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4
e delicate art of commenting:
Exploring dierent approaches to editing
and their implications for the author-
editor relationship1
Oliver Shaw and Sabrina Voss
1. Introduction1
e premium placed on English-medium international publications for career
advancement in academia has been widely documented, and this virtual English-only
playing eld creates a substantial burden for academics who are non-native English
speakers [NNES] (Belcher, 2007; Lillis & Curry, 2010; Sheldon, 2011; Uzuner, 2008).
While NNES scholars are widely published in many scientic journals and acceptance
rates for these academics are similar to those of native-English-speaking authors (Beneld
& Feak, 2006; Burrough-Boenisch, 2003; Ferguson, 2007; Kourilova, 1998), this success
often comes at a substantial cost in terms of eort, time and other resources (Curry &
Lillis, 2004; Huang, 2010; Swales, 1990; Tardy, 2004). Many scientists who wish to
publish in international journals seek language support for their manuscripts, although
the availability of these services can vary substantially depending on the researcher’s
location, network of international researchers available to assist them, availability of
1 is chapter is based on a presentation given at the October 2015 meeting of Mediterranean
Editors and Translators in Coimbra, Portugal.
72 • Publishing Research in English as an Additional Language
funds, and other factors. Assistance can come from individuals in researchers’ personal
or professional environments, and the background and experience of these facilitators
may vary widely (Burrough-Boenisch, 2003; Lillis & Curry, 2010; Shashok, 2001).
Professional language support provided to NNES researchers who have access to
such services may come in a variety of forms. While some authors have their manuscripts
translated into English from their mother tongue, others call on collaborators to improve
texts already drafted in English. is type of work has been described using a number of
terms, including revising, proofreading and editing, with each term subject to a range
of interpretations. For the sake of simplicity, we will refer to the process of improving
written work as editing, and its practitioners as editors.
1.1. Factors influencing approach and orientation in editing
When presented with English language research papers, editors may take any one of
a number of approaches that reect the many constraints inherent to the author, the
editor, the context of their collaboration, the type and quality of the original draft,
and the explicit and perceived relationship between the two. Some institutions hire in-
house editors to support sta researchers in their attempts to publish their papers. ese
institutional editors may be found in a number of private and public organisations,
including universities, hospitals, research institutes, national and international agencies,
and a range of enterprises. e responsibilities of these salaried employees are often clearly
outlined in institutional guidelines (Shashok, 2001), although, as in the case of one of
the co-authors of this chapter, this remit is sometimes developed more organically over
time, evolving through practice. In recent years, more and more editors have established
themselves as freelancers, working with clients who pay them to collaborate on specic
projects with no lasting contractual obligation to the author or the author’s institution
(Shashok, 2001). ough working toward the same goal of improving English language
manuscripts to meet the requirements of journal gatekeepers, these two types of editor
must align themselves to very dierent loyalties due to their physical circumstances, with
the in-house editor answering to the administrators of the institution that employs both
the service provider and client, while the freelance editor maintains a more exible yet
fragile relationship with each client in their portfolio and experiences greater exposure
to changes in clients’ circumstances and satisfaction with the work done.
Editors come from diverse backgrounds: some have previous experience in the
author’s eld, while others enter the profession with expertise in language teaching,
translation and linguistics, among others. Subject knowledge may sometimes limit how
an editor can intervene in a text (Burrough-Boenisch, 2002; Flowerdew, 2000; Mišak,
Marušić & Marušić, 2005; Willey & Tanimoto, 2012), although in some circumstances,
NNES authors prefer for editors to be from other backgrounds (Flowerdew, 2000).
Beyond this insider-outsider dichotomy, certain studies on the inuence of content
Publishing Research in English as an Additional Language • 73
knowledge and language expertise on successful NNES writing have found that it is more
advantageous for both scientic peers and language professionals to collaborate in the
editing process (Beneld & Feak, 2006) as non-scientists’ lack of eld knowledge may
make them better equipped to evaluate whether the ideas expressed in the manuscript
come across eectively (Willey & Tanimoto, 2012).
e initial quality of NNES writing can also impact the degree to which editors
intervene in texts. While some editing tasks involve fairly straightforward improvements
of syntax, orthography, punctuation and other issues, other papers require much broader
reworking or rewriting to overcome shortcomings in discourse and rhetoric (Burrough-
Boenisch, 2003; Shashok, 2001). Although editors are most often expected to orient
exclusively toward language, it is nearly impossible for them to draw a clean line between
linguistic form and content (Flowerdew, 2000; Lillis & Curry, 2006), and this may
increase the invasiveness required to improve manuscripts (Bisaillon, 2007). Studies on
language facilitation have found that these higher-order problems with writing require
great time and eort due to the uncertainty caused when the editor must try to discern
the author’s intended meaning or when attempting to improve ow between sentences
(Li & Flowerdew, 2007). is raises the question of whether a substantial gap in an
author’s writing prociency can be remedied by a language services provider (Harwood,
Austin & Macaulay, 2009).
