User:Chenopodiaceous

I see frequent errors of parallelism, punctuation, usage, and syntax and try to correct them without changing the sense intended by the author, or giving the author the appearance of a level of authority not supported by the quality of his/her writing.

I write (less nowadays) and edit scientific manuscripts as a profession and have studied the English language and its expression for 65 years, as well as being familiar with many other natural and constructed languages.

I don't create Wikipedia articles. I respect those who do. I ask authors to understand (and most of them do) that their writing can sometimes be improved. All editing is for the sake of the reader. I think all publications should be models of language use, to the extent writers and editors are capable of reaching this goal. I don't edit for personal credit, but because I hold language sacred as a means of exact transmission of meaning and am unhappy to see its misuse propagated.

If you don't understand the reasons for my edits, please contact me instead of reverting them. None is arbitrary. Every one* is backed by well-understood rules of spelling, grammar, construction, and style, and I will cheerfully explain them to serious inquirers.


 * OK, I sometimes slip up and change British to American spelling; recent example "North-West" to "Northwest". The reversion was meekly accepted.

A short tutorial on the use of modifier words

Of late some self-styled editors have been reverting corrections I have made of misplaced modifiers, without showing any understanding of what the error means. Here are a few words of explanation.

What is the meaning of this sentence, taken from a manufacturer's manual:

Only install refrigerant lines outdoors in dry weather.

Any of five meanings could be drawn from it, depending on what the reader considers only to be modifying. If you can't work out what these meanings are, I'm afraid the example is lost on you.

You may say “It doesn’t matter! You could figure it out from the context!”

Why should anyone have to “figure out from the context”, what a competent writer can easily express with unequivocal and graceful clarity, irrespective of context? Do you really think your job as an editor is to make readers work harder than they would need to work if you took the trouble to write clearly? Then you aren't an editor.

Please consider also that there may be readers whose first language is not English and whose understanding depends on literal translation. Literal translation of idioms, semantic or syntactic, doesn’t work well. If you don’t know any foreign languages, this fact will be lost on you, as will the related fact that you don’t know your own mother tongue as well as you imagine you do.

Place a modifier directly before the term it is intended to modify and not before terms it is not. In this case, the writer wished to say Install refrigerant lines outdoors only in dry weather. See how it works now?