DISCONTINUED: Council of Science Editors Book Club discussion

Toward the end of Chapter 2, Mary Norris writes, "Sometimes it's easier to reconcile oneself to the dangler than it is to fix it." I remember being so overly strict, early in my career, about adherence to grammar rules and the style guide that I'm sure I sometimes made more work for myself and probably made some sentences more complex that they needed to be. I mean, what's the return on investment of changing 'based on' to 'on the basis of' just to prove you know the rule? Tell me about the 'errors' you've let go. Alternatively, tell me that strictness is needed to keep all communication from devolving into abbreviations and emojis.

This is not related to copyediting, but work emails. I have one coworker who starts emails with
Hi, Becky;

This is technically correct punctuation, but a little too much for me. I just write
Hi Bob,

That coworker (name changed here) really is the most thorough, detail-oriented editor. But to me it seems presumptuous to use that punctuation every time in informal work emails.

I agree, Becky! I do sometimes make sure my punctuation is overly correct when emailing other editors, though. I'd hate for them to think I don't know better, lol.

I didn't even think of that but yes, I've received quite a few misspelled and heavily abbreviated emails (likely due to them being written on phones). Even a lot of unnecessary punctuations ("Can u give more info??????").

For one of the editing courses I've taken, we were "working" with an author who had a specific way listing bullet points that didn't meet the CMOS, the style we were supposed to use for the assignment. The lists very extremely long so correcting them would take a lot of time. The instructor advised that as long as it's consistent, understandable, and free of glaring grammatical errors, we should let it go. The best course of action is to query the author and let them know what the standard format is and to let them decide if they want to keep their own style or not. For the sake of not making more work for myself, I would agree with that advice. I think if I had focused on reformatting the bullet points with the time limit we had, I'd have missed the grammatical errors in the entry instead.