1.2. Previous research on language facilitation
To better understand the work carried out by editors and the way in which they orient
their services to texts, a number of studies have analysed the act of editing from a variety
of perspectives. Much of this scholarship has examined self-editing, and less is known
about the ways in which providers of language support orient themselves to texts (see
Bisaillon, 2007, for an overview). Some studies have based their analyses either fully or
partially on the work done in writing centres and other institutional contexts (Koyalan
& Mumford, 2011; Li & Flowerdew, 2007; Ventola & Mauranen, 1991; Willey &
Tanimoto, 2012), oering certain insights on intervention strategies despite the fact
that some of the data come from writing support provided to university students rather
than academics (Harwood et al., 2009). Outside of academic contexts, some of the
research looking at the impact of editors on texts has been based on genres other than
strictly academic work, including ‘journalese’ (Yli-Jokipii & Jorgensen, 2004).
In addition to the socio-cultural context in which editing takes place, some studies
on practice have examined a number of linguistic and textual features, while others
have observed the phenomenon of editing and self-revision from a wider perspective.
Searching to classify changes related to register, Koyalan and Mumford (2011) observed
ve dierent intervention types concerned with nominalisation, subordination, non-
nite clauses, prepositional phrases as post-modiers, and noun premodication.
74 • Publishing Research in English as an Additional Language
Others, however, adopt a broader perspective, as in the case of Knorr-Cetina (1981),
whose work tracked and categorised changes across dierent versions of a single academic
publication, nding two categories of changes geared toward content — deletion and
reshuing — and one category foregrounding rhetoric (that is, changes in modality).
Gosden (1995) later expanded on Knorr-Cetina’s work, studying seven dierent texts
produced by novice NNES writers of research articles from rst draft to nal draft by
examining the redrafting along the arc of each text and also taking into account more
substantive modications that are made during text production. Gosden concluded that
aside from deletion and reshuing, the writers who contributed texts to his corpus also
added technical detail, polished language (generally below the clause level), and engaged
in what Swales refers to as ‘rhetorical machining’ (1990) — that is, altering discourse
structure, modifying claims, and carrying out changes related to purpose.
For their part, Willey and Tanimoto (2012) used an abstract written by a novice
NNES academic writer to perform a comparative study of intervention patterns among
four groups, comprising inexperienced and experienced editors of academic medical
texts from outside the medical profession, scientists working within the medical
profession, and a control group.eir analysis grouped these interventions into seven
dierent categories: rewriting, recombining, mechanical changes, substitution, deletion,
reordering and addition. Lastly, in their multi-year text-ethnographic study of the
genesis and development of academic texts by NNES writers, Lillis and Curry (Curry &
Lillis, 2010; Lillis & Curry, 2006) have found the interventions of ‘language brokers’ to
vary in terms of involvement, ranging from the sentence level to deeper issues specic
to the author’s academic eld, with language professionals focusing more on textual
surface issues and academic professionals showing a greater tendency to rework content
for journal audiences.
One aspect of particular interest in the aforementioned paper by Willey and
Tanimoto is their inclusion of consultation points signalled by editors when revising. To
study this approach to problematic stretches in texts, the authors examined all points
marked by editors for clarication in face-to-face meetings with authors, calculating
both the frequency with which these points arose across the dierent groups of editors
and the characteristics that sparked this uncertainty, thus allowing for a more precise
description of textual hurdles as perceived by dierent types of revisers and the decisions
they made to address these diculties. is entry point into the editing process resembled
the ndings of Bisaillon (2007) and, especially, Flower (as cited in Willey & Tanimoto,
2012), who concluded that when confronted with such problems, editors may revise
when the problem is well dened, rewrite the problematic part of the text based on gist,
delay action/search for a solution, or ignore the problem.
