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By Root 388 0

of his lady. While some of these rules are merely anachronistic with a faint trace of logic in their origins, many simply popped into existence as the demand for such rules increased. The self-perpetuating emphasis on the “proper” way to handle all manner of minutiae demanded more rules, so more rules there would be. I could understand why people might throw up their hands at all the little grammar rules that feel much like table-setting details—which one of these is the salad fork, and why does the number indicating the footnote go after the comma?

While I might bend toward the Hawks here, I don’t want to twirl a baton in their parade. Lynne Truss manned a float in this parade when, succeeding her angry-panda grammar rant, she wrote Talk to the Hand, an intolerant little etiquette manual that bemoans the state of society today. What is the world coming to? Even as I felt repelled by the idea of becoming a maven of grammatical etiquette, the point remained that a certain inattention was rude, or worse. The Cartoon Art Museum had evidenced a disdain for its paying customers, tossing up signs that became utter nonsense in places; they couldn’t be bothered to check them over.

As Marie led us onto the Purple People Bridge, which crossed the Ohio River into Kentucky, Benjamin mentioned to her how much he’d enjoyed tormenting me over the past few days. “He tries to figure it all out, and I kick back and act profound by saying, ‘Um, not quite.’”

“All right, sensei,” I said. “What’s wrong with ‘It’s rude not to proofread’?”

“Nothing and everything. It’s all a matter of emphasis, grasshopper.”

In the mall on the Kentucky shore, a plural PHOTO’S sat on a light blue background painted with traces of white representing clouds. I tried to use the elixir of correction to cloud over the apostrophe, but it was too blatant that way, with the two shades of white not quite matching. Instead, I made a white elixir bird to fly up there in the sky with the clouds. I hope they liked it. Our Kentucky typo corrected, we left the shopping center and turned right back around.

“It’s rude not to proofread,” I said. “No. It’s rude not to proofread. Why don’t people proofread?” The author who doesn’t proofread may leave trouble behind for his readers. They’re now forced into exerting the extra effort to decipher what the author had meant. Then again, many readers won’t bother. Benjamin was right that the author didn’t automatically deserve to be understood. What readers deserve, though, is that the author present his message with the greatest possible clarity.

The shifting weather mirrored my inner exultation, as the wind picked up and the waves below the bridge chopped and frothed. We paused, occupying neither Ohio nor Kentucky, but some strange liminal zone.

“You’re an editor, Jeff.”

“I’m an editor.”

“As am I,” Marie chimed in.

“Yes! We’re editors! By the plow of Cincinnatus, we’re editors!” I shouted on the bridge, my words dispersed but not dispelled by the rising winds.

Our mission wasn’t about the mere typos, those little errors. Our message surpassed typos on its way to the greater realm of clarity. At some point an English teacher got through to me that I shouldn’t just write a paper and turn it in, that I should take the time to edit it. Maybe even edit it again. The first draft of writing was only about getting it down from your head and onto the page. The editing stage was where you made it work: refined what you were trying to say, figured out how to say it better, and polished it to maximum effect. In fixating on the niggling little rules, the Hawks were reading only sentences and not paragraphs, pages, or books.

Back at college, Benjamin had reorganized the whole first chapter of his thesis, cutting it up into pieces and shuffling them around on his floor, until he’d gotten all his information into a logical flow that helped his argument. My thesis adviser had sent me back through every chapter I wrote to cut the excess fat, redundant sentences and words that didn’t add anything new.

I didn’t want to stop at raising awareness