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]

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?