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