On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 2:49 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2008/5/24 SlimVirgin slimvirgin@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