Photo courtesy of pretty much everywhere on the internet since Inauguration Day, 2021. Meme text courtesy of Apple’s Preview software and my mind.
Apparently, the magical computer codes that live inside WordPress, chatting merrily through the cybernight with the magical computer codes that live inside Google, need to be told explicitly what my website is all about.
To that end, I say: Text editing, text editing, text editing, and more text editing.
More specically: Academic text editing, academic text editing, academic text editing, and more academic text editing.
But what does “text editing” really mean?
Technically, “text editing” means that an experienced writer polishes a text written by someone else – presumably someone less experienced – to ensure that said text conforms to a set of grammatical, stylistic, and formatting conventions that haven’t yet been fully mastered by the text’s author.
I can and do do these things as a text editor. I can fix grammatical and formatting errors for you. No problem. I can revise sentences for elegance, clarity, and stylistic consistency. No problem. I can even untangle syntactic snarls for you, unless the snarl is so snarled that I can’t quite figure out what you want to say. In that case, it’s best for me to leave your syntactic snarl alone, lest my attempts to revise change your meaning irrevocably or even just revocably (it’s a word now.) Instead of revising a very tangled sentence in ways that inadvertently change your meaning, I prefer to leave a question in the margin of your paper, asking “do you mean x?” or “do you mean y?” or “can you clarify the relationship between x, y, and z ideas? You present all three ideas in this sentence, but it’s not quite clear how those ideas are related to one another. It might help to present these ideas in two or three separate sentences.”
In asking questions of this sort, prompting you to clarify both your thoughts and the language used to express them, I take a slightly different approach to text editing than the approach defined above. I aim not only to polish the language and formatting of your text but also to help you grow as a writer, encouraging you to address the “big-picture” or “global” concerns that crop up in everyone’s writing. “Big picture” or “global” concerns are concerns about issues such as the organization of information, the reliability of the evidence used to support your argument, and the quality of the analysis that you offer to explain why and how your evidence supports your argument. Global concerns often overlap with concerns about language and style, which are also known as “local” concerns. As your editor, I tease apart the local and the global, repairing local concerns for you and helping you revise the global concerns not just for the purpose of improving your text but also for the purpose of helping you become a more confident, more persuasive writer in English.
This, my friends, is what my website is all about. (I hope Google has been paying attention.)
Tune in on January 29th to see how many times I can mention the phrase “academic text editing” in next week’s post….
Happy Writing, Happy Revising, Happy Writing Process-ing,
Dr. Lori
Engaging Texts: Has Your Text Been Engaged? 