SA #3 (2%) "Fearless Editing"
due 10/7/14 by 2:00 p.m., submitted to Bb "Assignments" and posted to your own blog
About "Fearless Editing"
Just like our course title, Short Assignment #3 asks you to consider editing in its fullest sense—from ethical appropriateness to linguistic clarity to material beauty. Putting aside the philosophical question of whether all texts are material, almost all texts have some materiality, which Carolyn Dale and Tim Pilgrim describe as the “presentation of material in a manner that appeals to the aesthetic senses of the intended audiences” (Fearless Editing, 2004, p. 11). In other words, we approach every “text” with a guided and trained “aesthetic sense,” which allows us to judge the integrity of the argument, the quality and character of the writing (9), and the success of its delivery through a particular medium (10).
For Dale and Pilgrim, this means that “editing” clarifies the relationship between situation, outcome, logic, and style. For us, this means that editing doesn't occur only on the surface; for us to make intelligent decisions about what to alter and how to alter it, we need to consider things like stasis level (i.e., “If the writer is trying to argue mainly on the level of conjecture, then how do his/her statements need to be modified in order to make these claims more clear?”), balance, warrants (i.e., “Is this the right kind/piece of evidence for him/her to be providing?”), and even tone (i.e., “Is this appropriate here, or is it too high-context?”), among other things.
For Dale and Pilgrim, this means that “editing” clarifies the relationship between situation, outcome, logic, and style. For us, this means that editing doesn't occur only on the surface; for us to make intelligent decisions about what to alter and how to alter it, we need to consider things like stasis level (i.e., “If the writer is trying to argue mainly on the level of conjecture, then how do his/her statements need to be modified in order to make these claims more clear?”), balance, warrants (i.e., “Is this the right kind/piece of evidence for him/her to be providing?”), and even tone (i.e., “Is this appropriate here, or is it too high-context?”), among other things.
The Assignment
This assignment has two parts:
- your editing of a single (alpha-numeric) text. I will ask you to upload your editing assignment to Bb “Assignments” under SA #3.
- an analysis of your own editing process. I will ask you to post this analysis to your own blog.
Select one text from the Bb folder called “Texts for Editing.” The texts in this folder all act as arguments in some way—positing claims, forwarding evidence, and employing highly intertextual examples. However, each of the texts most likely crosses a line from clarity to obscurity, from transparency to opacity, from complex to reductive, and from order to shapelessness. Your job as an editor is to do whatever it takes to reclaim a sense of clarity, transparency, complexity, and order. This will likely involve some reorganization, rewording, mitigation of tone, and line-editing for clarity and punctuation.
I will provide some context for each argument so that you can approach the editing task in an informed way. As long as your editing choices are justifiable and guided by the principles we are studying, you can feel free to make changes to your text. However, please keep in mind that your overarching goal is to help restore a sense of balance to the text (or to its discourse situation), so you should first try to recover the text's viable or plausible meanings, before deciding what content should be changed. Your job as an editor is to help the text make meaning, not to evaluate the position held by the argument in the text. What this means, is that your task may be different depending upon the text you select: some offer violations of what Williams calls "ethical style," some require more clarification of or connection between claims, some rely on value terms that need to be unpacked, while others may contain logical fallacies, etc.
Tools for Editing Your Text (Part One)
Your best sources of editing knowledge will likely be the following, all of which we have discussed (or will soon discuss) in class:
- Jones “Finding the Good Argument”
- Working with Words “Key Principles” and “Sequence of Tenses” and “Mood” and “Sexism/Racism/Other -Isms”
- Style “Actions” and “Cohesion and Coherence” and “The Ethics of Style”
- Killingsworth/Palmer “Transformations”
- Kaufer “A Plan for Policy Arguments”
However, you may also draw on other sources in addition to the above. I will ask you to do all editing in Microsoft Word, and to “track changes,” inserting comment boxes where necessary, and ensuring that strike-outs remain visible in the text. Please upload both Text A (the un-edited version) and Text B (your edited version) to Bb “Assignments” under SA #3.
Part Two: Tools for Composing Your Editing Analysis (Part Two)
For your Analysis, please draw heavily on at least 3 of the following critical texts to explain the choices you made:
- Jones “Finding the Good Argument”
- Working with Words “Key Principles” and “Sequence of Tenses” and “Mood” and “Sexism/Racism/Other -Isms”
- Style “Actions” and “Cohesion and Coherence” and “The Ethics of Style”
- Killingsworth/Palmer “Transformations”
- Kaufer “A Plan for Policy Arguments”
- McDonald “I Agree, but …”
The purpose of this Analysis is for you to diagnose the overarching problems of the original un-edited text, and to describe and illustrate the general principles that guided you in making the text more ethical, active, and coherent. What kinds of changes did you make to help the text regain its balance? What liberties did you take in order to strengthen the complexity of its argument? What overall patterns of language or punctuation did you find you had to correct? What did you discover to be your own strengths or weaknesses as an editor?
Feel free to categorize the kinds of editorial changes you made, or to demonstrate each category by discussing one or more specific examples of your editing. In past semesters, some students have captured screen shots of a particular page (or part of a page) where their editing was the most labor-intensive. While this kind of illustration is not necessary, those students wanted to show themselves in action and so they uploaded the screen shot as a .jpg directly into their Analysis.
Evaluation Criteria
- Quality and Completeness of Editing – your editing of the text is justifiable and grounded in course principles, but moreover, it shows your comfort and competency with a series of editing tasks; your editing of the text is sufficient to regain its clarity and balance
- Content of Editing Analysis – your Analysis is interesting, and it explains your editing process with at least 3 critical texts (beyond merely using some of their key terms)
- Coherence of Editing Analysis – your Analysis categorizes your editorial changes in an organized fashion
- Evidence and Justification of Editing – your Analysis provides specific examples from your editing to illustrate each category
- Clarity of Editing Analysis – as always, the paragraphs in your Analysis are well focused, your sentences grammatically sound
- Blogging Guidelines – your Analysis not only follows these, but uses them to your advantage
Yes this is work, but have fun with it!
-Prof. Graban
