Copy editors, writers, and linguists share their petty style grievances
Photo: John F. Funk/Mennonite Church USA Archives Earlier this week, I was reading a tweet from a writer I admire , and she ended it with a parenthetical that should have had the period outside the close parenthesis . But instead, it ended like I know it’s stupid, but this inconsequential error drives me crazy. Maybe it reminds me of what I hate about myself: a tendency to start things but never finish them, a droopiness, a carelessness.
Typing this all out mostly makes me feel ridiculous and wonder if the whole thing isn’t an illustration of even deeper personal flaws: the urges to show off and criticize while missing the bigger picture. “As a copy chief, many people think that I view the world as a field of grammatical landmines, but the one error that makes me see red is the one I committed at the beginning of this sentence, in which the noun in the introductory bit and the subject of the main bit don’t align — a dangler, in the local parlance. Danglers are the easiest errors to commit and somehow the hardest to spot — a dangerous combination — and they elude careful eyes and make it to print with dismaying frequency.
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