Copyediting and Philosophy, Part 1: What is Copyediting?

The Issues in Philosophy Beat is running a three-part mini-series called “Copyediting and Philosophy,” which focuses on issues around copyediting relevant to the philosophy profession: what it is, how to navigate it as an author, and philosophical questions it raises. This post is the first installment.

There’s a groaner of a joke about a panda who finishes his meal at a restaurant. Afterwards, he asks for the check, shoots the waiter, and then walks out. The joke’s punchline—that a wrongly punctuated dictionary entry says a panda is an animal who “eats, shoots and leaves”—was the title of a 2003 book about punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves.* The author, Lynne Truss, wagged her finger in the general direction of the English-speaking public and its declining grammatical competence, though her own competence was criticized by linguists and writers. This form of smug pedantry is what many academic writers think of when they imagine copyeditors: people gleefully unsplitting infinitives, inserting Oxford commas, and contorting sentences to avoid preposition endings, all the while stripping academic writing of style. Oh, and along the way, they probably insert a few stray conceptual errors.

As the newest member of the APA blog’s copyediting team and a philosopher of language with a recently earned copyediting certificate, I thought it would be useful to write a few posts about what copyediting is and is not, how academic writers can navigate working with editors, and the philosophical issues that editing raises. I hope these posts will be relevant to anyone interested in the professional aspects of publishing, whether traditional print media or online, since copyeditors are nearly always involved in the production process. (This is true even in the age of AI, when Grammarly and large-language models take on more roles that human editors traditionally occupy.) Finally, while copyediting as it is practiced today is fairly new, the practice of editing texts is not. There are important philosophical issues around editing practices, involving authority and linguistic dominance, the nature of meaning and intention, the relationship between grammar and convention, and so on.

In this post, I explain what a copyeditor is and what copyediting does in the life of a manuscript. In the next post, I’ll address the relationship between academic philosophers and professional copyeditors and also touch on the place of AI in editing today. In the final post, I’ll turn to philosophy and copyediting, focusing on the relationship between linguistic norms and power and what copyediting practices might assume about the nature of language and meaning.

What is a copyeditor?

Let’s get this out of the way first: one can be a “copyeditor,” a “copy editor,” or a “copy-editor.” The APA Blog follows the Chicago Manual of Style, so here I am a copyeditor. Hang around philosophy blogs long enough, and you’ll encounter posts and complaints about copyeditors (also inaccurately called “proofreaders,” which are different) using all these spellings. The Philosopher’s Cocoon has at least four: November 2015, February 2016, February 2023, and July 2023.

Academics usually encounter copyeditors in the production process of a book or journal article. Sometimes they also hire freelance copyeditors to edit their work before submission. A common complaint I’ve seen online, such as in a February 2023 Philosopher’s Cocoon post, is that these editors make unnecessary changes or introduce errors. My sense is that some complaints are due to genuine problems with editors and publishing processes, but some are due to philosophers not knowing what these editors do.

Copyeditors get documents before they are typeset, but after they have been substantively edited for content. It’s supposed to be the last chance to catch major issues before things are set in their final form. After typesetting, the proofreader fixes minor issues that remain, which should involve only formatting, spacing, and hopefully minor typographical errors.

The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition, defines copyediting as including both mechanical editing and substantive editing (at 2.53):

• Mechanical editing involves fixing grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc., and applying a specific style, like APA, MLA, Chicago, or a publisher’s house style. 
• Substantive editing focuses on how the material is presented. It might remove passive voice, restructure sentences for clarity or concision, address infelicitous word choice, and so on.

Copyeditors typically do not explain all of the mechanical changes they make. For example, in styles that enforce strict distinctions between nonrestrictive “which” and restrictive “that,” a copyeditor might replace “which” with “that” without explanation. It would be overwhelming to an author if editors commented on every change.