Publishing Research in English as an Additional Language • 75
1.3. ‘Unfinished business’ in edited text and its relevance to the author-editor
relationship
One editing strategy that is particularly illustrative of how editors respond to the many
factors inherent to the editor-author relationship is the author query. Unlike direct
interventions in texts, where authors are invited to either accept or reject the proposed
edit, the interactions we are referring to often appear as margin comments (Ventola &
Mauranen, 1991). e actions requested in these comments vary substantially and may
call on the author to conrm the editor’s supposition, revise a problematic passage, review
the edited passage with particular care, or reconsider broader aspects of the paper as a
whole, among others. e signals transmitted by these comments can be an indication
of what Burrough-Boenisch refers to as editor assertiveness (2003) and, by extension,
how the editor views their relationship with the author. When this stance toward the
author is contextualised against the backdrop of the editor’s working arrangement with
the author — be it freelance or in-house — new insights on this relationship can come
into focus.
e authors of this chapter — an in-house editor and a freelance editor — carried
out a comparative intervention study to explore their respective approaches to revising
NNES texts. In performing this analysis, we were particularly interested in seeing
where our dierent styles of editing might lead us to either intervene directly in the
text or defer responsibility, urging the author to revisit particular passages in light of
our comments or questions. As in the Willey and Tanimoto study, these consultation
points often signalled problems within the text, at times encouraging the author to take
action, although margin comments could also be intended to educate the author about
language, the genre of the research article, or other issues related to academic literacy.
By examining the nature of these messages for the author and the editing work they
reect, we sought to describe the way in which we oriented toward the text, and to map
these approaches against the categories of literacy brokers described by Lillis and Curry
(2006). We thus aimed to illustrate the way in which we moved along a continuum
between supercial copyediting at one extreme and highly substantive editing at the
other.
2. Methods
We each chose a set of three research articles written by a single past or current client
and sent to us for editing. Each of the two authors we selected had drafted and
prepared their three respective research articles for submission to biomedical journals
as original contributions following the IMRD format (introduction, methods, results
and discussion), and each had published. After obtaining written consent from both
authors to participate anonymously, we chose what we believed to be a particularly
rich section from each text for the purposes of this study because of its comparatively
76 • Publishing Research in English as an Additional Language
high concentration of margin comments, sending both the original text and our edited
version to the other co-author. Each editor then blindly edited this section, replicating as
closely as possible the editing approach used in their regular practice with such authors
and making comments to the author as per usual. When performing this experimental
edit, the entire text was made available in order to provide the normal range of resources
(for example, references, tables) to carry out a complete revision.
Once these experimental edits were performed, the six sets of two edited texts were
examined both quantitatively and qualitatively. First, the total number of comments
made by each of the two researchers was calculated to determine each editor’s tendency to
make such comments as evidenced in the three-article sample. en, each text segment
that had triggered commentary by one editor was studied to establish whether the second
editor had also remarked on the passage or, alternatively, had opted to propose changes
directly in the text or make no change or commentary. While direct interventions in the
text constitute a potentially rich focus of inquiry, they were disregarded if both editors
had proposed changes to the same passage as the study was concerned with the specic
implications of comments and not with the nature or quality of direct interventions.
All observations were evaluated qualitatively to classify the eld of knowledge
applied by the editor in each case. ese assignments were made according to the four
dierent orientations found by Lillis and Curry (2006) — that is, sentence-level edits,
knowledge content and claims, discipline-specic discourse, and target-publication
concerns. As a second step, all instances in which one or both editors included a margin
comment were assessed to codify the strategy used by the editor when faced with passages
that were problematic enough to warrant further communication with the author. For
both of these analytical procedures, all comments made in a single paper were placed
sequentially in tables containing three columns: the comments of the original editor,
those of the second editor, and analytical ndings arrived at by comparing the two sets
of results. e analyses were discussed by the two authors of this chapter to arrive at a
consensus on the goals behind these comments.
3. Results
e results of the study revealed signicant dierences in terms of involvement in the
text, didacticism and diplomacy. e rst of these dierences was seen in commenting
frequency. While the in-house editor showed a greater tendency to use comments to ag
passages requiring improvement, the freelance editor was substantially more likely to
make considerable changes directly in the text, even when doing so involved extensive
research in order to decipher the author’s intended meaning. As shown in Table4.1, the
in-house editor made margin comments three times as frequently as the freelance editor.
