Chaos Magnet

Everyone's a grammarian

I've been doing a lot of editing lately, which has made me very aware of personal biases that I have. For example, I always use "for example" instead of "for instance", because I was taken to task on it by an editor who said that it would cause confusion based on the use of the word "instance", as this was a tutorial for people who would think of that word as having to do with an instance of a particular object. So now, I correct everybody else.

I'm also somewhat fanatic about eliminating the use of the passive voice. It's not "a list of items will be displayed by the cart", it's "the cart displays a list of items". (And not, by the way, "the cart will display a list of items" unless there's a very good reason.)

But then, these things were drilled into my head, and they stuck. At least they're not as arbitrary as some of these gems from the American Journalism Review.

Technorati tags: humor | humour | writing | grammar | journalism

Technorati tags: humor | humour | writing | grammar |

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