[WikiEN-l] What to do about our writing quality?

[Ray Saintonge]

Ian Woollard wrote:
> 2008/5/23 George Herbert:
>   
>>  If anyone knows such people, either in the project or
>> outside, encouraging them to work on that point would be a very useful
>> thing.  Getting past the current copyeditor unfriendliness would be a
>> great long term improvement.
>>     
> The problem is, a copyeditor tends to value style over substance.
>   
The reverse problem is no less valid.
> Whenever I go through an article that a copy editor has been through,
> I end up turning about half of the edits back.
>   
Hopefully you do so in the context of a dialogue with the copyeditor, 
where you take ample time to find a consensual balance between the two 
aspects of the article.
> The problem is that a copyeditor makes a sentence read well, but in
> some cases, the sentence is simply the best sentence that anyone knows
> how to write- it's awkward text, because it's a difficult concept. The
> copyeditor just sweeps in and 'simplifies' it. Enough copyediting and
> the article is no longer in anyway correct.
>   
That view involves a healthy dose of jumping to conclusions.  Style and 
substance need to be viewed as complements, not opponents.  Being a 
difficult concept is no excuse for bad writing.  Books and periodicals 
with a credible popularization of difficult subjects do exist.
> This actually happened recently. An editor swept into an article and
> removed as they saw it, unnecessary detail, and the article certainly
> read a lot better afterwards.
>   
This may not have been a simple matter of copyediting
> Trouble is, this 'unnecessary distinction' was in a BLP article, and
> they ended up giving the person a transmissible, potentially fatal
> illness, that was not necessarily curable, but that the reference said
> that they didn't have.
The illness would just serve to reduce the time during which the article 
could be considered a BLP. :-)

Ec