A recent article, "'Grammar vigilantes' fined for fixing sign at Grand Canyon", by Shawn Day, tells of the misadventures of two would-be language heroes. Conversation in the comment sections of online versions of this article as well as a variety of blogs has focused on the rightness or wrongness of the offense versus the rightness or wrongness of bothering to prosecute it. How could I help but to weigh in on this issue myself!
There's nothing particularly odd about the corrections. They are the kind of edits that happen thousands of times a day in writing everywhere. According to the article, the men deleted a misplaced apostrophe and inserted a new one to create the word women's, and they added a comma before the and in a sentence that included a list.
However common, though, I take issue with at least one of those corrections. The gentlemen apparently considered themselves the ultimate authority on whether these changes needed to be made, but that's problematic. There is no one, definitive guide to "good" grammar and punctuation for the English language. Often, what's right is in the eye of the beholder. While any linguistic reasoning I've ever seen would agree that it is necessary to add an apostrophe to "women's," the adding of a comma to a list is an entirely different matter. That correction is good practice according to the Chicago Manual of Style but excessive and thus frowned upon according to the AP Stylebook. I happen to think AP is wrong on this particular issue, but that doesn't give me, or these two men, the right to impose my opinion on everyone else who reads the sign.
We should also consider the sign in its larger historical context. If it's historically valuable now, it will be even more valuable in the future. Grammatical and punctuation standards change over time. It's possible that fixing what we perceive as an error today would lead to misreading or the necessity for further changes later, when the sign is even older and more fragile and thus riskier to handle for the edits. And why attempt to clean up history anyway? We no longer commonly use some of the terms that appear in the Constitution, but we haven't attempted to edit that. Similarly, let the sign remain in its original form where there's a lesson in it for every generation, whether that lesson is in language or simply the history the sign outlines.
On a personal note, I have to object, too. When one language nut behaves this way publicly, it unfairly saddles all of us language nuts with an undeserved reputation for being condescending and judgmental. The men did editors everywhere a real disservice.
The bottom line is that making an unrequested change to someone else's writing is way over the right/wrong line. Doing so is high-handed and demeaning--and, as this case demonstrates, illegal and prosecutable.
I'll happily proofread when a friend asks me to do so--or better yet, a client pays me for it. And I sometimes offer a correction when I'm not asked, but I offer it privately, and the writer is free to take or leave my comment at will. There's a big difference between quietly calling a writer's attention to a potential problem and doing so publicly. The end result of a public correction is not likely to be future freedom from the error, either--just future resentment from the writer toward the critic who embarrassed him.
If this opinion is beginning to sound familiar, that's because you've read something related here before. I addressed When Not to Edit in the May 4, 2008, issue of Word-wise. But since this time it's related to a current event item, I invite you to share your take on it. Readers, if you feel strongly about this particular case, or the issue in general, whether you agree with me or not, please let me know. I would love to reprint reader views in a future issue!
© 2008 by AnnaLisa Michalski