How was this edit rejected?

Question

https://ell.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/26336

How is that edit rejected and the user rejecting it now has this version there

Many times I heard these words interchangeably. I want to know if "Let's" and "Let us" is used for the same meaning. (emphasis mine)

How is that correct grammar and that suggested edit has wrong grammar?

Answer 1

It wasn't rejected for improper grammar.

I see two potential problems with your edit:

1) You used this monospaced font for "Let's" and "Let us". Our convention is to avoid using "codeblock" text, and use either quotes or italics instead.

2) You replaced:

But as my speaking language isn't English, I want to know clear understanding for using these words.

with:

I am asking because I am not a native speaker and have this confusion.

I don't think "have this confusion" is a good way to say this. More importantly, though, I think a reviewer felt that the "I'm not a native speaker" part was unnecessary, because that's what ELL is for.

In short, my guess is that the reviewer felt that the suggested edit added as many problems as it fixed, so it would be easier to simply make another edit altogether.

However, your edits addressed some legitimate concerns, and these might not have been noticed had you not made your edits. So, in the end, even if your edit was rejected, it was still useful for the community.

Answer 2

J.R. is correct, but I wanted to provide a recounting of how I was thinking at the time. I rejected and edited for two specific reasons:

1. Using backticks for anything that's not machine-readable text or ASCII art (basically, code or tables) is a grave error. Semantically, it's totally wrong to use it on a quote; visually, it's the ugliest emphasis possible here*. That formatting option is very rarely useful on this site. (It's overused almost everywhere else on the network by eager edit suggesters, too, which doesn't help.) This alone will almost always get a Reject, unless the rest of the edit is very good.
2. Rephrasing fluffy text like "But as my speaking language isn't English, I want to know clear understanding for using these words." with, well, anything at all is unnecessary. The original text from the question does nothing whatsoever but restate the very purpose of the site, and is the purest expression of noise imaginable. I have no qualms with removing any and all such empty text as soon as possible, which extended as far as the closing restatement of the question — it was redundant, and the question wasn't long enough or complex enough to need a restatement for effect or better understanding. This was not exactly a rejection reason in itself, but it did mean I wasn't just going to hit Approve and move on.

Using the general line of reasoning ColleenV mentions in comments, I deliberately avoided inserting "have" before "heard"; the phrasing is unusual and probably unnatural, but not wholly wrong**, and it gives a slightly better idea of the asker's skill in English. (I didn't leave the misplaced question mark or the missing "the" alone, though, either because they itched too much for my self-control or because there seemed no justification for leaving them that way. This is a bit fiddly.) I would not have rejected the edit on these grounds, though, even if I might not have made it myself that way.

I don't know why I didn't notice "is"/"are". That seems to have been an error on my part.

_{*All right, it's possible there's an uglier. I don't know of one, though.
**Although it doesn't mean exactly what you would expect here, "Many times I heard <someone saying something>" is perfectly grammatical, and actually makes some degree of sense here. You'd expect that to be followed by "I always wondered what that meant. Can you explain?", or something, but oh well.}