Editing in the Modern Classroom

Suzan Flanagan, Michael Albers, Suzan Flanagan, Michael Albers, Michael J. Albers, Suzan Flanagan, Michael J. Albers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780815354468
• eBook ISBN: 9781351132732
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Editing in the Modern Classroom is a research?based collection that defines the current state of technical editing pedagogy and plots a potential roadmap for its future. It examines current academic and professional editing practices, the global and corporate contexts of technical communication programs, and the role of new challenges such as content management in order to assess what should be expected from editing courses today and how instructors can best structure their courses to meet these expectations. It provides a research foundation to determine where changes are needed, and points to areas where additional research must be done to support further curricular and pedagogical innovations. Editing in the Modern Classroom challenges instructors to look deeper at the pedagogical aspects of what makes up an effective technical editing course at undergraduate and graduate levels and provides them with comprehensive and evidence-based resources to design and teach these courses.

1

EDITING IN THE MODERN CLASSROOM

An Overview

Michael J. Albers and Suzan Flanagan

Introduction

Editing in the Modern Classroom is a research-based collection that both defines the current state of technical editing pedagogy and plots a potential roadmap for its future. The chapters are research-based and solidly grounded within the existing literature.

We see this introduction not as a place to answer questions about editing; the remainder of the book works toward that goal. But, instead, we see this introduction as a place to raise questions about editing, only some of which will be partially answered within the book. The rest will remain open research questions, which we hope this book will inspire researchers to begin to address.

We use text and document interchangeably throughout this chapter. The terms do not refer only to printed texts, but to any text, whether paper based, web based, or content management system (CMS) based, or other digitally created forms of text that a technical communicator may work with. At the discussion level here, the forms of text are all identical in that texts need to be created that effectively communicate their content; the actual presentation media used for that communication is more or less irrelevant here. We also use the term editing as shorthand for technical editing.

One of the aspects we emphasized when inviting chapters was that they should be research based. Overall, “the field of editing is remarkably light on empirical research,” and some of that research is not directly “useful to a technical editing instructor, such as the pieces that examined whether copyediting improved the readability of medical manuscripts” through measurements using the Flesch-Kinkaid Readability Index, which is itself of questionable usefulness (A. Eaton, personal communication, May 15, 2017). (We agree that copyediting improves a text, but also acknowledge that a text can be grammatically perfect and still fail to communicate because of problems with content and/or presentation.)

Research into technical editing can be divided into two categories.

Methods of editing. Research that looks at specific editing methods or techniques and measures their effectiveness, such as research that examined whether copyediting improved the readability of medical manuscripts (e.g., Roberts, Fletcher, & Fletcher, 1994).

Methods of teaching editing. Research that looks at the pedagogical aspects of editing, such as how should students be taught to edit and what aspects of editing should be emphasized (e.g., Norman & Frederick, 2000).

However light the empirical research on practical aspects of editing, there has been essentially no empirical research on the technical editing course itself. What should a modern editing course contain? What should students learn? What is the relative importance of the preponderance of topics that could be included?

This book works to fill that gap and set the boundaries of what we already know about editing and editing pedagogy, and to state where the major holes exist—major holes that urgently need empirical research from technical communication researchers.

In an interesting twist, although there is a lack of empirical research, there is no dearth of pieces on the practical aspects of how to edit and on how editing is changing (e.g., Amare, 2009; Buttram, 2016; Schrank, 2013). But they tend to be opinion or anecdotal articles with no well-shaped research to back up their claims. We want to make clear that we separate empirical research on the editing course from either opinion or “how I teach” articles. Articles on “lessons learned,” “my favorite assignment,” or “what is unique about how I teach editing” are not uncommon and are how most questions about “how to teach editing” get answered. Unfortunately, the assignments and methods that work in one instructor’s classroom rarely can be transferred directly into another.

