Using it, one can describe sentences according to a limited number of types of transformations and embeddings of simple sentences. In this presentation, I'll show how its analytic techniques can help editors and reviewers help readers. Many fewer appear to require coursework in grammar or linguistics. People with formal TC backgrounds make up only a small portion of all who review and edit documents. Thus, one might guess that most editors and reviewers are operating on intuition and whatever sense of grammatical structure they learned in grades K- 12.
Editors now learn to work with language mostly by reading literary works.
Not only not right, not even logical. True, linguistic theory states that all of us acquire as toddlers the generative rules allowing us to produce idiomatic sentences in our native language. Generating sentences, 19th century faculty psychology might say, requires the use of the synthetic imagination. But analytic reason comes into play for editing sentences. Over the past 40 years, one variety of descriptive grammar, transformational, has become standard.