Editing and inclusion
Rhetorical Facilitators or Gatekeepers
“Consciously or unconsciously, the reader is dissatisfied with being told only what is not; he wishes to be told what is.”
William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style
Overview
My Background
There were several factors that led me to my topic of editing and inclusion. First of all, I love editing my own and others’ writing. Whether I’m editing a series of poems or a research paper, I find slowly reading, adding and deleting words, and inserting suggestions to be a pleasure. It all began in high school when I transferred to an arts school to pursue creative writing seriously alongside my regular studies. We read numerous novels and wrote many pieces in the literary track as I had anticipated. However, our creative writing teacher introduced my peers and me to the concept of “workshops.” During workshops, we gathered over our pieces and edited them to enhance their quality. We would spend hours pouring over each others’ artistic texts, contemplating syntax, and correcting grammatical mistakes. I savoured our workshops.
My Topic
It wasn’t until I began my studies in technical writing did I fully comprehend that these workshops, also known as peer review in technical and academic fields, were a method of improving the rhetorical value of our texts through editing. This task, however, is not just for authors; to put it briefly, editors are the ones who prepare manuscripts for publications.
In general, editors do not receive tons of recognition for their work. Many assume that writers type up a manuscript and its smooth sailing to the printers from there. Even though editors hold tremendous power over the content of journals and scholarly fields, their work is widely misunderstood. They can either be the rhetorical facilitators of communication or they can be gatekeepers.
Even though Mickinley Green came into our class as a guest lecturer early on in the course, his message still strongly resonates with me. He spoke about how technical writers are never simply neutral in the issues they write about; they are contributors to whatever they are writing about and they carry more influence than people realize. There is a lot of responsibility that comes with that. My wish is to explore editors’ same sense of responsibility to the content that they help to publish and the information that they help to spread.