On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 10:23 PM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Relata Refero wrote:
What is also frequently a concern is that material is frequently added to articles based on scholarly resources or books
that
are not online.
Material that is not online is just as valuable and important as material that is. If you doubt the material look it up.
Umm, yes.
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.
"Closely paraphrase" and "sufficiently faithful" are points of view about a particular text. Close paraphrases intended to avoid a copyvio can change the meaning of a passage entirely. How do you presume that the copyeditor does not have access to the source? Whose nuance is correct?
I'm not presuming, I'm basing it on actual incidents. And if you think that people routinely order $39.95 books or put in an interlibrary loan before doing a bit of copyediting....
The rest of what you say isn't really an objection, merely a general statement about Meaning. The bottomline is that a close paraphrase is sometimes necessary, and when its done, it needs to be done with reference to the source, and should not be copy-edited without the copy-editor also reading and assimilating the source. The latter happens all the time.
RR