GREENBERG: When the Editor Disappears, Does Editing Disappear?

Professional editors have long been aware of the mutability of text – it took the internet and computer editing software to make that more obvious to a wider audience.

POINTS from
When the Editor Disappears, Does Editing Disappear?
Susan Greenberg
Convergence 2010 16: 7
DOI: 10.1177/1354856509347695


The Shift of Editing to Author and Reader
A mixture of economic and technological changes in developed economies has resulted in a widespread outsourcing of labour, and alongside it a transfer of risk, from the producer or service provider to the consumer. Software that ‘enables’ the end-user to carry out many functions usually becomes a requirement that s/he do so, for cost reasons: to give a trivial example, many banks now expect customers to print out their own statements.
In book publishing, this transfer of risk has meant a shift in responsibility for editing, from in-house editors to freelance editors or agents, and ultimately, further down the chain, to the author. Very little in-house textual editing now takes place. The shift has prompted a wide-ranging debate, among both professional editors and book historians, as to why this has happened, the consequences it might have for quality, and how to respond. The debate is influenced by the fact that skilled human intervention is expensive, and the invisibility of editing makes its ‘added value’ very hard to quantify.11 Readers and authors can and do complain about the consequences of poor editing, but publishers measure themselves chiefly against their peers, and protests are unlikely to translate into action if the standards of all are sinking at the same rate.

With digital text, it can be argued that the shift of responsibility from publisher to author has continued moving down the chain, towards the reader him/herself. Originally, when reception theory made the case for the ‘active reader’, the reception was of a finished text and the ‘remaking’ took place in the mind only. With digital text, the reader can re-make the material in a literal sense. The most obvious example of this comes in the form of experimental fiction, which uses hyperlinks to allow (or oblige) the reader to construct his or her own bespoke narrative. And, with Wikipedia, the example has already been given of an endlessly changeable text, which never passes into a definitively ‘finished’ state.12 But even the most conventional online text is different from print, in that it is searchable, copy-able, and linkable. The reader can act on the text, at least in a fashion, in all three of the editing modes: selecting, shaping and linking. To this extent, any text available online is ‘unfinished’.


What is Editing?

Editing as a distinct activity or role tends to be pushed into the margins of our attention.
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To provide a clear and comprehensive basis for analysis, I have come up with my own working definition, based on both professional experience and a reading of the relevant literature. I argue that editing is a decision-making process, usually within the framework of a professional practice, which aims to select, shape and link content. The whole point of the exercise is to help deliver the meaning and significance of the work to its audience. I will look at that definition in more detail:

Process: Editing is part of a process, in the obvious sense that a text or image usually moves through a production cycle. But, like every other stage of text creation, it also has its own intrinsic decision-making process, and is part of a wider sense-making process.

Selection: The initial editing decision – what gets published or produced, and by whom – is not a passive activity. The editor is often involved in selecting or ‘finding’ the unifying idea (rhetoric’s ‘inventio’) and then commissioning someone else to develop it. Editing also exists in the list-building of a publisher; the creation of anthologies and series, and the assembling of a recognizable group of contributors. Even when the author has taken the initiative in proposing or producing a text, the idea may lack definition and the editor’s input makes it ‘selectable’ for the audience, lower down the chain. On the internet, brands operate as an ‘editor of choice’: people rely on the selection made by a particular website publisher that they like and trust. The content has the ‘imprimatur’, the authority that comes with the brand and its
reputation.3

Shaping: This concerns everything to do with changes to the content itself. In rhetoric, it is referred to as ‘dispositio’ (structure) and ‘elocutio’ (style), including the writing’s ‘voice’. If one holds to the idea of ‘pure’ authorial intention, these decisions are made by the author alone and editing changes are limited to the correction of mistakes. But in practice, drawing a line between the two is very difficult. And with ‘collective’ cultural artefacts, put together by many people – for example, a magazine, website, film radio or television programme – a distinctive voice is needed, and it is the person doing the editing who creates that effect.

Linking: Writing does not appear in a vacuum. It appears in a specific context: with a particular title, as a one-off or part of a series, on a particular page in a publication or internet domain, reached by a variety of navigation paths. Each context calls for a different set of decisions about how the material is selected, shaped or ‘repurposed’.
In new media, the linking is literal, and provides a key measure of value, as indicated by the number of other sites that link to and from the text. Some publishers provide extra information online, to compensate for the physically unmoored nature of the content: for example, readers of Guardian Online can access a ‘history’ of a specific text, including where it originated (in the newspaper or online) and the timing and rationale of any post-publication amendments.

This all happens, I contend, in a triangular relationship between the editor, the originator (the author for example), and the content itself – either text, image or sound. The content is in a state of ‘becoming’, rather than being a final, finished product. The author’s intentions matter to the editor, but the priority is to the text, to make it as good as it can be. To do this, the editor is asking the same questions as the author about the process of creation, but from the distance of a third party. This is certainly true when the text is being published for the first time: we can debate if it also applies in scholarly editing, when the work is being ‘remade’. And the process of ‘becoming’ applies as much to printed text as much as to material on the internet.

Professional editors have long been aware of the mutability of text – it took the internet and computer editing software to make that more obvious to a wider audience.