctive in a paragraph that didn't actually have any subjunctive, but that used (correctly, actually) past perfect. I saw another complain that a title he had to use in a reference list needed an apostrophe when it didn't. I've seen several examples of people just flat-out overediting. It's the kind of thing I fight against in fiction. :-)

It's like the person complaining about "entitled" and "titled" the other day. It's perfectly fine to say that a story is entitled "Whatever." It's fine because every dictionary I have says it's fine, and it's really irrelevant to me (for fiction) that the style guide for newspapers says it's wrong. I wouldn't "correct" that in an author's work.

I just get frustrated at that kind of prescriptivism; it's inappropriate for fiction. I'm a descriptivist and firmly believe that the way people use language determines language. Language does not determine itself. People who insist that words don't "correctly" mean a particular thing long after the dictionaries have said they do (the dictionaries don't pick up new definitions until they've been in common use for a while) are trying to force language into some fixed and utterly unnatural state. Language changes, and there's nothing wrong with accepting that fact.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I'm used to dealing with fiction editors. cranky_editors includes nonfiction, mainstream, newspaper, and magazine editors, some of whom I guess have different standards.

Are rules for fiction different? Less dictionaire?

[amyirene-40.livejournal.com]

My favorite lately was the corporate publication that noted only two candidates for an open position "passed mustard."

I don't have it on my friends list; I bookmarked a link instead. So I only end up checking once every couple of days, which means I miss the pissy little fights that get removed by the group owner.