Over the last two months, I’ve begun copyediting for the APA Blog, and I’ve also begun the last course for my copyediting certificate, offered by UC San Diego Extended Studies. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how to edit academic writing to be clear and even stylish.
In this post, I’ll explain how I do this in a heavy copyedit, the kind of edit in which I revise sentences to remove redundancy, improve clarity, and ensure they still convey the author’s ideas. At the APA Blog, in contrast, I’m doing light copyedits, only making changes for mechanical errors or genuinely ambiguous sentences. I don’t typically suggest or implement changes like the ones I’ll talk about below.
(Before I start, I should note that I learned a lot about academic style from Helen Sword’s Stylish Academic Writing, a book I recommend to academics and academic editors.)
When I’m editing academic writing for clarity and style, I’ll typically do three things that are interrelated:
- Remove unnecessary nominalizations.
- Revise lengthy strings of prepositions, especially ones that connect abstract nouns.
- Restructure nested that-clauses.
These three things often come together, as we see in this made-up example: “The nonproduction of perception of the object that is due to the subtlety of that object is that from which false beliefs about the nonexistence of the object arise.”
This sentence essentially means: “Because we don’t perceive an object, since it is too small for the naked eye, we falsely believe it doesn’t exist.”
Now, in an academic context, rewriting the entire sentence in the way I just glossed it may not be an option. That’s because sometimes nominalizations like “nonproduction” play a technical role. This is one challenge of academic editing: knowing when to query the author, when to intervene, and when to leave good enough alone! (“It just sounds better to me” is never justification for an edit on its own.)
I made up the example sentence based on an old translation I was reading recently (it’s not from any of my clients or colleagues). There, “nonproduction of perception” is a technical phrase. In philosophical Sanskrit, which loves nominalizations, it would be the subject of the sentence. And so, there could be a reason to preserve this phrase as the subject rather than turning it into a verbal form (“we don’t perceive”). The author may wish to emphasize that there is a thing, nonproduction of perception, that has some causal force. But there may also be versions between the original example and the rewritten sentence that would preserve technical terms and make the sentence clearer for readers.
(By the way, I’m treating the sentence as an example of academic writing. Editing translations involves fidelity to the source material, not just authorial intention, and it involves an additional set of considerations.)
So, if I’m unsure whether a revision would impact a technical term, I will query the author. That means adding a comment bubble with a request for them to review the edit. Doing that too often is cognitively taxing for the author. But not asking can convey that I am just rewriting however I like, without concern for their intentions or consideration for their voice.
The three changes I’ve mentioned, though, can be ways to ensure the author’s meaning comes through clearly. When the reader can easily appreciate the logical subject and its relationship to the rest of the sentence, they can track the argument. There are many ways to do this, of course. And an editor’s revisions are only suggestions.
Still, sometimes a revision can prompt an author to rethink something. Even in my light copyediting for the APA Blog, when I’ve queried authors about ambiguous or ungrammatical sentences, they will sometimes propose a different rewrite that’s better than mine. That’s not surprising. It’s their ideas, after all. I’m just there to help them come across clearly.