I copyedited for five years in the offices of an esteemed book publisher, and during that time I became an expert in the most trivial things. Minor details occupied my workdays, which I spent in a …
Definitely, which is also what the author of this article writes in this paragraph:
Do we really need copyediting? I don’t mean the basic clean-up that reverses typos, reinstates skipped words, and otherwise ensures that spelling and punctuation marks are as an author intends. Such copyediting makes an unintentionally “messy” manuscript easier to read, sure.
I think the point is that there's no clear line between obvious mistakes and the arbitrary preferences of 19th century Latin fetishists (or contemporary pedant authorities). She names things like the position of commas before or after quotation marks, which I find it really hard to care about. The other group of examples she uses are non-prestige dialects that may not have standardized spelling. Is it really wrong to write "dont" when writing AAVE, like the example she quotes? That is probably a decision that should be made by the author and not a random white person with some college education.
That's not her point, though. To quote the end of the article:
Copyediting shares with poetry a romantic attention to detail, to the punctuation mark and the ordering of words. To treat someone else’s language with that fine a degree of attention can be an act of love. Could there be another way to practice copyediting—less attached to precedent, less perseverating, and more eagerly transgressive; a practice that, to distinguish itself from the quietly violent tradition from which it arises, might not be called “copyediting” at all; a practice that would not only “permit” but amplify the potential for linguistic invention and preservation in any written work?
It's not like she's actually arguing against any form of editing a text, she's critiquing the overly standardizing practice of it, and the gatekeeping function of the prescriptivist policing of language, especially through institutions like academia and the wider publishing sector. It's about how non-standard text is treated, how the authors are often dismissed outright and when not; how editors use their knowledge of standard language to (occasionally invasively) 'standardize' a text. It's about how power is enacted through the policing of language on a wider scale, and how editors understand themselves to be in the role of the de-facto enforcers of that language police - and the cops, they are all bastards. But there could be a self-understanding of an editor out there, that doesn't act like a piggy, you know. That's what she's arguing for.
Counterpoint: It is a pain in the ass to read texts full of obvious unintentional errors.
Definitely, which is also what the author of this article writes in this paragraph:
I think the point is that there's no clear line between obvious mistakes and the arbitrary preferences of 19th century Latin fetishists (or contemporary pedant authorities). She names things like the position of commas before or after quotation marks, which I find it really hard to care about. The other group of examples she uses are non-prestige dialects that may not have standardized spelling. Is it really wrong to write "dont" when writing AAVE, like the example she quotes? That is probably a decision that should be made by the author and not a random white person with some college education.
That's not her point, though. To quote the end of the article:
It's not like she's actually arguing against any form of editing a text, she's critiquing the overly standardizing practice of it, and the gatekeeping function of the prescriptivist policing of language, especially through institutions like academia and the wider publishing sector. It's about how non-standard text is treated, how the authors are often dismissed outright and when not; how editors use their knowledge of standard language to (occasionally invasively) 'standardize' a text. It's about how power is enacted through the policing of language on a wider scale, and how editors understand themselves to be in the role of the de-facto enforcers of that language police - and the cops, they are all bastards. But there could be a self-understanding of an editor out there, that doesn't act like a piggy, you know. That's what she's arguing for.