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

[Ian Woollard]

2008/5/23 George Herbert <george.herbert at 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 at gmail.com

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.