Editing Otherwise: A Manifesto

A lot of editorial knowledge is learned through participating in editorial communities of practice.

 

Becoming a professional editor involves learning and applying certain conventions.

 

Some of this knowledge is highly specific to UK/US publishing.

 

Knowing it can gatekeep access to the editorial community, and it can easily filter out inexperienced writers from highly experienced writers who have engaged with this pool of editorial knowledge.

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But much of this knowledge could be different. Some of it is arbitrary (e.g. using an en dash rather than a hyphen for number ranges), while other aspects reflect deeper guiding principles. For example, keeping readers immersed in the story is a commercial concern. Immersed readers will keep on reading and buying books by that author. 

 

Especially when working with authors across cultures and literary traditions, but also often in other contexts too – such as working with indie authors – it's worth questioning whether some of these rules and conventions should be applied.

 

This decision depends on the writing and publishing context, so collecting some information about the writer’s aims and where they wish to publish is important. 

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Here are some examples – two from fiction, two from non-fiction editing – to explain what editing otherwise can entail:

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1)      Unusual dialogue tags in adult fiction

 

If an author of adult fiction uses lots of funky dialogue tags, then editors will assume that they are a new author or they haven’t received professional editorial feedback on their work. But in other European literatures, more diverse dialogue tags are commonplace and not the hallmark of a new author.

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Novels written in other European languages often include a much wider variety of dialogue tags than English. English strongly favours the dialogue tags “said,” ”asked,” and “replied.” Phrases like “she suggested,” or "she explained," usually sound unnecessarily verbose in English. But they are often relatively invisible to the reader in other languages.

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This is often explained in terms of showing vs. telling. Showing the mode of address through the dialogue trumps telling it to the reader through a dialogue tag. And that could be part of a wider UK/US trend toward deep POV, which involves more showing. But this call is somewhat arbitrary!

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2)      Head hopping

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The same goes for head hopping, which was fairly commonplace many years ago, but is now widely viewed as amateurish. I’ve noticed that this, and certain other POV slips, are more common in other literary traditions I read.

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The second point is really about promoting reader immersion in the story – and avoiding head hopping is one way of doing that. But for smaller or different audiences, reader immersion could be promoted in other ways. And reader immersion is partly a commercial concern.

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3)      Voice and overuse of direct quotations

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One point I notice a lot with academic writing written by multiliterate authors is heavy use of direct quotations. I've seen some texts that read very staccato!

This is both a line editing and developmental consideration: it affects cohesion and voice. Paraphrasing is often (but not always) better as it retains the author's voice and removes any awkward transitions in the text. 

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Sure, overuse of direct quotations can be a sign of laziness, of just pasting relevant quotations in rather than spending time on subtle-but-important sentence-level craft.

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But a preoccupation with voice is specific to Anglo-American publishing and writing traditions. And readability and unique voice link to commercial considerations too.

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So while it's often appropriate to tone down or swap direct quotations for paraphrasing when translating for an Anglo-American audience, it's not necessarily always the right option for different audiences.

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4) A preference for terse sentences and concision over long sentences and an ornate style

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These are conventions, again, that highlight features of the Anglo-American publishing context. For academic and technical writing, no common context is often assumed by all the readership, and this diversity of background favors explaining connections explicitly in a simple style.

 

This may also reflect a legacy of a relatively liberal political context – in other literatures, the stakes can be higher for making certain views clear, and so indirectness and approaches that rely on metaphor, for instance, are favored. Or a single state context may be assumed.

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Summary

 

When texts travel across cultures and literary traditions, it’s important to pay attention to these nuances and decide how and to what extent you should adapt a text to its new audience.

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Equally, when working in Anglo-American publishing, rather than take writing and story conventions for granted, it's worth exploring what work those conventions are doing and when they may be excluding others unnecessarily.

 

Ultimately, the editorial choices you make depend on your brief, the author's writing context, audiences, and the resources you have at your disposal.

 

But by “Editing Otherwise,” you can give the author more choices and make space for voices and perspectives that have often been excluded from publishing in the past. 

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My client work is mostly in developmental and stylistic editing, but I imagine there are other examples related to copyediting too. For example, using en dashes for number ranges features in many style guides. If someone completes a sample or test edit, not making this change often highlights that the editor has no links to editorial communities.

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Many of the articles on this blog explore Editing Otherwise in more detail.