Editorial Oddities

At the beginning of July, I wrote a post about "bad advice for writers." One item was "avoid adverbs." Over the years, I've run into other odd taboos promulgated by editors. For example, "avoid prepositions," a warning that, if strictly followed, would severely hamper normal communication. It seems to arise from an exaggeration of the reasonable concern that two or more phrases in one sentence introduced by the same preposition could make the passage feel clumsy.

The weirdest category of things-to-avoid I've seen recently was in a list of words to flag during the sensible procedure of checking for awkward repetition -- "he," "she," and "I." What's the alternative? Continually repeating characters' names? Eschewing pronouns altogether like Elmo on SESAME STREET? Along the same line, I've had an editor maintain that beginning a paragraph with "he," "she," or "they" signals omniscient point of view. I'm lost there; that idea utterly baffles me.

Many years ago, another editor insisted the possessive case couldn't be used with inanimate nouns. Really? What about "the dawn's early light" and "the twilight's last gleaming"? "The Church's one foundation"? New Year's Eve? The possessive case has legitimate uses other than indicating literal ownership and always has (in Latin as well as English; I can't speak for other languages). I think the same editor was the one who told me it's always incorrect to have a character start an action. To "start" doing something is to do it, according to her. While it's true overuse of the verb "start" can produce unnecessarily verbose prose, banning it altogether goes too far. Sometimes we have to write sentences like, "Just as she started to unlock the door, somebody grabbed her from behind.)

And consider the word "that." Editors who admonish writers not to use "that" more than a certain fixed number of times in a page or document (yes, some do!) seem to overlook the difference between "that" as an often unneeded conjunction or relative pronoun and "that" as an adjective or demonstrative pronoun. As in, "That's exactly what I said" or "I want this car, not that one." Omitting the supposedly taboo word in those examples would require awkward, wordy circumlocution to keep the sentence from decomposing into nonsense.

An outright error that makes my teeth grind: People who object to the progressive aspect as "passive." E.g., "I was strolling down Broadway when I ran into Harry the Horse." First off, only transitive verbs, those that can take direct objects, have passive and active voice! Intransitive verbs such as "stroll" don't. This mistaken objection seems to arise from an irrational aversion to the verb "to be." True, too many unnecessary instances of it can result in weak prose. But it's necessary for the present progressive or past progressive. Moreover, using the past progressive rather than the simple past sounds MORE active (in the loose sense of the term) than the simple past. "I was strolling" suggests movement, whereas "I strolled," indicating an action completed in the past, feels static -- not to mention, in some contexts, stilted and unlike the way people usually talk.

In short, reasonable pieces of writing advice carried to extremes can generate unreasonable taboos that risk disabling normal English constructions from their legitimate uses. (I considered writing "taboos at risk of" but decided a relative clause sounded less verbose and flabby. In this case, the relative pronoun "that" can't be omitted without making the sentence incoherent.) My advice would be to flag certain words, not intending to delete them automatically, but to examine whether they're truly needed wherever they appear. Except for search-and-destroy missions against "he," "she," and "I." Good grief.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.