Reply: Levels of edit

[Geoff Hart <geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

     Audrey Choden wrote: <<I had never heard of the Levels of Edit concept
     before. Could someone enlighten me? I need a reference...>>

     Here are two references:
     1. Donald Samson Jr. 1993. Editing technical writing. Oxford Univ.
     Press
     2. William O. Coggin and Lynnette R. Porter. 1993. Macmillan
     Publishing Company.

     Here's the quickie explanation, though: When you edit, you can do
     anything from (most simplistically) checking only the spelling to (in
     most detail) rewriting every last sentence so that it is as nearly
     perfect as human frailties permit. The more time you have, and the
     more permissive your client (the author), the nearer you will come to
     the latter extreme. Most real-world editing, done under heavy time
     pressure, falls somewhere in between, with the goal being (i) to avoid
     embarrassing typos and other obvious errors and (ii) to reword
     anything that the reader won't be able to figure out without
     considerable thought.
        "Levels of edit" per se strikes me as an artificial concept, since
     I always tailor my editing approach to the individual job and author.
     But in some organisations, where the relationship between author and
     editor is more formal (or the environment is more production oriented
     and less collaboration oriented), the concept seems to serve very
     well. To me, the real problem is that assigning a fixed level of edit
     assumes that the author (or program manager) knows more about the
     manuscript than the editor does; in my experience, this is never the
     case. If it were, we probably wouldn't need editors because the
     authors would do their own corrections (or the program managers would
     return the drafts for revision because they were unsuitable). Note:
     Before I get flamed by the publications managers out there, let me
     reiterate that I said "program managers" (the author's boss), not
     publications managers. The latter, often being editors themselves, may
     be sufficiently involved in the production process to be able to
     characterize a manuscript correctly. Even so, I say leave the work to
     the editor.
     --Geoff Hart  #8^{)}