In an earlier century, I taught at an exclusive four-year college whose English department had a bang-up reputation for producing fine writers. Elders in the department had produced a style manual that all instructors were to follow. The rule of thumb was to mark papers with the style-manual codes and not to accept final versions until all errors had been taken care of. Such error codes included “wc” for “word choice” (using “like” for “as”); “cg” for “incongruity” (“an example of this is when”); “da” for “dangling”; and so on. I found the practice tiresome and relatively ineffective, particularly when I turned in my first annual report, where I had noted that my research “centered around” a particular topic, and one of my elders had written “cg!” in the margin. We were missing the forest for the trees, I thought then and think now; we were…
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No More Gatekeeping
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