Publishing Research in English as an Additional Language • 77
Article Comments by in-house editor
in a single paragraph
Comments by freelance editor
in a single paragraph
1 8 6
2 5 2
3 6 3
4 9 2
5 19 3
6 9 3
mean 9.3 3.2
Table 4.1: Total number of margin comments made by each editor in the selected paragraph
of each article. The mean number of comments appears in the bottom row.
Turning now to the perceived deciencies or other issues that sparked these
comments, the editors made observations on 62 text fragments, consisting of single
words, terms, clauses, sentences, or even stretches of text comprising more than one
sentence. Twelve of these passages (that is, 19%) saw both editors writing remarks in
the margin, although in many of the remaining comments the editor who intervened
directly rather than indirectly did so to address the same problem perceived by the other
editor. An example of this divergent approach to resolving the same diculty appears
in the three excerpts appearing below. e text highlighted for commentary by the in-
house editor appears in italics.
Original text Comment from in-house
editor
Direct intervention by
freelance editor with no
comment made
It is known that the Cln3
levels are controlled by the
phosphorylation state of its
destruction box, the PEST
region, by Cdk1, and the
subsequent proteosomal
degradation.
Parallel grammar. When I
read a list like this, ‘by’ tells
me that I’m at a new item.
How many items are in this
list? Revise.
It is known that the Cln3
levels are controlled by the
phosphorylation state of the
destruction box, or PEST
region, through Cdk1, with
subsequent proteasomal
degradation.
Table 4.2: Passage from a text illustrating the different approaches taken by the in-house
editor and the freelance editor.
78 • Publishing Research in English as an Additional Language
Detecting the same error in the original, the two editors take dierent paths to solve
the problem. While the in-house editor chooses to ag the problem, the freelance editor
assumes responsibility to both detect and remedy the error.
When the 62 passages that elicited editor commentary were analysed and coded to
establish the orientation of the editor in the comment, we found 78 instances of these
messages. Most of these remarks were aimed at just one of the four categories, although
some comments were assigned two, as in the following comment in which the freelance
editor intervened directly by proposing a change to the text and also explained how, if
accepted, the change in the text had implications beyond the section of the manuscript
where the fragment was found.
Original text Freelance editor’s proposed edit Commentary on the edit
21 paired samples were
analysed by western blot and
it was found 10/21 (48%)
showed UNR overexpression
while 1/21 (4%) presented
downregulation.
Western blot analysis
revealed that 10 out of 21
pairs (48%) showed UNR
overexpression while 1 out
of 21 pairs (4%) presented
downregulation.
You need to rst explain
that only 21 of the 31
samples underwent western
blot analysis, if that is the
case, both here and in the
methods section.
Table 4.3: Passage in which the freelance editor made a correction to the text and added a
margin comment.
In addition to proposing a change to the text, the freelance editor defers responsibility
to the author to explain more clearly the concepts conveyed in this sentence and also
displays sensitivity to genre issues here and beyond.
e most common type of margin comment had to do with sentence-level issues
(50), followed by discipline-specic discourse (6), target-publication concerns (6), and
knowledge content and claims (3). Many of the comments addressing sentence-level
issues were concerned with writing clarity, terminology, and other aspects in which
the editors brought their language expertise to bear on the text, either after having
researched possible solutions to the problem or not. Comments addressing discipline-
specic discourse referenced citation practices, discourse-level ow beyond the sentence
level, genre appropriateness, and other issues interpreted as limiting the text’s degree
of adaptation to the genre of the research article. Remarks made by the two editors
regarding target-publication concerns urged the authors to consult the journals’
standards for citing works in the literature, use of abbreviations, and warnings on what
could constitute copy-paste writing and be interpreted as plagiarism. Lastly, references
to knowledge content and claims challenged the author to review certain passages where
the editor believed the ideas conveyed by the text contradicted scientic fact. Here, it
is of interest to note both that all three of these comments were made by the in-house
Publishing Research in English as an Additional Language • 79
editor, and that the analysis we undertook during the research for this chapter showed
them all to be unfounded.
One salient dierence revealed during this study was in the way margin comments
represented both the editor-author relationship and the role played by the editor in
improving the text. To assess possible dierences in editing style in general and,
in particular, the correspondence embodied in margin comments, we analysed all
comments that were related to sentence-level or paragraph-level problems, coming up
with a four-category system to describe what action was requested of the author.
