“He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.” Ben Franklin
Sometimes when we’re here too late in the evening, trying to edit that last story — the one that inevitably needs a lot of work — the temptation is to say “close enough,” spellcheck it and move it on down the line. Who will notice, you ask yourself, if I recast this sentence from passive to active voice? Will anyone care if I change “they will be deciding” to ”they will decide”? Is that dangling preposition really a problem?
Then I get a letter from a retired schoolteacher containing newspaper clips that appear to have been attacked by a red-pen-wielding psycho. “Here’s a typo … there’s a sentence fragment … doesn’t anyone know the difference between ‘its’ and ‘it’s'? Who’s minding the store there?”
The first reaction is to be defensive. We’re all working on deadline; we publish tens of thousands of words every day; we don’t have the size of staff we once had. Cut us some slack!
But, fearful of living down to Franklin’s words, we right our listing spirits and promise to do better. As we should. We are professional writers and editors and it should be no more acceptable for us to mismatch subject and verb than it is for an accountant to misplace a decimal point.
I was reminded of that earlier this week after speaking to a local group. An audience member came up to me after the session and offered some constructive criticism of the misuse of “that” and “who,” an all-too-common occurrence in the Mail Tribune and publications across the land. “That” is a thing, “who” is a person or persons. We all should know “the people that spoke before the council” should be “the people who spoke before the council.”
The grammar critic, who was very kind in her delivery, said it seemed to her to be just one more dehumanizing miscue in a world intent on turning us all into “that” instead of “who.”
No argument. It does matter.
