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Ethical considerations in copyediting

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Bitmoji of Sue Littleford approving ethical editing
© Sue Littleford 2023

Editing is a very personal service between author and editor, and one that should therefore be conducted ethically.

That sounds rather dry, but ethics in our business practices is important, in my view. It plays out in many ways – confidentiality, bringing your best self to your work, your conscientiousness as you work, being alert for discriminatory and othering language, being alert for plagiarism, and not simply rolling past it if you find it and, for me, not working on text that is going to be marked.

Let’s take a look at these situations in a little more detail.

Professional practice

My aim is to work in an ethical way. This means doing the best job I can for the client, within the constraints of time, budget and the brief.

It means bringing my best self to the work, rather than phoning in an edit by just running the text through a checker like Grammarly or Word’s Editor. I do use some tools, as computers are far better than me at saying ‘this was hyphenated on page 3 and not on page 207. Is that OK?’ But they are tools. I use them in addition to my own brain, not instead of it.

It means not taking on a job if I don’t have time to do justice to the text. This is one of the reasons I don’t have a ‘rush rate’. I don’t rush – I’m always working as fast as I safely can – emphasis on safely.

It means being thoughtful and polite in my dealings with publishers and authors, by email and in author queries.

It means flagging up problems as early as possible, and maintaining good communications between the parties.

It means proposing solutions, not dumping problems.

It means I can sleep at night!

Students

I know a lot of editors specialise in working with students, and that’s fine. It’s just not for me.

I have two main objections to editing students’ work:

  • It is fundamentally unfair, in my view, for students who are better resourced to be able to afford editing or proofreading assistance and therefore potentially get better grades than those who cannot.
  • Amongst the many things students should be learning are how to write, how to reference and cite, and how to organise their thoughts, then express them well. Their teachers cannot judge this if a student is obtaining professional help – especially if they omit to declare that help. And students don’t learn as well if someone else is being hired to bail them out. Writing well requires practice, not just dumping thoughts on a page and hoping someone else will turn it into a polished essay or thesis.

That’s me. I’m not judging those who are comfortable doing such work.

Then there are the students themselves. Have they checked their institutions rules on accessing outside help? Institutions vary enormously, between one another and actually within one another – one faculty, one department, may have different standards from other parts of that institution. Indeed, I have heard it reported that different faculty members within a department have different views about how much assistance students can buy in (by Professor Nigel Harwood of the University of Sheffield, who spoke at a Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading conference two or three years ago).

Apparently, some institutions have no official guidance on editorial assistance at all. We definitely need national standards on this!

I’ve had approaches from students asking me to rewrite their theses (over my weekend, too!). This is far too intrusive, even for those who do work with students. Many institutions allow light proofreading, with errors being pointed out but not fixed. A few allow more work but may exclude references from being touched at all.

Some students are positively devious, and I’ve heard all sorts of stories from colleagues that would make your toes curl! It’s a fraught area for many reasons.

The CIEP has a guide (free to members, available for others to buy) on proofreading theses and dissertations that helps guide you through what is probably allowed, what’s possibly allowed and what almost certainly is not allowed, with an exploration of the ethics.

I must say, though, that some of the foregoing will not apply to students who need institute-sanctioned help, perhaps because of dyslexia or other challenges. But to keep things simple, if the text is going to be marked, look elsewhere for your copyeditor or proofreader.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism – taking someone else’s ideas, writing or artwork and claiming it for your own – is a real problem. Sometimes it’s deliberate, sometimes it’s accidental, sometimes it’s culturally acceptable by way of ‘The original writer is so famous, no one could possibly think this work is mine’, and sometimes it’s of something you wrote earlier.

Many authors recycle their own text from report to journal article, from journal article to book – this is particularly easy to spot when I’m checking references lists and find the only place Google finds something is from my current author’s previous writing, and then I see that the whole paragraph is identical.

Self-plagiarism isn’t fine – the author may not be the copyright holder, and the author’s current publisher may be expecting new – not simply ‘original’ – writing. It’s also cheating the reader a bit, too.

Happily, I also see notes for book chapters declaring that the content is based on an article by the same author, and citing it. Good to have a bit of honesty, here. This is particularly important because the copyright need not be with the author, depending on how the earlier piece was published. It warms the cockles of my heart when I see that citation, especially when ‘reproduced by permission of X’ also appears. I know I’m working with a careful, alert author.

