Academic Style Proofreading

Tables

Table 1. Terminology card: Revisor

Table 2. Terminology card: Copyeditor

Table 3. Terminology card: Proofreader

Table 4. Most common content words and verbs in ECO subcorpus

Table 5. Most common content words and verbs in HUM subcorpus

Foreword

Among the many consequences of globalisation, we must not forget the widening of horizons that has resulted from the internationalisation of academia and academic disciplines. Dealing with a global economy means working within a global knowledge economy, with the promotion of knowledge sharing on a global level in an attempt to extend debates with a multiplicity of peers and stakeholders. Such collaboration leads to the creation and strengthening of connections and relationships among scholars from different countries and higher education institutions. When interacting, these academics display diverse communicative and organisational behaviours that reflect their cultural and linguistic backgrounds and, in turn, their professional and personal identities. Indeed, a scholar’s academic identity is created and built throughout his or her career, starting in the classroom and growing with each international publication and partnership in English, which is currently recognised as the global scientific language and the main means to connect with one another. Accordingly, university systems all over the world have followed suit and adopted the forms and standards of communication, as well as the organisational culture, of the international academic discourse community. When this variety of English is achievable by non-natives and aligned with their communicative patterns and academic culture, it is fast and efficient; on the other hand, when it is exclusive and restricted, it slows down and limits knowledge sharing. This is where the main term proposed by this book comes into play: academic style proofreading.

Differences in academic approaches stem from the diversity of academic linguistic and cultural mindsets that must be voiced and circulated so as to open the floor of academic debates to various cross-cultural perspectives. For this to happen, and to communicate better within the academic community, alongside the question of ‘what’ to communicate, there is also the question of ‘how’ to communicate. This ‘how’ has been extensively studied in terms of vocabulary, grammar, syntax and textual ←ix | x→organisation, but there is an equally significant component that has been overshadowed, that is ‘academic style’. The struggles of non-native academics to get their work published have been dealt with extensively in EAP (English for Academic Purposes) and ERPP (English for Research Publication Purposes), but style has still not been considered as a significant part of textbooks and courses. The word ‘style’, in fact, is used on an everyday basis and often dismissed as unmeasurable. In truth, it hides a significant knowledge gap that can impact on an academic’s chances of being published in international journals. In addition, the analysis of style has been hitherto approached only in a fragmented manner, and more specifically in the field of stylistics with literary and rhetorical origins. Therefore, the only way to approach this fragmented field and enable academics (and, in particular, non-native academics) to write and communicate more efficiently is to combine methods and frameworks deriving from different branches of linguistics. Doing so will yield qualitative and quantitative insights and better outline the main issues that non-native academics have to consider when submitting their writing within a semi-Anglo-Saxon model of international academic communication.

Along with academic style, this book approaches ‘academic proofreading’ to draw insights from the experience and practice of language professionals who become mediators between academics and the promoters of knowledge in international publishing. These, in fact, are the professionals who are in the best position to intervene on behalf of non-native academics and help them with the style of their writing. However, the role of these language professionals is often confused and intermingled with those of copyeditors and revisors, and they are often expected to either correct everything in the initial phase or correct as little as possible at the end, as the terminological study points out. Because stylistic ‘errors’ are often not pointed out because they are not ‘mistakes’, non-native academics are unaware that these diverging patterns are noticed by other editors and language professionals. By understanding and underlining the importance of academic style (which is different from the style of non-academic texts) during the proofreading phase, academic proofreaders provide a bridge between the individual scholar’s findings and the academic community’s reception of these findings by enabling the non-native academic to gain awareness ←x | xi→of expected stylistic patterns and avoid at least some of the common criticisms regarding the language use of non-native academics.

Abbreviations

AFEPI Association of Freelance Editors, Proofreaders and Indexers of Ireland

CARLA Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition

EAL English as an Additional Language

EAP English for Academic Purposes

ERPP English for Research Publication Purposes

ESP English for Specific Purposes

ESPP English for Scientific and Professional Purposes

IATE Interactive Terminology for Europe

IB international business

IL interlanguage

IMRaD Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion

L1 first language

NNS non-native speaker

RA research article

SfEP Society for Editors and Proofreaders

SVO subject-verb-object

TL target language

Chapter 1

Introduction

The idea of studying the concept of ‘academic style proofreading’ and providing an introduction to it stems from the personal and professional experience as a revisor and proofreader of the author, who is a native English-speaking academic working in the field of English language. More specifically, in light of increasingly frequent requests by linguistically competent non-native academics to ‘revise’ and ‘correct’ papers that had sometimes already been translated and revised by a native speaker but rejected by reviewers and publishers on linguistic grounds, it became apparent that the idea of ‘good academic English’ was changing in the international academic context. While it is true that requesting a non-native author to revise the language of his or her paper is often a way of further justifying a ‘minor revisions’ or ‘major revisions’ evaluation, it is also true that even the most reluctant academics have accepted that it is essential to write in proper academic English and have therefore trained or employed assistance accordingly. Nowadays, in fact, it is clear that publishing in international journals or with international publishing houses is considered to be a sign of prestige for both the academic and his or her institution, and has therefore become a determining factor in decisions on tenure and funding.

This led to the realisation that the intervention of a native speaker (especially if he or she is not an academic) and studying EAP are no longer sure-fire guarantees that a paper will be linguistically acceptable. In fact, EAP is focused on the academic author’s written and oral production, over which he or she has control, and a proofreader can predictably intervene in the text by using the materials and resources at his or her disposal. EAP remains, however, unable to completely foresee the way a non-native academic’s writing will be perceived beyond what is indisputably and grammatically ←1 | 2→‘correct’. Another, related, important field of research – ERPP – has already taken a step further and expounded on the requirements of international publishing, as well as the challenges and occasional injustices that non-native academics have to face when writing and publishing in English. It therefore focuses on the international academic community’s perception of an academic’s linguistic competence, and consequently on what is outside the non-native academic’s and – to a certain extent – even the proofreader’s control. This has resulted in various proposals, editorial practices and standards, and didactic improvements, but there is still one piece missing: determining precisely which level of linguistic and discursive competence lies in the gap between the current level of teaching and training preparation of academics and the perception of the receiving community. Excluding what can and has already been taught and contemplated in textbooks and research makes it increasingly evident that this ‘gap’ is positioned between various linguistic levels and between language and discourse. As a result, it eludes any precise description, although it may be ‘sensed’ by experienced reviewers and editors. This linguistic, academic and research gap lies in ‘style’, an aspect of communication that has been studied since the times of Aristotelian rhetoric. However, it was epistemologically codified much later on, with the emergence of ‘stylistics’, a methodological approach that is as flexible and elusive as the object of its inquiry.