Since becoming a copy editor for The Breeze, I’ve read a lot of writing. Sports recaps, album reviews, profiles of local business owners, news reports, op-eds, listicles, everything. By my estimate, I’ve read at least 500 articles. In terms of student newspaper fodder, I feel like I’ve almost seen it all. The authors range from freshmen who haven’t taken intro to writing yet to now-graduates working for prestigious print and online publications. There are journalism and English majors, but the most frequent movie reviewer is an accounting major. Hell, our news editor is a creative advertising major. Area of study rarely affects the strength of their writing.

 

From the outside looking in, journalism classes* don’t teach anything about good prose. The writer whom I edit the least (and am lobbying for to be copy editor next year) is a freshman theatre major. An alarming amount of the writers whose names I shudder at most are journalism majors. These are people who take news reporting classes! Feature writing classes! COPY EDITING CLASSES! On the other hand, I was taught how to cover a press conference over text: “Just record it and write about it later.”

 

And while some of these writers’ flaws include an inability to fish a half-decent quote from the their subjects, those aren’t dealbreakers. These are issues that can be fixed with gentle critique and a sit down with their editor. By time these journalists become a staff writer (a meager five articles of experience), they’ve learned not to bury their lede and to avoid one-sentence paragraphs. By time they’re senior writers, they might even know an AP style rule or two. But despite their journalistic experience, they improve little as writers.

 

Improving as a writer isn’t something that just happens. And I concede, there are reasons I don’t see huge improvement in journalists’ writing, one being that I’ve had less than a year to see them grow. But outside of my impatience, there are other reasons. Writing in the same section, often the same type of pieces, makes a more efficient journalist. The author who writes the most profiles on JMU students that started some club, new-in-town business owners, or barely-newsworthy alumni news, can crank them out like a Nike factory worker. To be fair, they aren’t paid much more than one considering that a single article, often hours of work, is worth $10 to The Breeze.

 

But while quantity improves, quality does not. In fact, it almost becomes worse. Reading a piece by the same author every week makes their template obvious, but admittedly perfected in the eyes of their section editors. Every week I read a JMU athlete profile, one that the author funnels in the same quotes from teammates and coaches about the player’s dedication and skill, but also how they’re a human like the rest of us! Almost as if we don’t see them on campus every day, wearing the collegiate athlete badge of honor: an oversized black backpack with the iconic NCAA logo.

 

I digress. Becoming a better writer requires intent. Most of my bitterness comes from how frequently I explain a change only for the writer to make the same mistake the next week. I don’t mean to imply I am the best writer to ever grace The Breeze — I’m not. But anyone, especially any decent writer, can evaluate your work from a different perspective than you can. In my obviously biased opinion, there is immeasurable value in this. When editors do their job and edit the work I give them, I love it. Most of the time, I quickly understand why I was wrong. When I don’t understand, I ask them why and have a conversation. In these cases, I’m almost always wrong and am thrilled to learn something. Even when I disagree wholeheartedly (I still can’t believe I couldn’t use the word “iconoclast”), I usually submit to them. In the end, I’m a writer and they’re journalists; at The Breeze, I have to play by their rules.

 

When I make edits on articles, the number of which must be five digits by now, I find myself making the same ones over, and over, and over, and over. When I was introduced to The Elements of Style in class, I realized many of these edits paralleled the points Strunk and White harped on most.

 

To me, style is how writing most effectively conveys the author’s point. Writers primarily improve from two things: reading more and writing more. And while good writers build a strong intuition based on these basic practices, learning stylistic and grammar rules refines that intuition to a knowledge. Strunk and White provide a good starting point, but I don’t believe style is as rigid as they’d like it to be. People will always disagree on serial commas and splitting infinitives; it’s up to the author to decide what expresses their intent best.

 

Admittedly, I’m lucky that I was raised as a writer. I started reading at a young age and never stopped. My indignation with The Breeze writers is mostly melodrama; I’ve never lost any sleep because the number of “thats” I’ve edited out could fill the pages of War and Peace. However, whether they like it or not, these journalists are writers. Inevitably, most people in the world will have to be writers at some point, especially those of us getting a college education. For that reason, we should all consciously try to improve as writers every chance we get.

 

Not everyone wants to read and write to get better at writing. For those without the time or care to actively improve, simply following grammar rules and style guidelines makes for better prose. Ironically, the pieces praised as the best at critique every Monday are sometimes the ones that make us copy editors groan before making initial edits. It’s proof that intelligent people can produce great content, but its quality is obscured by poor grammar and style. With a short meeting with Strunk and White, these good writers can be polished into great ones. They won’t always have at least three different eyes on their piece, so it’s important to commit the stylistic errors they’re guilty of to memory.

 

If every writer at The Breeze wrote even more inane pieces than they already do but treated Strunk and White as a tag-team Pied Piper, I don’t know what I’d write this essay about. I’d be blissfully bored editing. However, editing has made me a stronger writer more than anything else has. It has taught me just how important style is — how a few commas really do make a difference, how passive voice creates boring writing, and how concision almost always trumps complexity. In today’s media landscape, where articles have an increasingly limited time to draw the reader in, making writing easy to read and follow is just as important as the content itself.

 

Voice can’t be taught any more than humor, earnestness, or imagination can — voice reflects a writer’s personality and real-life qualities. It can be refined to accentuate the author’s personality effectively, but you can’t teach a boring person to just… not be boring. On the other hand, style and grammar can be taught. Taught isn’t the right word — style can be discovered.

 

Everyone likes different types of writing, and everyone writes in different ways. Style how one author can be distinguished from another. The beautiful thing about it is how a writer can pick and choose what they like best, what conveys their point most effectively. Even though I consider consistency a crucial element of good style, there are times where have to disregard my personal style rules. Every writer should have their own personal style guide, physically recorded or not. As shown in The Help, Aibileen does not use traditional language and grammar conventions. However, her style strengthens her voice tremendously. It may not be Garner-approved, but it’s consistent, readable, and gives us more insight into her character than a disciple of style guides would.

 

There are countless authors who have made their career by defying traditional style, many of them regarded as the best of the English language. But simply bucking the status quo isn’t enough; their work still has to be engaging, followable, and clear. Without any consistency — adherence to their personal style guide — the work of these authors wouldn’t have the significance that they do.

 

Style is not objective, uniform, or easily defined. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. Style is at the core of writing; there is no voice, tone, or rhetoric without it. The clarity and effectiveness of writing depends on style. Every time we write, we should try to improve in that regard. It should be in the forefront of every writer’s mind — thanks to The Breeze, it’s certainly in the forefront of mine. Even though The Breeze made me love to hate writing, it made me love writing that much more.