On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 2:49 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2008/5/24 SlimVirgin <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com>om>:
Yes, it's a big improvement, but in fairness,
it's not a major copy
edit. It really is quite difficult to turn an article from something
disjointed and poorly written into a flowing narrative. It's
especially frustrating when the works gets reverted, or more often
chipped away bit by bit over the following weeks and months. When we
see a well-written piece of prose, we should hesitate to wade in
unless we're sure we can improve it, but very few people have that
attitude, maybe because they think good writing is easy, or because
they think it doesn't really matter.
Actually, I disagree: content accuracy is more important than writing
flow, and reverting or even discouraging the addition of new
information for the sake of writing flow is very bad practice.
- d.
This is quite correct. What is also frequently a concern is that material
is frequently added to articles based on scholarly resources or books that
are not online. If the original addition is carefully worded to closely
paraphrase a point in the secondary source, a copyeditor concerned about
style might well - and frequently does - come in and change that such that
it is no longer sufficiently faithful to the nuances in the source, since
the copyeditor does not have access to the source. I see this all the time
in FACs, and it drives me crazy. I've stopped commenting on it, though.
RR