Author action indicated in editor
comment
In-house editor Freelance editor
Responsibility deferred to author; no
change proposed
26 (57.8%) 1 (6.7%)
Conrmation of proposed edit made in
text
4 (9%) 5 (33.3%)
Conrmation of proposed edit with no edit
in text (e.g., Do you mean … ?)
11 (24.4%) 6 (40%)
Comment refers to edit made directly in
text or edit required; evidence mentioned
or provided in comment
4 (9%) 3 (20%)
TOTAL 45 15
Table 4.4: Types of author action requested in margin comments targeting sentence-level or
paragraph-level problems detected by the in-house editor and the freelance editor.
e four categories of editorial strategies appear in Table4.4, along with the frequency
of each strategy and the percentage of all comments made by each editor. As can be
seen, the rst category of editor comment — in which the editor encourages the author
to rewrite the text — was used with much greater frequency by the in-house editor.
ese comments included indications that the original text was dicult to comprehend,
which in some instances was marked only with question marks, comments such as
‘I don’t follow this’, or other remarks agging problematic passages but not oering
alternatives. Interventions of this nature approach the text from a distance, with the
editor implicating themself only to detect language requiring improvement and, at
times, to comment on the problems, though without venturing any possible solution.
Regarding the second category of comments requesting conrmation of direct
interventions, both editors made use of this strategy, although the freelance editor did
so with greater frequency. is tactic is used by both to signal direct interventions in
80 • Publishing Research in English as an Additional Language
the text in which the editor, having doubts as to whether they interpreted the author’s
meaning accurately, invites the author to evaluate the proposed edit for conceptual
accuracy.
When oering alternatives to the author to improve a text without including
such edits in the text proper, the freelance editor was much more inclined than the
in-house editor to use the third category, clarifying the gist of the passage by oering
an alternative. In interventions like these, proposals are most often phrased in terms
of ‘Do you mean … ?’, as recommended in e Chicago Manual of Style (section 2.66).
is strategy is more diplomatic, as it simultaneously highlights a problem and provides
a solution while avoiding a critical or otherwise potentially oensive tone. Commenting
on problems in the text without oering actionable solutions may lead to lengthy,
dicult-to-invoice queries in order to negotiate the intended meaning of the author,
if not the comment itself. e freelancer must weigh carefully the extra time spent
researching content in order to get the edit right against the time that might be spent
on follow-up queries, emails or phone calls from the client if a simple highlighting
comment had been used. As stated earlier, time spent on follow-up is perhaps less of an
issue for the in-house editor, who is not often approached after delivery of the work and
who, in any case, receives a regular salary.
In the fourth of these categories, the editor comments on direct interventions in
the text or indicates possible solutions to the problem. ough this strategy is similar
to those used in the second and third categories, here the editor either mentions his or
her justication for the intervention or provides evidence that the author may consult,
often in the form of a hyperlink to a Google search or a specic paper in the literature
where the author may nd alternative ways of conveying ideas using more appropriate
language. In the six texts studied, the freelance editor tended to refer to linguistic usage
‘in the literature’, indicating to their client that this assessment had been informed by
research into the topic. e in-house editor, in contrast, opted to use hyperlinks so that
the author could consult actual examples of the issues highlighted for commentary.
Examining the two professionals’ work broadly, the observed use of comments to
direct self-correction in in-house editing reects a more didactic approach at this stage
of the process, which is associated with the fact that few in-house clients meet with
the editor to discuss their papers. When deciencies noted in the text would require
either highly specialised eld knowledge to interpret the intended meaning or lengthy
searches in the literature, feedback of this nature not only shortens the time required
to revise the text but also invites authors to rewrite these passages, thereby creating
the opportunity for them to identify their own weaknesses and act on them. Indeed,
in certain comments the in-house editor extends this practice even further by clearly
indicating a more appropriate alternative to excerpts containing errors, placing these
comments deliberately in the margin for the author to type in themself. e freelance
editor, in contrast, often reserves remarks like this for face-to-face conferences held
Publishing Research in English as an Additional Language • 81
throughout the process of editing and revising, most often when working together for
the rst time in a designated coaching session. e freelancer may also have to ‘read’
the client and determine whether such added-value services, like teaching, are welcome.
