Reading Reflection #6
I thought that Rubinstein’s overall critique was well evidenced and supported, and felt more in line with how I feel about editing, although with much greater context. Towards the end of the article, she talks about a new path forward with copyediting, likening a revised and reimagined practice as a form of poetry. She writes about how this method is less concerned with every tiny detail, with rigorous rules and conventions, and more concerned with what each sentence and line means and is meant to evoke from the reader.
One of the pieces of her critique that I appreciated the most was the examination of what we know of as copyediting is rooted in, and the ways in which it contributes to systemic issues. I had not thought of this practice from this perspective, and it felt as though a lightbulb went off as I read her take here. There is something particularly inhuman in editing that is so firmly attached to its rules and structures, especially when humans often tend to find themselves in gray areas. The human experience doesn’t always fit inside the lines that we draw for ourselves, and the messy pieces of our existence make us who we are. Without this, we are sanitized versions of ourselves, and I think that this is true for the written word. This perfectionism, like she mentions in the article, not only removes some of the humanity that comes through with the mistakes that we make, but it is also rooted in white supremacy, effectively removing and silencing voices that do not linguistically fit into the boxes we create. While something that has been copyedited into oblivion may, by the standards of whiteness, be perfect in its composition and form, it has been removed of what makes it human, and of any other perspective or experience outside of the white cultural lens.
Another piece of her argument that resonated with me was how this perspective leads to an even more unbalanced power dynamic between the writer and the editor. She calls one end of the spectrum of edited “brute, insistent force”, and this illustrates how truly detrimental the rigidity and adherence to precedent can be. She goes on to discuss how these displays of force are often not truly about the corrections themselves, but instead about something deeper, something that could be (and seems as though it is) perceived as a personal affront. The copy editor is in a place of power, and with that place of power comes the expectations from those above to uphold the structure and rules that they have deemed appropriate and necessary for civility and normalcy to continue. By questioning or opposing these rules, the writer not only disregards the authority of the rules and where they come from, they also challenge the power and privilege that the editor has been given. When people feel threatened, they often react in these extreme ways, and this is no different in copyediting than it is as an elected official or police officer.
I think that one of the best things that this argument does is offer the reader, and hopefully the editor, a different perspective to see the practice from, and potentially a different framework to operate out of. If we can confront the harmful and inequitable places that we operate from, and work to break those patterns, we can change the way that we do things for the better. While this may seem more like a sociological issue, language at its core is a social function of our species, making it all the more important for us to consider the way that we engage with and use language, for better or for worse. This applies not just with the spoken and written words that we use, but with the way that we edit and alter them.