As a copyeditor, plagiarism presents me with a tricky issue, because I don’t immediately know if it’s an accident from untidy note-taking, or a deliberate plan to conquer the field by annexing someone else’s work as the author’s own, or somewhere in between.

If I find it, though, I have to do something about it. Depending on the circumstances, I may raise it as an author query, report it to the publishers, or just add quotation marks if there’s a reference, but the text hasn’t been shown as a quotation.

Incidentally, authors shouldn’t think that they can sidestep this by taking someone else’s paragraph and switching a word or two – that’s ‘mosaic plagiarism’ (a term I recently learned at the 2023 Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading conference), and indeed shows you know that you’ve taken it from elsewhere without the courtesy of quotation marks.

AI-generated writing

Don’t get me started on ChatGPT and its ilk! Anyone using this to write scholarly work, even in part, is asking for all kinds of trouble. I use an AI detector tool if I get twitchy around a piece of writing and I’ve already had occasion to report my findings to a publisher. If you want me to be your editor, I’ll expect a human being to be sole author of the text. No AI involved. My terms and conditions make this explicit.

In any event, the text produced by AI is derivative – it can’t be anything else. No originality of thought – because there is no thought. AI is just reproducing patterns it found in its training. What serious scholar would be content with that?

Discriminatory language

From changing ‘man’ or ‘mankind’ to ‘humanity’, ‘people’ or ‘humankind’, to applying singular they (which is nothing new – it’s been around since the fourteenth century, if not earlier), there are many simple things a copyeditor can do to nudge writing into a less discriminatory form.

It’s not too hard to find unwise terms – words around gender and sexuality, around appearance, race, age, health, intelligence, disability, religion, education, socio-economic status and on and on need to be considered carefully. Some of these are in the list of ‘protected characteristics’ in UK law.

Equality, diversity and inclusivity (often referred to as EDI) are important watchwords.

It’s sometimes harder to propose good alternatives when othering language is embedded in common phrasing that has fallen naturally on the ear in earlier times, which is why I use the Conscious Language Toolkit for Editors by Crystal Shelley when I’m in a tough place.

It’s a delicate line to tread – some people seem determined to be offended, whilst others shrug it off, but others still are wounded and made to feel less than they are because of clumsy speaking and writing, which is surely not your intent.

Not all members of any given grouping will prefer the same solution, so sometimes there’s no easy please-everyone answer.

This doesn’t mean we don’t make the effort. If you want to know how far we’ve already come, try watching a classic comedy from twenty years ago – some of the script and gestures will make you wince. Try one from fifty years ago – some of them are just about unwatchable, now.

Far from ‘political correctness gone mad’, it’s a matter of treating people with respect, and not making one aspect of them a shortcut for all an individual is.

Nevertheless, it can be hard to avoid in some cases. I copyedit a lot of social sciences, which is basically talking about people in groups, and attributing group characteristics to them, so I need to be extra-careful as I copyedit such texts.

Confidentiality

Few authors are happy to see their unedited text in public, which is why the editors I know crowded around the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading’s forums are always careful to use anonymised versions of a problem piece of text before seeking advice from their peers. Rather than quote, they’ll provide a made-up sentence that reflects the grammatical issue, or whatever the crux is.

Members of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading are also bound by the Institute’s Code of Practice. This requires us to maintain the confidentiality of our clients – and their writing – and we have a section dedicated just to this.

And just for the record, no, I’m not going to steal your writing.

Pricing

I expect to be paid fairly, and promptly, for my expertise, experience and time, and the skill and attention I bring to the job in hand. Equally, I have no interest in ripping people off. Remember – I like to be able to sleep at night with a clear conscience!

If I’m calculating a price for a job, I’m usually able to give an estimate of the time I will need, and the cost. Then I give a maximum price, beyond which I will absorb any extra costs myself – unless the text supplied is materially different from the sample used to provide the estimate, in length or in quality, in which case negotiations will be reopened. That gives the client control over their budget and an incentive not to try to skew my calculations by picking the best bit of their text as the sample.

If I take rather less time than I’d anticipated (perhaps the text is indeed materially different from the sample – it’s better!), then I reduce my invoice pro rata. You play fair with me and I play fair with you.

In summary

Ethics plays an important role in how I approach my business. Clients can trust that their own business goes no further.

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