Substantive changes, though, typically involve authors. That’s when authors get Word documents with Track Changes turned on and comment bubbles asking them to review the editor’s revisions. Ideally, a copyeditor is a partner with the author. When I copyedit, I think of myself as an advocate for the author and their relationship with the reader. I want to catch any errors or infelicities that might obscure or distract from the author’s intended argument. In academic works, a successful argument can sometimes hang on word choice, so I alert the author to potential issues they’re in a position to resolve.

Thus, I put myself in the position of an interested academic reader who wants to follow the author’s ideas. For example, if the strict grammar of a sentence clashes with what I think the author intends, I will revise and add a comment asking the author to check the revision, as I want to remove unnecessary obstacles to a reader’s understanding. Dangling and misplaced modifiers are a common issue. These are easy to miss because the author (and many readers) may understand the intended meaning even if the sentence is ungrammatical. An invented example: “Being a fundamental bearer of truth values, Frege’s theory of the proposition became influential in twentieth-century analytic philosophy.” The sentence grammatically ascribes to Frege’s theory what should be ascribed to the proposition. (Though insofar as his theory is propositional, it is also a bearer of truth values!)

Now, that an argument is complex or ideas are difficult aren’t unnecessary obstacles or reasons to revise. In my view, copyediting shouldn’t transform all academic prose into an “Explain It Like I’m Five” version, though the plain language movement, originally developed in a legal context, may be reaching academic editors with its flattening, standardizing effect. Editors should use their best judgment about which revisions serve the purposes of a text, its author, and audience. (I’ll return to questions around copyediting, prescriptivism, and linguistic norms in my final post and turn to editor-author relationships in my next.)

What do copyeditors do?

In my UCSD copyediting certificate program, instructors used the taxonomy of light, medium, and heavy to describe copyediting. It’s a helpful heuristic, though not universal or uncontroversial. These terms distinguish between the kinds of interventions copyeditors engage in:

• Light copyediting fixes mechanical issues but not substantive ones. A light copyedit will fix punctuation, grammar, spelling, capitalization, conformity with a style guide, and so on. But it won’t address readability, and it won’t involve any fact-checking or plagiarism checks.
• Medium copyediting fixes mechanical issues in light copyediting and also identifies substantive ones. Medium copyediting adds basic fact-checking and identification of possible plagiarism, plus noting sentences and clauses that may be redundant or unclear. Inconsistent language is also something medium copyediting identifies. But it won’t correct these issues; the editor flags them for the author.
• Heavy copyediting is medium copyediting plus suggesting corrections. The editor may rewrite or even move sentences.

Ideally, these are not copyediting menu items but are levels of editing that a manuscript requires given its state. However, many editors, including myself, offer these as options when freelancing. A good editor, though, will tell an author when they think a manuscript needs more work than just fixing comma splices.

Copyeditors are sometimes confused with two other kinds of editors:

• Developmental editors. These editors work with an author to help them with the content, earlier in the writing process. They focus on the bigger picture, addressing things like structure and argumentation.
• Line editors. Though their kind of editing is sometimes folded into heavy copyediting, line editors focus on style. Ideally, they help a writer’s sentence structure before copyeditors get the manuscript, leaving only mechanical edits to address.

Copyediting is not just “catching typos,” then, although that’s certainly part of it. Copyediting, as the Chicago Manual of Style puts it, “requires attention to every word and mark of punctuation in a manuscript, a thorough knowledge of the style to be followed, and the ability to make quick, logical, and defensible decisions” (2.53). In an ideal situation, philosophers would benefit from this sort of attentive reader as their editor. But life is usually not so simple. In my next post, I’ll take up the complex realities of the writer-editor relationship, including the role of artificial intelligence in editing.

*The titular joke is written in British English, which typically does not use the serial or “Oxford” comma. The dictionary should say that a panda “eats shoots and leaves,” but the insertion of a single comma turns the nouns “shoots” and “leaves” into verbs. In American English, the punchline might be written “eats, shoots, and leaves.”