One of the most persistent (and pernicious) myths in editing is that good writing = technically flawless writing.
It’s easy to understand why. We expect editors to correct grammar, punctuation, usage, and consistency. And that’s what they spend a lot of time doing. From the outside, it can seem like technical correctness is the holy grail of writing, and editors the pilgrims in search of it.
On a basic level, technical correctness matters. You shouldn’t have to fight your way through a piece with distracting errors or confusing syntax. (See: “Let’s eat, grandma!” vs. “Let’s eat grandma!”) But a sentence can be technically correct and still feel… flat. Likewise, a sentence can bend the rules and be unshakeable for years after you’ve read it.
Okay. Why?
Because people aren’t ticking off a checklist of grammatical choices while they read. They’re absorbing the art of communicated experience.
What Happens When We Break a Rule?
Let’s look at two sentences that convey the same information:
I was angry.
I was angry, so angry I could barely think, barely breathe, barely force myself to stay in my chair.
The narrator is angry. Got it. Which of those sentences feels more angry to you? Probably the second one. Some editors might argue that the second sentence is repetitive. They’re technically right. We see ‘barely’ three times in quick succession. So why doesn’t it feel wrong?
Well, maybe repetition is exactly the point. What if the sentence is trying to mirror the speaker’s emotional state? What if the loss of composure on the page reflects the loss of composure in the character? What looks like a mistake starts to look a lot more like a choice. Because now the writer isn’t explicitly showing you the narrator’s anger through a clenched jaw or a shaking fist—they’re showing you through how the words themselves feel. This is what happens when form itself creates meaning.
Sentences don’t—and can’t—exist in isolation. They need context. A history. A future. They live in an ecosystem of paragraphs and pages that give each other meaning. A sentence that feels excessive in one paragraph might feel perfectly placed in another. A fragment can create emphasis. A run-on can generate urgency or momentum or breathlessness or excitement and now your heart is pounding a bit, isn’t it? Repetition can establish rhythm, establish fixation, establish intensity, establish pursuit.
When you’re writing (or reading), don’t ask whether a sentence follows every rule you learned growing up. Ask whether it’s reached its goal.
Good Writing is All About Experience
You’ve read books. Of course you’ve read books. You’re a human. But do you remember your favorite novel because every comma was perfectly placed? Probably not. More likely, you remember how it made you feel. You remember a character whose emotions leapt off the page. You remember a line that captured something you’d never been able to put to words. You remember moments where language itself took the shape of the thing it was describing.
I’ll bet some of the things that stuck with you were communicated through sentences that broke a rule or two. Maybe even three.
That doesn’t mean every awkward sentence should be left as-is. Writers are often too close to their own work to distinguish between intentional choices and accidental ones. An editor’s job is not to preserve every single quirk for its own sake. The challenge for an editor is figuring out which imperfections add to a piece and which ones distract from it. For that, you need curiosity.
Getting Wildly Curious
I can’t read or edit writing without getting wildly curious. Not just, “Hm, interesting. How did they come up with that?” I mean that I get obsessive. Even while I’m getting sucked in by emotionally charged dynamics or a beautifully embodied setting, I’m practically vibrating with questions:
- Why does this sentence work?
- Why does that one feel ‘meh?’
- What happens if we remove a word?
- Rearrange a phrase?
- Break a long sentence into two shorter ones?
Sometimes the answer is that it gets more impact or clarity. Sometimes it just drowns out the author’s voice. One can get us excited. The other can leave us disappointed.
This is incredibly true in fiction, where voice matters just as much as correctness. Characters don’t speak in perfectly balanced clauses or politely wait for the other to finish because people don’t speak that way. People interrupt themselves, repeat themselves, trail off, and chase a thought halfway across a paragraph before arriving at a conclusion. Or maybe they never arrive at all. Maybe they forget what they were saying because the dog was barking or they got spooked by a shadow or—
Wait, where was I?
See? Writing that reflects those patterns can feel far more authentic because it departs from technical perfection.
The goal, then, isn’t to red-line every imperfection out of a manuscript. Your goal—my goal—is to understand what the writing is trying to accomplish.
Sometimes the strongest editorial choice is changing a sentence to be technically accurate. And sometimes the strongest editorial choice is seeing that what looks imperfect is actually doing exactly what it was meant to.