As mentioned above, there was a marked dierence in the way each editor treated
a situation in which two forms of English, US and UK, were being mixed, a sign that
could raise suspicion of plagiarism or micro-plagiarism. In this instance, the freelance
editor made no comment and revised the entire manuscript according to one variant of
English, while the in-house editor clearly stated that such a mistake could be taken as a
red ag by the journal gatekeepers. In situations like this, the freelance editor proceeds
with caution, opting to edit the text without mentioning this potentially delicate subject.
Meanwhile, the in-house editor, whose only employer is the institution, did not feel the
need to be quite so concerned about the author taking exception to such remarks. is
example highlights how freelancers must nurture more carefully the working relationship
with the author, exercising greater diplomacy than in-house editors.
4. Conclusion
In this comparative intervention study of two professional editors’ approaches to
biomedical editing for NNES authors, we have examined the way in which an in-house
editor and a freelance editor interact with texts and with their author-clients. Taking
margin comments as key data points and situating these comments within writing
intended for international publication, we show how dierent approaches can be taken
when problem areas in texts require communication with the author. e interventions
we made during this study were rst examined according to a framework that follows
in the tradition of Lillis and Curry (2006) and then evaluated using a t-for-purpose
empirical scheme that classied the particular calls to action conveyed by these messages.
To our knowledge, no previous studies have examined this para-textual correspondence
produced during the editing process, choosing rather to focus on language facilitators’
contributions to writing from the vantage point of the nished product.
In revising the texts, we activated a varied set of knowledge and skills. ese
interventions were mostly applications of linguistic knowledge, helping the author
to produce error-free English to the extent of our abilities. Knowledge of the genre
of the research article was also evident in our revisions, although because of the text-
wide implications of genre and other discourse-related features, contributions aimed at
helping the author produce discoursally eective texts is a substantially more ambitious
project, albeit one that other editors may undertake by accompanying authors more
closely as they design research, perform experiments, and then draft their texts (Kerans,
2013). As we are not members of the authors’ discourse communities, our interventions
reected less control over eld knowledge, and we deferred these matters to our author-
clients. We attempted to compensate for this lack of expertise by researching problematic
passages in the literature, although we have seen how the freelance editor was more
82 • Publishing Research in English as an Additional Language
inclined to invest in this eort than the in-house editor. We compensated for potential
areas of incorrect interpretation of the authors’ intended meaning by using a number
of strategies, which included calls for the authors to conrm reformulated text, queries
requesting the scholars to indicate whether the gist was what we understood it to be,
indications of problematic language with little or no further commentary, and other
remarks which sought to focus the authors’ attention on the clarity or appropriateness of
certain stretches of text. In employing these tactics at dierent points in the articles, we
displayed sensitivity to both the many levels on which language works and the diculty
of isolating linguistic form and scientic content.
e dierences highlighted in this study in terms of author involvement and time
devoted to the text, didactic editing as an opportunity to both educate the author and
defer responsibility, and diplomacy in the relationship with the author are an indication
not only of personal style but also of the way in which each editor manages the constraints
of their situation. Editors adapt their methods to factors such as their expected output
and the number of projects they are obliged to, or able to, take on; the implications
of this output on the protability of their work; the loyalties they must honour when
collaborating with authors; and the explicit or implicit remit they are given. Freelancers
strive to maximise their time because of the implications of output on their nancial
bottom line, while also maintaining relations with the clients who entrust them with
their work and holding themselves to high professional standards. While similarly
maintaining the highest level of professional integrity, in-house editors have somewhat
greater leeway to employ such strategies as satiscing (Burrough-Boenisch, 2003) — that
is, focusing more on surface-level issues rather than deeper problems found in the text,
or commenting on, rather than correcting, aws in author manuscripts (Harwood et al.,
2009; Li & Flowerdew, 2007; Ventola & Mauranen, 1991).
e question of how well these dierent approaches meet the expectations of
NNES scholars is complex and would require feedback from the clients of both editors
in order to reach a well-founded conclusion. Studies of editing practices in institutional
contexts have revealed that, when asked, authors report that they expect revisers to
directly intervene in their texts and query the author little or not at all (Flowerdew, 2000;
Harwood et al., 2009; Willey & Tanimoto, 2012), thus suggesting that the approach
taken by the freelance editor may be more pleasing to clients. is view has been
challenged, however, by Ventola and Mauranen (1991). Other research, meanwhile,
has found that insucient contact with the author may be detrimental to the quality
of the nished product (Burrough-Boenisch, 2003) and that a lack of author contact is
demoralising for the editor (Willey & Tanimoto, 2012).
