In some cases under English law, a decision-maker may be under a public law duty to give reason for any decision it takes. I’ve been a government lawyer, so have direct experience of jumping through hoops to make sure that no one has a real prospect of success should they rush off to court to challenge your actions on the grounds that they are unfair, fundamentally unreasonable (‘irrational’, as the case law puts it) or not taken for the proper legal reasons.
Of course, the work I do now is rather different and clearly I have no formal legal obligation to specify why I edit in a particular way. Nonetheless, when I revise legal texts in English, I consider that I should often try to explain myself.
In very first piece on this blog, I said that a native English speaker who works with non-native speakers should aim to produce work that can serve as at least a half-decent example of acceptable written English. To this end, just as a lawyer should always be keeping themselves up to date in their area of expertise, so an editor should constantly be looking to improve their proficiency in written English generally. If they have an expertise in a particular type of text, they should also be working on their background knowledge of that subject matter.
As an editor of texts by non-native speakers, you need to bear in mind that when you change someone’s work, it effectively means that you’re saying: ‘I’m a native speaker so I have an advantage over you here, and I’m telling you that my suggestion is better than yours.’ If it weren’t, you wouldn’t be changing it, and that’s a serious responsibility.
I appreciate the need for speed. Obviously for a freelancer, time is money so work needs to be done quickly. But those of us working in-house face our own deadline-driven imperatives, and much as we’d like them to, commercial pressures mean that we rarely have the luxury of taking our time.
Nonetheless, when I’m able, I do try to explain changes, and make a habit where I can of not amending something unless I think I could explain exactly why. In my view, people whose work you edit can then have confidence that you’re likely to have thought properly about the reasons before you use that strike-through facility in Word.
It’s also good discipline generally. It makes you think about your work before you do anything, and that’s rarely a bad thing.
