Further copyediting rants

I’ll be happy to say I snuck this post in before running off to my son’s soccer game, where I will show my fatherly devotion by spending an hour and a half training the dog. I’m training her to be steady to thrown dummies—which might sound like it has something to do with judo and copyeditors, but I really can’t throw a copyeditor far enough to excite the dog into retrieving it.

Anyway.

Proceed without delay over to The Paris Review, where you can read this:

It ought to go against any writer’s grain when people try to pass off schoolmarmish grammarianism as a concern for style. Style is about getting the maximum effect out of words, eliminating unwanted ambiguities, and writing in such a way that readers see things better—in short, it’s about meaning. Grammarianism, which is to say, an out-of-control prescriptivism, is about doing things “the right way,” or more often, about giving others grief for not having done so.

Among other things.

Why are you still here? I told you to go.