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 second installment.
A few years ago, I signed up for a copyediting certificate program to improve my editing skills. The instructors taught us that good editing involves a relationship, not just with words on a page, but with the author of those words and their envisioned readers. In addition to studying English grammar, familiarizing ourselves with the thousand-plus pages of The Chicago Manual of Style, and practicing edits on sample documents, we practiced writing helpful comments and communicating professionally with authors. Navigating the author-editor relationship is the subject of plenty of copyediting books, too, like Carol Fisher Saller’s The Subversive Copy Editor, which emphasizes a partnership between author and editor rather than a power struggle over words.
I’ll return to the theme of power in my next and final post, since it’s important, but one of the first suggestions for navigating copyediting as an academic author is to keep in mind that an excellent copyeditor wants to help authors achieve their goals. It’s helpful to understand them as another professional working with us and on our behalf, even when we disagree with their edits. This can reframe what might otherwise feel like being judged, and it can also personalize the editor’s intervention. The person on the other side of the red comments in MS Word was largely invisible to me before I started editing, except sometimes as a source of frustration or bewilderment when I didn’t understand a change (or found a mistake). Thinking about them as a professional with a part to play in my manuscript’s development has improved my reaction to edits immeasurably, and it has changed my attitude towards “dumb copyeditor” stories.
Navigating the copyediting process
Beyond reframing the author-editor relationship, I think it’s also helpful to understand what copyeditors do.
- Copyeditors follow a publisher’s style guide and a set of grammatical norms. They don’t usually have the final say.
This point is important for appreciating seemingly arbitrary changes involving style and spelling. A British journal, for instance, may require you to spell words with an -ise, not an –ize, ending. Typically, authors can ask for the style guide (or find it posted on a website). The other reason this point is important: authors can usually reject (or “stet”) changes. If the editor makes a lot of the same kind of change, you can stet the first change and add a comment explaining you’d like a global change. However, the publisher has the final say.
Revisions that impact word order or involve rewriting happen because an editor has identified a grammatical error that requires a rewrite or an ambiguous or confusing sentence. Authors can always propose a different way to fix these issues. Copyeditors don’t really care whether their precise words are preserved. They care if the manuscript is correct and clear. If you disagree with the change and don’t understand the reason for it, inserting a comment along with your “stet” is a good idea. Maybe the change was an error.
- It’s a good idea to review the publisher’s style guide.
Some publishers require authors to put their manuscripts into the correct style early, at the review stage. Others will send the style guide when production begins. Whether you succeed in completely implementing it or not, an initial attempt to follow the house style will save time, since hopefully there will be fewer edits, and it will help you understand the edits you do get. Most publishers work with MS Word, though some will take LaTeX documents—which they typically then convert to Word for editing. Either way, you can ask the publisher if they have a template for their preferred house style. If not, and especially if you’re working on a book manuscript with multiple chapters, you can use Word’s template function combined with styles to make sure you’re largely following the style. (Some publishers actively discourage the use of the built-in styles for typesetting reasons; it’s worth checking about this.)
- Depending on the production timeline, authors may have just a few days to respond to changes. Getting a sense of the timeline at the outset is crucial.
Publishers have internal timelines they must follow. You may not be able to get much more time to review the edits than the publisher gives. But you can ask, especially if you have conflicts during that period or if yours is an especially challenging manuscript for some reason. It is immensely more expensive and difficult to make major corrections once the manuscript has been typeset. At the proofreading stage, once the manuscript is in its final form for printing and sent to the authors in a PDF, the corrections are supposed to be minor. Proofreaders aren’t copyeditors, so asking them to implement major changes risks not only introducing errors but also upsetting the budget. All this is to say that it’s worth making sure this stage receives enough time and attention.
- Expect a lot of changes, but don’t think that means your writing is poor.
Excellent writers still make grammatical mistakes or are unclear now and again. And copyeditors enforce consistency, so their focus is different than a writer’s. For instance, perhaps your publisher follows The Chicago Manual of Style’s suggestion to set a commonly used foreign word in roman type after the first italicized instance (11.82, 18th edition). If you always put foreign words in italics, that one global change adds up to quite a lot of edits. These kinds of revisions are common. In a book, there may be inconsistencies among chapters in spelling or capitalization that you don’t notice. Plus, academic writers aren’t reading their work from an editorial vantage point; they’re usually reading for content and structure. Finally, human beings aren’t perfect. Some proofreading studies indicate that professional proofreaders catch about 87% of the errors in a document. And official certification with Editors Canada requires catching 80% of errors. This suggests that writers who don’t edit as a profession are likely leaving behind some mistakes for someone else to catch, even when they have already edited their own work.
- However, you don’t have to view all the changes in the document at once.
I think this isn’t widely known: you can use the “Simple Markup” view in Word to show what the document looks like with all the changes accepted, leaving only comment bubbles. Toggling back and forth can help with being overwhelmed by red marks.
The suggestions above assume an ideal situation, in which a professional, trained academic copyeditor is working to ensure an author’s work is in the best shape possible. But situations are not always ideal. I’ll conclude by reflecting on a challenge in academic editing: AI automation. Academic publishers outsource copyediting and other aspects of production to save money. For instance, most no longer have in-house copyeditors, but instead employ freelancers and agencies across the world. For similar economic reasons, academic publishers are turning to automated processes for editing, including AI.
Are robots copyeditors, too?
In 2024, Elsevier saw a mass resignation of the editors of one of its journals, the Journal of Human Evolution, over the copyediting and typesetting process. The editors argued in part that the lack of attention to details like consistent spellings, capitalization, italicization, and so on, jeopardized the journal’s goal of being internationally accessible. They blamed AI and outsourcing, although Elsevier denied that they used AI. And accessibility isn’t a concern only for scientific journals. Some philosophy journals, like the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, explicitly mention accessibility in the discussion of their house style. The AJP says its “readership is culturally and linguistically diverse,” so that “deliberate obscurity in choice of vocabulary or syntax should be avoided” and they prefer “a sturdy and plain style…for effective philosophical communication.”
If we can set aside the more substantive heavy copyedits that address clarity and effective philosophical communication, perhaps AI could replace a copyeditor implementing mechanical edits. Give Claude a specific house style and a manuscript, then ask it to revise.
This is the direction some editing is going, surely. AI may replace some of the Word macros that editors typically use for these repetitive tasks. However, one worry is about intellectual property. Unless their publisher has a proprietary LLM that will not share the manuscript, an author who entrusts copyediting to AI risks their work being used for training data. This could result in unintentional plagiarism when someone else uses an AI to write a related manuscript, as recently occurred at The New York Times.
Further, in its present versions, AI does not yet work well enough to replace humans. It needs humans to ensure it is given the correct prompts (which requires trial and error) and to check its work (which involves “hallucinations”). Harry R. Lloyd, who published an article in Springer Nature’s journal, Synthese, reported “nightmare experiences” with that journal’s use of Straive, a company using AI to “reimagine the science and research ecosystem.” The comments thread at Daily Nous, which reported on Lloyd’s experience, is full of philosophers who have experienced similar problems. When AI copyedits, there is no longer an author-editor relationship in which a sympathetic, professional reader is working on behalf of the academic. There is no longer any human relationship at all.
