A noble craft: authors’ editors and the ethics of collaborative sensemaking

A very full room enjoyed a lively panel discussion based on selected chapters from two books, Women Writing Socially in Academia (on academic writing as a social process) and Dialogic Editing in Academic and Professional Writing (on the communication ethics of editing), to which the panellists (Luigi Russi, Kate Sotejeff-Wilson, Theresa Truax-Gischler and Wendy Baldwin) had contributed.

The discussion began by considering biographical resonance: how panel members had reached the point where they are now, through collaboration, collegiality and communication ethics. The question “Why are you telling me this?” is central to how writers frame their stories.

Copy-editing concerns mostly technicalities, turning editors into (unwilling) “policers of the genre”. The antidote is developmental editing, which begins with the author’s stance and how they put their argument together. For authors’ editors, developmental discussions with authors are essential.

Taking time to let a difficult text filter, engaging in slow editing, can be considered an ethical and therefore radical act in the global publishing economy. Creating space, allowing yourself to not know, to recognize what one panellist called “useful friction”, leaves the editor open to hearing and understanding the author’s voice. Growling at the text is more ethical than growling at the author.

With very difficult, unclear passages – which, due to academics’ time constraints, may well have been written in a hurry or at night, and possibly in their fourth or fifth language – a good approach is to leave it after a few minutes, then come back to it when the unconscious has had time to work on it. One panellist noted that whatever authors have struggled with in a text, editors will struggle with too.

The panel then discussed the humanness of writing and editing. Editing work is “invisible” and needs acknowledgement. One way to achieve that is to get academic writers to try editing and translating for themselves, to show them what editors do.

Writing, editing and translating are by their nature lonely occupations, improved by dialogue between the people involved. Editors are often the first readers of a text, and it can be useful to meet the author in person or in groups. It is vital to be a good listener for the author, to befriend the text. Where an opaque text needs clarifying, the editor can point this out and help, as a colleague.

A member of the audience commented that this personal relationship is very important: there is a huge amount of fear, of impostor syndrome, and authors don’t give themselves enough credit. Providing a safe space for them, interactive and ethical, and building a relationship with them, creates a multilingual partnership that can lead to much richer writing.

Another comment suggested that, when the editor has been stuck on a section and thinks they have made sense of it, asking “Please confirm that this is your intended meaning” is an ethical procedure. Asking the author questions about sections of the text that do not make sense is where editors can add most value and may lead to authors rewriting the whole passage. Where a text is hard to understand, telling the author so and asking the right questions or making suggestions adds the vital human element.

To sum up, the editor or translator does not work in isolation; the process of editing and translation should be an ethical partnership with the author in order to produce a text that collaboratively communicates the author’s sensemaking to the reader.

This METM24 panel was chronicled by Charlotte Fleming.

Featured photo courtesy of MET.