2008/5/23 George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com:
We're not copyeditor friendly.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing.
That said, a few loud, outgoing copyeditors wandering randomly around dropping gems of rewrites here and there might have a wonderful effect.
Or *not*.
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.
Whenever I go through an article that a copy editor has been through, I end up turning about half of the edits back.
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.
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.
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.
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com