Elements and the Mod Copy Editor

Plenty of comments and much debate to keep grammar-teurs busy here in a New York Times piece last week announcing a fiftieth anniversary edition of Elements of Style. The ol' manual does offer sound advice on an approach to writing. Further, it prepares a copy editor for inevitable encounters with self-proclaimed sticklers and grammar junkies.

Without that book, a flabbergasted copy editor might have no explanation for why an author would insist on particular usages. Strunk and White's work, or nuns, have entrenched prescriptionists and some authors. Whereas in the modern copy editor's library, that ubiquitous go-to manual has become a field guide for the copy editor to the prescriptionist camp and to some authors' origins. Strunk and White's work reminds us that conventions, not rules, shape American grammar, and the relevancy of those conventions will vary from author to author, project to project.