I’m well aware, of course, that language changes; I studied English language for my master’s, after all, including Old English and Middle English. I know that change is inevitable, and resisting it is futile.

At the same time, I advise people who are writing today to know and follow today’s conventions – by which I mean the conventions followed by today’s most skilled writers. I posted a piece a little while back about the five errors I see most frequently in published fiction: missing past perfect tense, “may” instead of “might” in past tense free indirect speech, over-application of the coordinate comma, missing the vocative comma, and missing or (more frequently) misplacing the apostrophe.

All of those are conventions. They’ve been different in the past – in some cases, the not particularly distant past – and will doubtless be different in the future, should we last so long. But if you don’t use the conventions because you don’t know the conventions, you don’t look as professional as the people who do.

And then there are matters of clarity. If you use “enormity” to mean “enormousness”, you now have two words that mean the same thing instead of meaning very different things, and you’ve lost the ability to mean the first thing without some extra contextual cues that tell your readers that’s actually what you mean. If you dangle your modifiers, you not only reveal that your thinking is a bit fuzzy; you risk making a seriously-intended piece ridiculous, which will distract readers from your point. If you use “alright” instead of “all right”, at least some readers will object (even though that’s a change that’s probably now inevitable, and will join “altogether” and “anymore” in the category of “compressed words that mean something subtly different from the uncompressed version”).

I suppose my point is: think about language. Be aware of it. If you’re a writer, it’s both your tool and your medium, just as brushes and paint are for an artist. Be aware of what your language is doing and what it’s conveying about you to various groups of readers. Don’t just slap it on any old way; think about the brushstrokes and the colour wheel.

But don’t obsess about the brushstrokes, or insist on only using the ones that appear in classic paintings, and none of your newfangled acrylics, either, and my art teacher when I was nine years old never let me do X, and…

If you’re an editor, or a book reviewer, I believe you have a form of professional responsibility and also an explicit or implicit invitation (respectively) to critique an author’s usage as well as their style, craft, and other choices. If they’re offering a product for sale, it should be professionally prepared to the best of their ability, and following current conventions is part of that. Otherwise, try not to get too wound up about other people’s brushstrokes. There are more important things; and some of the strokes are changing, whether you like it or not.

Originally shared by Karen Conlin

An excellent post, as always, from my colleague James Harbeck.