5 Myths of Editing an Author’s Writing
MYTH 1: “IF WE FOCUS ON GRAMMAR, EVERYTHING ELSE FALLS IN PLACE.”
This common myth is commendable in desire to correct what we see on the surface so that an author’s writing “looks” better. The problems inherent in viewing writing this way are various but can be understood in three categories: 1) what we value, 2) what author’s learn and 3) how we assess the effectiveness of written communication.
What we value represents those “things” (outcomes) in writing that we want our author’s to demonstrate to us as readers. Whatever the content, we typically want to see authors to provide us with an engaging text that contains ideas worthy of our attention. However, if we only look for grammar and usage[1] mistakes, then we communicate to our author’s that what we really value is “clean” prose, not critical thinking, insightful ideas, strong characters, and developed plots.
What authors learn represents what they actually receive and understand from our feedback. In addition to implicitly recognizing category one above, that we value sentence-level correctness, writers can only digest a few deep-level comments at a time (more on this in “6 Best Practices for Commenting on Writing”) and focusing on grammar only alters grammar and usage, not the larger-level developmental concerns we typically have in mind. This practice implicitly trains authors to pay more attention to surface details than the things they (and their audience) value most and can also lead to writer’s block as writers struggle to craft clean sentences first, instead of focusing on ideas and story.
Assessing effective written communication is linked to the categories. 1 & 2. If we mark sentence-level errors and focus on these in an author’s writing, then we are, in effect, assessing an author’s writing at that level, not at the level of ideas, engagement, argument construction, and critical thinking. In other words, we are trying to critique author’s on the things we don’t generally partner with them on until later in the editing process.
[1] By the way, research demonstrates that what we “call” grammar mistakes are mostly “usage” mistakes. Since usage changes with context and time, arguing that students don’t know grammar is counterproductive. For example, if a student were to write a truly grammatically incorrect sentence, it wouldn’t make much sense: “Went man I grocery get store today,” for example. When students end sentences in prepositions, choose to say “I” instead of “me”, they are actually making usage errors that are dictated as errors only based on context. In effect, a student making a usage error is misreading the situation that called for the writing.
MYTH 2: “THE MORE COMMENTS THE MERRIER.”
Writers, like all of us, can only really concentrate on a few things in any given session of work. Now, if we mark every error[1] in a an author’s writing, the response to that marking will be predictable. Authors will be 1) overwhelmed and give up, 2) focus on correcting the easiest editing comments only, or, if we’re lucky, 3) meet with us for help. Generally, writers will choose options 1 or 2. Think about it this way. If we have only a fifty-minute session, we know we can only cover a few things a most in our partnership time and expect some recall and later application on the part of authors. The same goes for individual writing. We can’t expect writers to correct all possible errors on every draft (more on this in “6 Best Practices for Commenting on Writing”).
[1] Many people don’t realize that error is a tricky thing to define. Researchers have long demonstrated that how an audience defines what counts as an error is heavily influenced by the audience’s situation and expectations. What one audience member might recognize as error, another might not. This doesn’t mean crafting beautiful, clean prose shouldn’t be our goal; it means we have to be attentive to the expectations of our audience. For more on this idea of the phenomenology of error, see Joseph M. Williams landmark article.
MYTH 3: “WRITING ERRORS EQUALS A STUPID AUTHOR”
Unfortunately, this common myth needs to be dismissed outright. Author error in writing does not mean that writers are unintelligent (or lazy). There are many things that work to encourage error in writing including 1) poor prompt/assignment/task design, 2) distraction, 3) misunderstanding, 4) lack of practice, 5) fear of failure, 6) hyper-correction, and others. Just as we shouldn’t equate written error with lack of morals, we shouldn’t equate it with lack of intelligence. After all, we wouldn’t want others doing that to us.
MYTH 4: “COMMENTS SHOULD REQUIRE A DECODER GIN/ROSETTA STONE”
Many editors and teachers today remember receiving feedback on an essay in high school in college on which the teachers scrawled some coded language such as “awk” or that funny paragraph symbol (¶). These symbols are not only confusing to some teachers, but authors who have never encountered them or never learned their secret meanings have even more difficulty. Writers shouldn’t have to join the Masons to get a decoder ring for an editor’s comments. Be specific, honest, and direct and clear (more on this in “6 Best Practices for Commenting on Writing”).
MYTH 5: “MY AUTHOR CAN’T WRITE A SENTENCE”
Sometimes we all like to vent our concerns, lament an author’s writing to our colleagues. Having heard this from the mouths of colleagues many times, I can attest that we have good intentions. However, such statements help no one and they are factually incorrect. If an author couldn’t write sentences, it is unlikely s/he would have written anything in the first place. Furthermore, even if we only mean this myth figuratively, we do both our author-partners and ourselves a disservice by placing our mindsets into a negative framework that leads to poor evaluations later.