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We had yet another protracted and unproductive style discussion in our editors' meeting today. (This time about "toward" and "towards," a topic we've already beaten to death without coming to a satisfactory conclusion.)
Some of my coworkers feel very strongly that "towards" is British (it's not) and thus should be avoided, while some admit that both forms are correct but feel very strongly that we need to be consistent.
I, being the contrarian that I am, feel very strongly that it doesn't matter and that we don't need to create a house style rule on this particular point.
At some point during the discussion, I said that people freely vary between the two in speech and in unedited writing and that I didn't think it was the kind of thing that most people noticed or cared about.
But then someone responded that that was probably true about 90 percent of the changes we make—that most readers don't notice or care about them.
I don't think that estimate is at all accurate, but even if it is, I don't think it supports the argument that we need to be consistent on this point. If anything, it just begs the question of why we do all this work that doesn't make a difference to our readers.
The funny thing is that we often invoke reader botheration as a justification for the thing we do as editors, but when it really comes down to it, we don't really know what bothers most readers. We just know what bothers *us*.
But editors are bothered by things because they're trained to be bothered by them. Tell an editor that "towards" is wrong—whether it's because it's British or unnecessary or just inconsistent—and they'll be bothered every time they see it.
And once you've learned to be bothered by something, it's very hard to unlearn it.
But back to that 90 percent number. Whether or not it's accurate, I really do wonder how much of our work is noticed or appreciated by our readers and how much is just a waste of time.
But back to that 90 percent number. Whether or not it's accurate, I really do wonder how much of our work is noticed or appreciated by our readers and how much is just a waste of time.
There have been a handful of studies on which usage items bother readers, though I don't think any of them have made much of an impact on the advice found in usage dictionaries or style guides. But I'm not aware of any comparable studies on points of style.
Debbie Cameron ( @wordspinster) makes some great points in her book Verbal Hygiene. She says it's in editors' interest "to edit copy with extreme thoroughness, both to display conscientiousness and to maximize the hours for which they would be paid."
She also says that hyperstandardization—which she defines as "the mania for imposing a rule on any conceivable point of usage, in a way that goes beyond any ordinary understanding of what is needed to ensure efficient communication"—can be a source of professional satisfaction.
That is, having a lot of rules to enforce allows us to show that we're good editors—just look at all the things we caught!—even if those changes don't necessarily help the reader.
It makes us feel good to learn rules, because we feel like that makes us better at our jobs. And it feels good to apply those rules, because then we've just demonstrated that we're thorough.
Anyway, this thread has gotten long and rambly, but I'm just wondering how much of what we do is really in service of the reader and how much is just because we get a little dopamine hit when we notice something and fix it, even if it wasn't really wrong.
Like I said, I'd really love to see more research in this area. But I think most linguists aren't really interested in studying editing—or even prescriptivism more generally—as a linguistic phenomenon. And of course, most working editors don't have the means or motivation either.
