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