e freelance editor complements editing with face-to-face meetings, discussing a
number of issues that arose while revising the text. ese encounters are directed at going
beyond obvious errors to provide added value to the client, and the editor has noted that
clients are usually amenable to such instruction, often referring to the editor as their
Publishing Research in English as an Additional Language • 83
English teacher. Indeed, it has been reported that editing work that focuses exclusively
on the textual surface is unsatisfying to NNES writers, even though a majority of editing
done by native-English-speaking editors was found to be limited to basic aspects in
texts (Ventola & Mauranen, 1991). However, studies of conversations around texts
have found that authors experience great diculty in articulating their desired meaning
(Willey & Tanimoto, 2012), often because authors and language professionals do not
share a common metalanguage (Burgess & Lillis, 2013). erefore, editors must hone
their skills in communicating with authors so as to maximise the eciency of these
meetings and limit the complications that this extra time spent creates for issues of
billing, in the case of the freelance editor, and for potentially longer waiting times for
other authors of the institution in the case of the in-house editor.
In spite of the potentially negative eects of the limited contact that the in-house
editor has with clients, it is of interest that few writers in the institution instigate meetings
to discuss their work and the editor’s sometimes extensive commentary included in their
texts. Although the in-house editor often encourages writers to meet for a conference in
case of doubt, not many seize this opportunity. ere may be a number of reasons for
this, and the nature of the present study is not conducive to assessing this matter. One
possible explanation for this reluctance, however, may be that the margin comments
appear in English, giving the authors pause at the prospect of discussing these ideas
in English despite the fact that the in-house editor is a procient speaker of Spanish
and generally able to discuss matters in either language. Another explanation may be
that scholars work under tight deadlines, often balancing clinical work, teaching and
research, and the added delay involved in scheduling and holding a meeting with the
editor may be unfeasible given the imperative to publish as much and as quickly as
possible. Lastly, we have noted in our experience that most criticism of language quality
levied by journal reviewers encourages NNES authors to have their manuscripts revised
by a native English speaker without providing much detail as to what precisely must
be improved. Such blanket instructions may lead NNES authors to adopt a satiscing
strategy of their own, arranging to have their manuscripts edited by a native English
speaker only to comply with journal reviewers, even when it is clear that editing work
done under suboptimal circumstances produces texts of lesser quality.
In addition to the implications of the study’s scope mentioned previously, this
research has a number of limitations. First and foremost, we, as the authors of this
chapter, having undertaken the study partially to identify certain dierences in our
approach to editing, are likely to have introduced some degree of performance bias
in their data. ough we intended to replicate our approach to the highest degree of
accuracy possible, it is likely that the very question that brought us to conduct the study
— that is, how it is possible that two types of editor working toward the same goal and
for very similar clients display a notable degree of dierence in the way we go about our
task — interfered in the blinded editing. Further studies along these lines should seek to
limit the inuence of this bias.
84 • Publishing Research in English as an Additional Language
Second, the fact that we selected the passages to be used in the editing exercise,
together with the brevity of these passages, limits the extent to which the results can be
extrapolated beyond the experiment, as the choice of text was clearly made to illustrate
our beliefs rather than randomly test a hypothesis. ird, in circumscribing the blinded
edit to a particular passage rather than revising the entire manuscript, we limited the
possibility for each of us to demonstrate how we propose improvements in the text as a
whole. ese textual samples might have displayed greater focus on non-surface issues
if we had revised the entire article rather than just a small part. Lastly, this experiment
cannot account for the inuence of the existing author-editor relationship on the type
and frequency of margin comments, and this relationship is not to be underestimated.
In one comment made to the author, the freelance editor raised doubt as to the author’s
usage of a particular term, indicating that the only other example of this particular
language was found in a paper written by someone whom the editor knew to be a
collaborator of the author in question. Such situatedness is a key element in editing
work and may be the subject of further study.
With this chapter, we hope to have contributed to the ongoing research on the
challenges faced by language services providers who work with NNES authors in
specialised elds of discourse. Based on the analysis of our own previous work and our
attempt to determine how the other would have handled the points of diculty in the
texts, we believe our ndings show a varied palette of tools upon which editors can call
as they help authors improve the quality of their research publications. Considerations
on the use of these tools by each editor raise interesting questions as to the remit of each
type of professional and are useful in suggesting ways in which both types of editor may
add value to their services while at the same time highlighting the factors that may limit
the viability of these strategies.
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