2008/5/26 Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org>rg>:
Indeed in my "day job" as a computer science
academic, this sort of
concern is making copyediting fall out of favor quite rapidly. It's
mostly been phased out for unrelated reasons (cutting expenses), but the
few journals that still insist on doing extensive editing for style
(like anything the IEEE runs) annoy many authors, as we have to keep
re-reading our own drafts to figure out what they screwed up this time.
It can even end up in comical exchanges of drafts where the author will
change something back to what they actually meant to say, the copyeditor
will change it back to conform to "house style", the author will revert
the change in the next exchange, etc.
God help us if anyone ever attempts complete codification of
copyediting for non-crappy writing style. There's a certain hubris
that seems to affect Wikipedia editors: that sufficient instruction
creep can abstract away the need for any judgement whatsoever.
- d.