Re: Rule about not using possessive? (Take II)

[Bruce Byfield <bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com>]

"Hart, Geoff" wrote:


> No more than you can say "a technical writer by definition"; editors come
> from a variety of backgrounds, like writers, and have as wide a range of
> training and competence. 

An editor's job is to correct other people's work. To me, that
presupposes a sophisticated understanding of grammar. Someone who goes
by a set of rules - including some that are arbitrary and incomplete -
is not operating at a level that inspires much trust in their
competence. It's as simple as that. Your only hope would be that such an
editor understands the job at an unconscious level better than they do
at a conscious level.


> Speaking as an editor, I think you've mis-stated
> something here. (Unless you're saying that editors occasionally mistake
> style preferences for grammatical rules, in which case we agree that this is
> wrong.) Grammar is indeed a matter of rules.

Yes, this is part of what I'm saying, but not all of it. Your
distinction between grammar and style is worth mentioning, but it's not
quite what I had in mind. 

Acceptable punctuation and structure can vary considerably according to
your purpose and your audience, and yet still be accepted. To give a
simple example, a contraction is perfectly acceptable in an informal
circumstance, while, in formal circumstances it would be generally
considered improper. However, even in formal writing, suddenly using a
contraction might be an acceptable tactic for emphasizing a sentence. To
take the formal position that contractions are always unacceptable would
be to place yourself among a minority.

If you ignore such contexts, then you're forgetting that the purpose of
grammar is to aid communication. You can easily construct sentences that
are correct by the strictest rules of grammar, but clumsy and
ill-formed: Winston Churchill's "That is an imposition up with which I
will not put (his - or someone's- reply to the statement that a sentence
shouldn't end in a preposition) being a deliberate example of this fact. 

So, while knowing the rules (or several sets of rules, actually) is an
important part of editing or writing, knowing when to break them (or to
change the set of rules) is equally important. It's not that the rules
are unimportant - it's that knowing how to apply them is equally as
important. And that's what I meant when I said grammar was partly a
matter of circumstance.

-- 
Bruce Byfield 604.421.7177 bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com

"You know there ain't no kind of dream without some kind of debt
And I don't wanna go to bed, ain't nothin' happened yet."
- The Mollys, "I Don't Wanna Go to Bed"

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