One of us (Alex) trained in philosophy, so it is natural that we apply some of this training to refining our editing work. Today, we’ll run through a gentle example of how this works.
Philosophy
Very briefly, philosophy is inquiry into the big questions of life. It’s traditionally broken down into four sub-fields: ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, and metaphysics. Ethics concerns how we should live. Aesthetics concerns the nature of experience: sensation, feeling, beauty, ugliness. Epistemology concerns the nature of knowledge. Metaphysics asks how things are in the most general sense: what exists, what doesn’t, how are different kinds of things related to each other, what things are, and so on. All four fields are linked, and rivers of ink have been spilled debating them in sometimes absurdly intricate detail.
Philosophers usually proceed by taking a simple question and making it horrendously complex in the hope that grinding through the complexity will give us deeper, hard-won simplicity. When this goes well it is satisfying, but often it doesn’t go so well. So be warned!
Recently, we found ourselves wondering where the ethical line is between editing a client’s work and doing the writing for them. We are committed to avoiding even the suggestion that we do our clients’ writing for them. so it’s important to get clear on where the line is. Sometimes people approach us quite indirectly to do the writing for them, and we aim to be very direct with our boundaries.
There’s a simple answer here, of course. Skilled and ethical editors know the line, and the line is applied on a case-by-case basis. But this isn’t a satisfying general account. And without a general account, the odds of being taken in by an indirect approach increase. So (Alex thinks), some philosophy might help here!
Meaning, Form, and Surface Form
When it comes to any piece of writing, we can distinguish three levels at which editors engage it. The deepest of these is meaning: what the author intends to convey through writing. The second level is form. It packages the meaning. Form indicates the way the sentences work together (or not) to convey the meaning. An author might know exactly what they mean, yet if the form is inadequate, the reader will not get the meaning. The third level is surface form. This involves the stylistic details of punctuation, word choice, and the like to emphasize shades of the meaning and the form. This is the level that’s easiest to clean up, since if meaning and form are clear, improving surface form is a matter of polishing the writing.
Much more could be said here, and the editor blogosphere and twittersphere are filled with endlessly nuanced analysis. For our purposes, editors typically work on the second and third levels, but not the first. Where the meaning is clear we polish the form and surface form to convey meaning as directly as possible. Where meaning is unclear, we offer suggestions about what we take the author to have meant—and here we have to acknowledge guesswork much of the time.
There is one important gray area in this scheme having to do with non-native writers in English. With non-native speakers, sometimes unclear meanings are a function of not having thought the idea through, but other times there is a clear idea that happens to be executed in a slightly garbled way, usually because of still-developing grasp of surface form. In those situations, it is not always clear how much filling-in of meaning an editor should do.
Our solution is to restrict ourselves to offering suggestions and comments in this situation. The one exception here is if there are discernible patterns of divergence in surface form that are characteristic of the non-native speaker’s native language. An experienced specialized editor usually has a good grasp of these. For example, subject-verb agreement is often not a salient feature for many speakers of Mandarin, and errors persist even in fluent English writing. Or for people who come to English from more case-marked languages often order their words slightly oddly.
So, after having complicated the boundary between proper editing (working with form) and improper editing (changing or inserting meaning), we have returned to simplicity. We editors shouldn’t touch meaning; we should offer suggestions according to our best judgment. And maybe going somewhat deep has made it a little more clear what meaning is. (If you’re interested in going deeper, the question of the meaning of meaning is wide open. Fair warning!)