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 Jesus’ was lacking its last, hard “s,” or whatever other reason we were sending the proofs to be printed again—and if they did, who the fuck cared? [....]
I can’t help wondering, though, whether there wasn’t something insidious in the way we worked—some 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.
It’s fun—it’s dangerously pleasing—to 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 “correcting” “errors” of convention most readers would never notice was the least meaningful work a person could possibly do. I’m writing this, however, to ask whether copyediting as it’s been practiced is worse than meaningless: if, in fact, it does harm.
Do we really need copyediting? I don’t 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 “messy” manuscript easier to read, sure.
But the argument that texts ought to read “easily” slips too readily into justification for insisting a text working outside dominant Englishes better reflect the English of a dominant-culture reader—the 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. Tonouchi’s “Da State of Pidgin Address.” Written in Hawai’ian Creole English, or Pidgin, it asks whether what “dey say” is true: “dat da perception is dat da standard english talker is going automatically be perceive fo’ be mo’ intelligent than da Pidgin talker regardless wot dey talking, jus from HOW dey talking.” 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, “Should Writers Use They Own English,” Vershawn Ashanti Young answers Tonouchi’s implicit question, writing, “don’t nobody’s language, dialect, or style make them ‘vulnerable to prejudice.’ It’s ATTITUDES.” Racial difference and linguistic difference, Young reminds us, are intertwined, and “Black English dont make it own-self oppressed.”
It’s clear that copyediting as it’s 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 don’t or won’t perform this culture. Beginning with an elementary school teacher’s 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 don’t mimic dominance are muffled when they get to the page and also before they get there—as schools, publishers, and their henchmen entrench the idea that those writing outside convention are not writing “well,” 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 “correctness,” sometimes to our aesthetics, and sometimes to our sense of ourselves. [...]
There’s a flip side, if it’s not already obvious, to the peculiar “respect” I received in that dusty closet office at twenty-two. A 2020 article in the Columbia Journalism Review refers casually to “fusspot grammarians and addled copy editors”; I’m not the only one who imagines the classic copy editor as uncreative, neurotic, and cold.
I want to say they’re the publishing professionals most likely, in the cultural imagination, to be female, but that doesn’t 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.
I’m willing to bet, too, that self-professed “grammar snobs” rarely come from power themselves—that 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 it—in calling copyediting the world’s least meaningful work—I might have been reenacting some of the literary scene’s most entrenched big-dick values: its insistence on story over surface (what John Gardner called the “fictional dream”), on anti-intellectualism but also the elitist cloak of it-can-never-be-taught. The grammar snob’s aspiration and my professor’s 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 else’s language with that fine a degree of attention can be an act of love. Could there be another way to practice copyediting—less 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 “copyediting” at all; a practice that would not only “permit” 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
