A number of my coworkers — myself included, to an extent — are recovering fundamentalists of some kind or another (exvangelicals, as those who emerged from the evangelical movement sometimes call themselves). Those who break free of some kind of fundamentalism tend to have a continuing leftward trajectory after their departure, in terms of their religious and political ideologies. Which makes perfect sense — if they were part of a right-wing movement that damaged themselves and others, they’d be naturally inclined to move the other direction.

One interesting exception to this trend though is that there is often some vestigial posture of fundamentalism that remains. In the world of publishing, this often manifests itself in my coworkers’ approach to grammar and other issues of style and usage.

Let me be clear: I’d take this kind of fundamentalism over the religious kind any day. I’m less bothered by it than fascinated and a little amused by it. It affects me a bit as a copywriter, but I mostly get to be a spectator as they debate whether the the before New York Times should be capitalized and italicized along with the rest of the title, or whether a distributive adjective is making a sentence too ambiguous or not. 

Rather than citing verses of the Bible, they cite rules from the Chicago Manual of Style. Rather than drawing fiery inspiration from the prophecies of Isaiah, they speak reverently of the words of Benjamin Dreyer from some chapter of Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style (a subtitle which I know is supposed to be taken tongue-in-cheekly but which I’m positive a few of my coworkers read in total earnest). And rather than using precepts of church doctrine to show whether a certain kind of behavior is or isn’t normative and acceptable, they share charts from Google Ngram to show whether a phrase is or isn’t “idiomatic.”

Is there a place for this sort of approach to writing? For sure. There are some things that are incorrect without any good reason for being so, and in those cases, it helps to have people who can spot the error and suggest a change. Particular contexts require particular conventions. But there’s a certain point where the conventions become no longer a means to an end (the end in question here being clarity and impact) but the end in and of itself. This despite the fact that the rules are all made up anyway — and will continue to be made up. (Someday, there will be an 18th edition of CMOS that will redefine what those who adhere to it consider “correct.”)

I’m not a psychologist, so I won’t go too much further. But it sure seems like some people have a need for something in their lives to be above reproach. A set of guidelines etched onto tablets by something other than a human hand. I know from experience that when you orient your entire life around something you consider to be inerrant truth, and then you find that it is anything but, it’s terrifying. There is suddenly a lack of order and meaning to the world around you. The temptation to plug that gaping hole with something, anything at all — even the rules of grammar — is immense.