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

[Relata Refero]

On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 2:49 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2008/5/24 SlimVirgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com>:
>
> > Yes, it's a big improvement, but in fairness, it's not a major copy
> > edit. It really is quite difficult to turn an article from something
> > disjointed and poorly written into a flowing narrative. It's
> > especially frustrating when the works gets reverted, or more often
> > chipped away bit by bit over the following weeks and months. When we
> > see a well-written piece of prose, we should hesitate to wade in
> > unless we're sure we can improve it, but very few people have that
> > attitude, maybe because they think good writing is easy, or because
> > they think it doesn't really matter.
>
>
> Actually, I disagree: content accuracy is more important than writing
> flow, and reverting or even discouraging the addition of new
> information for the sake of writing flow is very bad practice.
>
>
> - d.


This is quite correct. What is also  frequently a concern is that material
is frequently added to articles based on scholarly resources or books that
are not online. If the original addition is carefully worded to closely
paraphrase a point in the secondary source, a copyeditor concerned about
style might well - and frequently does - come in and change that such that
it is no longer sufficiently faithful to the nuances in the source, since
the copyeditor does not have access to the source. I see this all the time
in FACs, and it drives me crazy. I've stopped commenting on it, though.

RR