Language is a beautiful, diverse, and evolving thing. This is the fundamental attitude we bring to our editing work. Because of this, we aim to clarify our clients’ voices within the constraints of good style. This means working in the gray areas between flexibility and consistency. (For fun, we have hyperlinked some stylistic controversies that apply to this very blog post.)
Consistency is great, especially within a text. But different texts have different audiences, with different expectations. And what might be expected with one audience can come across as either too sloppy or too buttoned-up with another audience. One piece of our job is to be sensitive to this.
Of course, we all need some ground rules. In the world of editing this is done by style guides. There are many different style guides out there for different purposes. For example, the Associated Press StyleGuide is popular in journalism and is sometimes used (in modified ways) for writing internet content. The Chicago Manual of Style is used for book publishing and in some academic writing. There are many others.
While useful, style guides should not be treated with too much reverence. They change from edition to edition. Some style guides are somewhat out of touch with popular usage. This is not by itself a problem, but here at Clarity Doctors we are sensitive to the politics of holding too rigidly to grammatical rules which have historically been associated with snobbery and exclusion. Our stance there is to fervently support flexibility.
The value of style guides is not necessarily in the stance they take. rather in sensitizing writers and editors to potential ambiguities. Their suggestions are reasonable for certain purposes, and might come across as inflexible in other situations. Indeed, most style guides acknowledge the limitations of their rules explicitly—but we humans tend to forget this when in the trenches of writing and editing.
If you are interested in exploring the vast world of style guides, associated controversies, and other gray areas, you can start, here, here, here, and here. This is guaranteed to improve your sensitivity to ambiguity over time. Of course, having an editor also helps.