SOLTuesday: Like vs. Such As

            I’ve been a copy editor most of my working life, at book publishers, the Village Voice, and Publishers Weekly, and for many years teaching copy editing at NYU’s journalism program. When I first started teaching I had come across an editorial in the New York Times on the topic of “like” vs. “such as.”

            Older readers may remember a TV ad for Winston cigarettes featuring the line, “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should.” This is generally considered ungrammatical (“like” should be “as” in this case), and the ad was widely ridiculed at the time. But a side effect was to make some writers leery of using “like” in any comparative form at all. And some grammarians encouraged them in their fear. The result was the proliferation of “such as” in such sentences as “The reading list for Freshman English included classics such as Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and The Red Badge of Courage.”

            Maybe this reads okay to you, but that “such as” is clunky to me. It could be split: “...such classics as...” Or it could be replaced by one word, “like.”

            Where I am free-lance copy editing now, there is a proliferation of “such as.” It’s as though all the editors at this magazine were taught by English teachers who’d been spooked. So today, I went to the basement, where I have all my teaching files, and found the clipping of the 1985 New York Times editorial on the subject. I e-mailed the top editors at the magazine I free-lance for and made my pitch to change some of those “such as”s to “like.” I await their verdict.

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