A consistent style aids the reader. If the punctuation is constantly varying, the reader has to focus on the punctuation and not the message or the prose. And in an ambiguous case, the reader can often rely on the consistent style to help determine what is meant.

As far as house style goes, it’s probably less important for a book publisher to maintain a consistent style among different writers than it is for a magazine, newspaper, journal, or website, where you have pieces by many different writers in close proximity. But for academic presses, it’s really aids the reader to have a consistent style even among different books. It really speeds comprehension to have a single style that is used throughout a number of works.

And when I’ve had my writing professionally copy edited, I’ve found that the a significant percentage of the suggested changes were highly beneficial; the majority were minor improvements, a small number I deemed to be pointless, but went along with them anyway because I didn’t care; and occasionally a suggestion ran counter to what I wanted, and in those cases my will as writer prevailed.

I have commented before that in those instances where my writing has been professionally copy edited I have found about a quarter of the changes to be beneficial, a small (but vital) number to be far worse, and the bulk to be pointless.  Any insertion or deletion of Oxford commas falls solidly in the “pointless” category.  I don’t worry about it one way or the other, but I do wonder that the copy editor has so much time on his hands that he has no better use for it.

This kind of thing is very annoying for a copyeditor to read, especially the last sentence.  It is my job to impose house style; my employers don’t mind my fact-checking, looking up quotes, and so on—the kind of thing you would doubtless consider beneficial—but that is not what they pay me for (I do it because it enhances my job satisfaction).  The fact that you don’t understand it is a fact about you, not about the world of books; I don’t understand ballet, but I don’t go around saying ballet is crap and the money spent on it is wasted and should be put to better use.  A little intellectual humility wouldn’t come amiss.

Edit: Sorry if I sound cranky, but I don’t like being told my job is worthless.

I agree with languagehat.  Education, after all, is supposed to encourage independence of thought and precision in writing and speech.  But sometimes even those who have the best education may - just may - be wrong.  Casting blanket aspersions is, sadly, often due to arrogance, ill-informed and ill-advised.  Education isn’t finite - it’s an ongoing process and humility is often one of the most difficult things to learn. I’ve been extremely grateful to my army of critics along the self-publishing road.

Dave Wilton - 12 November 2011 09:24 AM

A consistent style aids the reader. If the punctuation is constantly varying, the reader has to focus on the punctuation and not the message or the prose.

I would say that, in general, you would have to focus on the punctuation to even notice that the Oxford comma was not being consistently used.  I’ve been reading some Smithsonian articles and in three articles I’ve seen three instances of lists that could have an Oxford comma, two in one article and one in one of the others.

The point - THE point - about style guides, and house style is that having a consistent imposed style stops every editor who gets hold of a piece of copy changing things to his/her preferred version, only for the next editor to change it back because their personal preference is for something else. The more changes that are made to copy - I’m sure LH will agree - the greater the chances that errors will be introduced into that copy. So style guides are there to reduce the number of corrections that might otherwise be made to a piece of copy as it goes through the system. This need to have an imposed consistency to prevent constant meddling with copy as one editor alters the revisions of a previous editor is something, I have noticed, that the principals at Language Log don’t seem to understand. Any benefits to the reader of a consistent style are incidental to the advantages of eliminating time-wasting successions of changes (which, of course, in the days of metal typesetting, and printers on piecework, could be money-wasting as well) and cutting out the opportunity to introduce errors and typos that every fresh edit brings.

That hadn’t occurred to me before, but it sounds quite sensible.  As a graduate student and postdoc I was often caught up in such editing conflicts between senior co-authors of my papers.