“…Many of my students have been ill-served by their education. Some have been taught writing as self-expression and are largely innocent of formal grammar and usage. Some have been through the five-paragraph-essay mill. Some have been taught the zombie rules and have to be disabused. (Great Fowler’s ghost! one commenter on my blog appears to impose the default masculine on his unfortunate charges.) So the first three weeks of my editing class are a desperate effort to accomplish some basic learning and unlearning before we can get to actual editing….”
2 Replies to “You want to be an editor, you can’t be a mere rule-follower – Baltimore Sun”
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HemmingPlay 
I looked up Shebboleth too. Like so many words, I skimmed over it and guessed its meaning by the context and like so many words, once I looked it up it clarified the context.
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Good article (it made me look up shibboleth–he used it twice). Overly accurate writing can be annoying. Sometimes it just sounds better to end a sentence with a preposition. It think it’s more about clarity and the overused word “flow”. Enjoy your posts!
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