Can We Copyedit Progressively?

“We do not endorse guilt and anxiety about copyediting.”

That line comes from a 2014 article by Joel Heng Hartse and Ryuko Kubota, “Pluralizing English? Variation in High-Stakes Academic Texts and Challenges of Copyediting.” This paper lit a fire under me (I even blogged about it here), and this month, I got to talk with Joel about it on the Talking Proper podcast.

In the article, Joel and his coauthor recount their experience working on a book together: Joel was the copy editor and Kubota was the anthology editor. Most of the book’s contributors were nonnative English speakers, and Kubota stressed the importance of not making unnecessary changes to their work. At one point, she even asked Joel to review his work again to see if he could scale back his edits.

Joel had fairly progressive views about editing and accepting variants of Standard English. But this book would be published in the scholarly arena. How much variance could the authors “get away with”? Would Joel be serving them by accepting variations of Standard English, or was he setting them up for failure in this high-stakes publishing context?

In this episode, we talk about this tension, and Joel offers tips for copy editors (for example, read work in your genre that is written by international authors, not just those in the United States).

Check out the episode below (coming soon on Apple and Spotify). Then come back to Outside the Book and read the quote at the start of this post! I’m glad you’re engaging with these ideas, hope to expand the conversation about what editing can be, but don’t want you to throw up your hands in despair (or throw a tomato my way).

If you’d like to discuss an article on the podcast, email info@outside-the-book.com.