EDITORIAL ENGLISH

This was one of the most difficult subjects of this semester. Editing is hard and doing it when English is your second language is almost impossible.

I faced the text trying to examine it scrupulously, but it was as if there was a barrier, an opaque screen over the written words that allowed me to see it only on the surface, and I struggled to understand it on a deeper level.

Editing means working on sentences and words with the purpose of improving the original text, maintaining though the author’s style and being consistent.

So, for example, let’s say that an author generally uses simple words, then he/she shouldn’t, at some point, surprise the reader by using a more sophisticated word, because it interrupts the normal flow of the reading and the author’s voice, at that point would not sound authentic, right? Consequently, an editor needs to recognise that word and change it. Yeah, here is the point! If you work on a text that is written in your second language you might miss the subtle difference of word selections for two reasons:

1.   the word is difficult for you to understand, so perhaps it doesn’t stand out from the text because there are also other words that you don’t know. You need a dictionary for understanding that word as well as the others so, you think that that word sounds weird to you due to your lack of knowledge of English and you fail to amend it;

2.   the word looks familiar to you. It is really similar to a word in your mother tongue, or it might look different but translated in your language doesn’t sound weird, but a common word used in your country habitually, if not everyday.

There are also other aspects involved; therefore, the complexity of doing it in your second language extends as well. Fundamentally, editing is fun but doing it in a language that is not yours is like leaving out fifty percent of the fun and adding fifty percent of frustration, and sometimes is the second half that prevails.