The Case for Copyediting in Higher Education

Administrative writing in higher education is often a collaborative effort. Reports, grant proposals, conference proceedings, copy for websites and marketing communications — these projects and others are often produced by groups and edited by committee. While collaborative writing helps distribute the work of a large writing project, the result is often uneven. These documents may be appropriate for internal reports, but when it comes to impressing prospective students, donors or the public, they often just don’t cut it.

The problem is basically two-fold: adapting language to the target audience, and the maintenance of a single voice. Subject experts among your faculty and staff are often competent writers, but are not always aware of issues around language structure and use of technical terminology in documents destined for the public. Moreover, contributing writers to a collaborative project will tend to produce documents in their own voice, giving different word choices and sentence structures. This leads to paragraphs and sections in the document reading quite differently.

I see this quite often on college and university websites, where I’ll find an introductory paragraph written by one person in accessible language, followed by a more formal paragraph that reads like a college catalog, followed by technical language and acronyms. What started as friendly and readable copy ends in confusion and unfamiliar terminology. Technical language, acronyms, research terminology and latin phrases may be second nature to your faculty, but they’re a second language to the public.

The solution: a strong copyeditor is needed on collaborative projects to maintain a single voice and style, and to assure that terminology is appropriate for the audience. The editor must also rewrite as needed, applying appropriate style guides, while keeping one eye on search engine optimization and other meta-concerns. It’s a complicated task that requires practice and experience to do well.

There is a tendency to give editing responsibility to a department secretary or graduate assistant. After all, anyone who can write can edit, right? Wrong. Anyone can proofread, but to solve more complex editing problems such as voice and style, you need an editor who is familiar with both the language of academia and the language of communications and marketing. You’ll need an editor who can read technical language with comprehension and turn it into accessible writing without introducing glaring errors of fact.

If you don’t have the appropriate talent in-house, there are many freelance and independent editors available to you, and some of those have the dual experience needed (shameless plug: Zen Writes offers such an editing service). Either way, it is important to identify your editor or editing team at the same time that you select your writers and the rest of the document development team.

Establish communications between the writing team and the editor from the outset, and make sure that each understands project priorities and process. Finally, be sure that your editor has access to subject experts. An editor working in isolation stuggles with an unneeded set of challenges that could be solved by a simple phone call or email.

Now that technology has made collaborative document development relatively easy, the need for copyeditors in higher education will only grow. Planning for the need in your institution now will prevent a lot of last minute stress later.