Editor's Curse

My first editing teacher warned me from the beginning this would happen. The symptoms showed up slowly in the beginning. One day I was in the lounge of a hotel, waiting for my family to finish packing so we could check out, and I snagged a pamphlet advertising a Six Flags theme park. It had a fun, flashy front page and I idly flipped it open and began reading. After a minute, I noticed the way the headlines were formatted was inconsistent. I gave the offending elements a death glare for a long minute, then shrugged and turned to the right leaf. Next, however, I caught a misplaced semicolon. For some reason, that semicolon seemed entirely inexcusable to me. With one free hand, I groped around until I found a pen on the hotel's front desk, ignoring a puzzled glance from the receptionist, and with a swift swipe of my hand, crossed out the semicolon and substituted a comma. Satisfied, I replaced the pen and tucked the pamphlet back into the pile from whence it came.

The symptoms only got worse from there, though. Suddenly, no written word was safe from my wandering eye. Driving in the car, I found myself scrutinizing the tag line of every billboard. When reading magazines or the newspaper, I would come across an interesting sentence and start doodling a diagram of it in the margin. Before long I would check to be sure I had a red pen in my purse before leaving the house. I had begun waging a one-woman war on the writing of the world. It didn't take me long, however, to decide that there was no way I could win this war alone. There were just too many grammatical mistakes in the world for one person to effectively combat. That's when I finally remembered my editing teacher's advice from back in my freshman year of college. He'd explained to us back then about the Editor's Curse and described the symptoms. That's then I realized that I was tight in the grip of this dread disease and there was only one way to treat it: become desensitized. It sounds like a heartless, awful thing to say, but it is the cross we professional writers have to bear. We may try to educate the seething masses and do our part to change what we can, but I have long come to terms with the fact that we can't change the world all at once. It has to go slowly; one semicolon at a time.