Granted, many of those articles have gems of ideas and can help individual instructors inform their teaching. We have tried to incorporate some of those ideas into our editing courses. Some worked; some didn’t. Some we try again next time; some we don’t. However, the actual usefulness and impact of the techniques they describe are purely anecdotal. One instructor can say it worked wonderfully and everyone should use a technique, and we can shake our heads and say it was a dismal failure. Both are anecdotal opinions based on a single person’s experience. What works well or fails with one classroom too often depends upon the dynamics of that one class and instructor. What made the idea or technique work for one instructor and not work for another—the underlying structural assignment issues—needs to receive our research attention. Empirical research studies can help us move beyond the individual class/instructor dynamic and uncover the pedagogical editing principles of what fundamentally works or doesn’t work. Using those fundamentals, other people can make informed decisions to reshape their pedagogy.

Any teaching method or assignment is a complex interconnection of ideas. Making them work requires understanding both that complex web and what factors make them work or fail for students. Once that complex interconnection is acknowledged and is reasonably understood, then we have research that is generalizable to the editing course in general. Achieving this understanding is clearly not the result of a single study or the work of one scholar, but a longer-term research agenda pursued across the discipline. Unfortunately, more than just for the editing course, technical communication (TC) research in general seems to fail to try to verify the general applicability of the suggestions of “my favorite assignment.” Hopefully, this book can help motivate researchers to undertake this work at all levels.

For example, consider a discussion among instructors about which order to teach the levels of edit. Many will argue for teaching copyediting first. One of us tends to teach that way, while the other tends to teach higher-level editing first. We both find that many of our students have trouble focusing on document-level issues of organization and content. Students are distracted by easy-to-fix lower-level issues. At times, we have had to explicitly state “no copyedit marks on the text” in order to force students to consider higher-level issues. The order-of-teaching issue is a fundamental structural issue that deserves research attention. This book doesn’t address the order-of-teaching question, but it does highlight the extent of basic questions that remain open across the editing subdiscipline.

Ways of Teaching

There are, of course, many different ways to teach an editing course. Our comments in this section are mostly written to an introductory editing course, but generally apply to an advanced course.

The introduction to technical communication and editing courses set the foundations of a student’s understanding and eventual methods of editing practice. Additionally, the quality of the courses determines how well students adjust to editing in the workplace and how much time practitioners need to invest in training new employees. Workplace job structures are depreciating the editor’s role, especially the comprehensive edit. The basic editorial functionality has not changed, but the percentage of the workday spent on it has greatly decreased. Rather than having dedicated editors, the job has morphed into peer writer/editor jobs with writers being responsible for editing each other’s work. We can argue the validity of this workplace practice with respect to creating good texts, but regardless of our wishes, it reflects current reality. It remains a question of whether to try to incorporate this practice into the classroom or to teach as if the students are dedicated editors.

We must question—and empirically research—our current teaching methods. For instance, we should tackle some of the following research questions.

• How are students being taught to edit?

• Does the course include client projects? Does the course include strategies for managing clients?

• Are students being taught to edit texts from nonnative English speakers?

• Does the course include editing text that will undergo translation and localization? As St.Amant points out in Chapter 8, these texts require specific changes that often make no sense to a person seeing the text through a single-language lens.

• What do undergraduate and graduate editing courses look like? Does a student who takes them in different semesters find distinctively different courses or is the graduate course more or less a repeat of the undergraduate course? (Yes, we acknowledge that most technical and professional communication graduate programs do not require the students to have had an undergraduate editing course.)

• Is our definition of the editing course too narrow and should it include the broader functions a practicing editor is called upon to perform: document management, publishing management, coordinating revisions and reviews, etc.?

These initial questions point to additional research questions about the editing course, some of which Bridgeford and Melonçon explore in Chapter 4 and Chapter 9, respectively.

• Should we continue to teach print-based editing techniques, such as hard copy markup?

• Are the movement of text to content management systems and other online writing methods being taught? Effective editing here is not a direct transfer from paper editing.

• How does editing fit within collaborative writing? How are these practices being taught?

• Does the course include editing situations in which the editor doesn’t fully comprehend the material? There is no guarantee that the writer produced a coherent text that contains the proper content in the proper order. Even here an editor needs to make effective comments.

• How can students demonstrate their writing and editing skills to potential employers? How can programs provide opportunities for students to demonstrate these skills?

• How do we define editing across TC programs?

