Journal 7: The Revision Process

Answers:

1) The author explaining the process of revision in editing, and her hypothesis is that editing varies among editors of different experience levels. She came to this conclusion after putting together an experiment including six professional editors.

2) Her information was acquired after she split the editors into groups of "normative" and "communicative" editors. The writer also split the groups into the more experienced editors and less experienced editors. Normative editors tend to focus more on the technicalities like grammatical errors, typographical errors, and such. Meanwhile, communicative editors focus more on the manner in which the paper would sound were it read aloud. Texts were composed containing strategically placed errors and later distributed among the editors to see which professionals would catch certain mistakes. Following the editing of the papers the researcher would get back with each editor to find out why the corrected what they did.

3) Professional editing differs from student editing in that professional editors make one swift overview to that they can keep the flow of a writing going. Its not as stop and go. In addition, editors revise for a living, and as professionals, they put more time and effort into their revisions because there is more on the line than simply what your classmate thinks of your work. Students typically don't know the writing styles of their classmates and may have a poor understanding of how the writer wants the piece to be written whereas an editor is usually approached by the same group of writers and has a general idea of everyones style.