But by the end of my five years [as a copy editor], I felt intellectually and psychologically worn down by the labor I logged on my biweekly timesheets. Whatever roller-rink of neurons helped me spot aberrations from convention had grown practiced and strong, and it was difficult to read any unconventional sentence without reflexively rearranging it into a more conventional form.
Something had shrunken and withered in me, for having directed so much of my attention away from the substance of the stories I read and into their surface. Few people in our office, let alone outside its walls, would notice the variation in line spacing, the fact that Jesusâ was lacking its last, hard âs,â or whatever other reason we were sending the proofs to be printed againâand if they did, who the fuck cared? [....]
I canât help wondering, though, whether there wasnât something insidious in the way we workedâsome poison in our many rounds of minute changes, in our strained and often tense conversations about ligatures and line breaks, in our exertions of supposedly benign, even benevolent, power; if those polite conversations constituted a covert, foot-dragging protest against change, an insistence on the quiet conservatism of the liberal old guard, and if they were a distraction from the conversations that might have brought meaningful literary or linguistic change about. In fact, I sense myself enacting the same foot-dragging here.
Itâs funâitâs dangerously pleasingâto linger in the minutiae of my bygone copyediting days, even if, by the time I left that job to teach college writing full-time, I was convinced that âcorrectingâ âerrorsâ of convention most readers would never notice was the least meaningful work a person could possibly do. Iâm writing this, however, to ask whether copyediting as itâs been practiced is worse than meaningless: if, in fact, it does harm.
Do we really need copyediting? I donât mean the basic clean-up that reverses typos, reinstates skipped words, and otherwise ensures that spelling and punctuation marks are as an author intends. Such copyediting makes an unintentionally âmessyâ manuscript easier to read, sure.
But the argument that texts ought to read âeasilyâ slips too readily into justification for insisting a text working outside dominant Englishes better reflect the English of a dominant-culture readerâthe kind of reader who might mirror the majority of those at the helm of the publishing industry, but not the kind of reader who reflects a potential readership (or writership) at large.
A few years before leaving copyediting, I began teaching a scholarly article I still read with students today, Lee A. Tonouchiâs âDa State of Pidgin Address.â Written in Hawaiâian Creole English, or Pidgin, it asks whether what âdey sayâ is true: âdat da perception is dat da standard english talker is going automatically be perceive foâ be moâ intelligent than da Pidgin talker regardless wot dey talking, jus from HOW dey talking.â The article leaves many students questioning the assumptions they began reading it with: its effect is immediate, personal, and profound.
In another article I pair it with, âShould Writers Use They Own English,â Vershawn Ashanti Young answers Tonouchiâs implicit question, writing, âdonât nobodyâs language, dialect, or style make them âvulnerable to prejudice.â Itâs ATTITUDES.â Racial difference and linguistic difference, Young reminds us, are intertwined, and âBlack English dont make it own-self oppressed.â
Itâs clear that copyediting as itâs typically practiced is a white supremacist project, that is, not only for the particular linguistic forms it favors and upholds, which belong to the cultures of whiteness and power, but for how it excludes or erases the voices and styles of those who donât or wonât perform this culture. Beginning with an elementary school teacherâs red pen, and continuing with agents, publishers, and university faculty who on principle turn away work that arrives on their desk in unconventionally grammatical or imperfectly punctuated form, voices that donât mimic dominance are muffled when they get to the page and also before they get thereâas schools, publishers, and their henchmen entrench the idea that those writing outside convention are not writing âwell,â and therefore ought not set their voices to paper at all. [...]
Like other emissaries of the powerful (see, e.g., the actual police), copy editors often wield what power they do have unpredictably, teetering between generous attention and brute, insistent force. You saw this in the way our tiny department got worked up over the stubbornness of an editor or author who had dug in their heels: their resistance was a threat, sometimes to our suspiciously moral-feeling attachment to âcorrectness,â sometimes to our aesthetics, and sometimes to our sense of ourselves. [...]
Thereâs a flip side, if itâs not already obvious, to the peculiar ârespectâ I received in that dusty closet office at twenty-two. A 2020 article in the Columbia Journalism Review refers casually to âfusspot grammarians and addled copy editorsâ; Iâm not the only one who imagines the classic copy editor as uncreative, neurotic, and cold.
I want to say theyâre the publishing professionals most likely, in the cultural imagination, to be female, but that doesnât feel quite right: agents and full-on editors are female in busty, sexy ways, while copy editors are brittle, unsexed. Their labor nevertheless shares with other typically female labors a concern with the small and the surface, those aspects of experience many of us are conditioned to dismiss.
Iâm willing to bet, too, that self-professed âgrammar snobsâ rarely come from power themselvesâthat there is a note of aspirational literariness in claiming the identity as such. [...]
It makes me wonder if, in renouncing my job when I left itâin calling copyediting the worldâs least meaningful workâI might have been reenacting some of the literary sceneâs most entrenched big-dick values: its insistence on story over surface (what John Gardner called the âfictional dreamâ), on anti-intellectualism but also the elitist cloak of it-can-never-be-taught. The grammar snobâs aspiration and my professorâs condescension bring to mind the same truism: that real power never needs to follow its own rules. [...]
Copyediting shares with poetry a romantic attention to detail, to the punctuation mark and the ordering of words. To treat someone elseâs language with that fine a degree of attention can be an act of love. Could there be another way to practice copyeditingâless attached to precedent, less perseverating, and more eagerly transgressive; a practice that, to distinguish itself from the quietly violent tradition from which it arises, might not be called âcopyeditingâ at all; a practice that would not only âpermitâ but amplify the potential for linguistic invention and preservation in any written work?
--- Against Copyediting: Is It Time to Abolish the Department of Corrections? Helen Betya Rubinstein on Having Power Over More Than Just Commas