And then there is the question of learning and knowledge transfer. Technical editing discussions tend to focus on what we are teaching. The follow-on question of what students are actually learning is rarely addressed. If it is addressed, the answers tend to be anecdotes describing how animated and engaged students are in the class—which is definitely a good thing. Unfortunately, it is one thing to include a topic in a course, even one that gets the student engaged, and another for a student to be able to coherently discuss the topic after they complete the course. And something else again for them to know to apply it to a different situation.

Let’s look at three different ways an editing course could be taught. We realize that many courses are actually a mashup of these different ways.

Copyedit and Grammar Course

When students start an editing course, many assume they will be learning copyediting and risk being transformed into that person who gleefully covers pages in red ink.

They also think “editing” starts and ends with the copyedit. This, of course, is a holdover from the deeply ingrained prior knowledge—driven deep by high school and freshman composition—that editing equals proofreading just before submitting a paper. The use of “edit your work,” “copyedit your work,” and “proofread your work” as equivalent phrases does everyone a disservice and requires the student to unlearn material.

A copyedit-based course comes with a strong focus on grammar. In this format, many lectures may be devoted to discussing sentence structure and grammar, and the student probably does many worksheets, each of which addresses one type of grammar problem, such as “edit these sentences for proper tense.” The learning transfer from such worksheets is questionable (Crovitz & Devereaux, 2017; NCTE, 2008). A copyedit-based course typically has an overly academic editing focus with test questions such as “take this information and properly mark it for APA format.”

We also see deeper curricular issues. We agree that many students currently lack and can benefit from a deeper understanding of English grammar, but we question the big-picture pedagogy that transforms an editing course into a grammar course. A strict copyediting course teaches editing equals “make grammatically correct.” Of course, after editing, a document should have correct grammar, but if the overall document structure or content fails to communicate or fails to meet the users’ needs, then the end result is a worthless, but grammatically perfect document. In other words, the company, the authors, and the editors have wasted their time and money.

We could be guilty of creating a strawman argument in the previous paragraph, but we fear it is not as strawman as many of us wish it were. We’ve had too many conversations at Society for Technical Communication (STC) conferences with technical writers who consider it very important to go over a text multiple times to ensure there are positively no grammar errors (the content came from marketing or an engineer and the writer doesn’t worry about the accuracy—they just format what they are given—but the content must have perfectly written sentences). They admit lacking knowledge to judge the content, so they focus on grammar and layout. Worse, they don’t seem to care how, why, or even if their documents are used. Many of these writers see their job as taking text from programmers/engineers, cleaning up the grammar, and properly formatting it . . . end of task. Sadly, they have redefined technical communication as being a copyeditor/layout person.

From an industry perspective, someone hired as a full-time copyeditor is viewed as a clerical person. Why would we, tasked with educating people to receive a college degree, want to prepare our students for clerical jobs with minimal advancement potential, rather than for professional jobs that require symbolic-analytic knowledge work (Dicks, 2010; Johnson-Eilola, 2004)? When this happens at the graduate level, we see it as highly problematical.

Comprehensive Editing Course

The most important aspect—and most difficult to learn—of technical editing is learning how to evaluate a text at a level higher than a sentence level. In other words, how to perform a comprehensive edit. Learning to perform comprehensive editing is learning how to evaluate a text’s structure and analyze the ability of that structure to effectively communicate with the document’s audiences within their context. This ability is difficult to master because (1) most students are not technically knowledgeable in the subject or context, and (2) a document has audiences, plural noun, not an audience, singular noun.

One scenario to ask students to consider early in a class:

There is a single report on one single topic . . . One author’s take i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Author Biographies
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Editing in the Modern Classroom: An Overview
• 2 The Current State of Technical Editing Research and the Open Questions
• 3 “How Does That Make You Feel?” The Psychological Dimensions of Editorial Comments
• 4 Imagination as Agency: Communities of Practice and Editing Pedagogy
• 5 Teaching Editing through a Feminist Theoretical Lens
• 6 Editing for Human–Information Interaction
• 7 Concepts in Technical Editing Technologies: What’s Important in Practice?
• 8 Editing for International Audiences: An Overview
• 9 A Field-Wide View of Undergraduate and Graduate Editing Courses in Technical and Professional Communication Programs
• Index