A recent post on edittorent ranting about the use of “then” as a conjunction woke me up this morning far better than the green tea I was drinking.
Guilty, guilty, guilty. I quick-searched my first-draft WIP for “, then” (instead of “, and then”), and found 112 of them in 72,000 words. They probably aren’t all wrong, but many were typed in without conscious thought. Yikes. In the writing course I’m taking online, Holly Lisle reminds us that the most dangerous grammar errors aren’t the ones we miss but the ones we don’t even know to look for. She recommends we find careful critique partners with pet peeves complementary to our own; they can catch our blind spots as we catch theirs.
Even this hoary newspaper copyeditor can benefit from such a sharp reminder now and then. But please, please let it always be before she submits her manuscript and causes another editor to rant.
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