Why copy-editing?
While writers on various topics may be experts in their subject, they won’t always be expert writers.
Good writing can be seen to reflect the patterns, cadences and rhythms of good speech. Some of how this is achieved is down to pacing, knowing when to speed up, slow down, introduce a pause. Some of it is down to sequencing, delivering the component parts of the text in the optimal order; since the advent of on-screen writing, authors seldom write their texts in a linear manner —from beginning to middle to conclusion—, and this nonlinear construction very often reveals itself in the first draft.
Coming to a text for the first time, the reader experiences the information contained as new information. Knowing what they’re intending to impart, the writer will often struggle to transmit the sense of novelty that distinguishes interesting writing. If a writer is losing interest in his / her own text, it will be difficult to capture the interest of the reader, and a text produced under these circumstances will often make for dull reading.
The writer may assume that readers will have more background knowledge than they actually have, or may underestimate what the reader is already likely to know. Knowing what the intended meaning is, the writer may be oblivious to potential ambiguities that might be introduced for the reader through the use of phrases that could be interpreted in more ways than one.
Unobstructed reading
As the first reader of a text, the job of the copy-editor is to make the text more easy to navigate for all of the readers who follow. This is done by arranging the text —sentences, or clauses within a sentence— in a way that allows the reader to take in all the information imparted in a needs-to-know sequence, removing any ambiguities and redundancies, and not unduly taxing the reader’s memory — as when a writer refers to “the example given earlier”, when there may have been several examples, or when ‘earlier’ could refer to anywhere in many paragraphs or pages of foregoing text. The copy-editor will also make sure that expectations created at various points in the text —as when a writer announces “I will discuss this in more detail below”— are delivered upon as the text proceeds.
By removing the roadblocks to a clear understanding of the author’s intentions, the copy-editor will ensure that the second reader —and all subsequent readers— will have a better reading experience, and a clearer understanding of the author’s intentions. Easy reading does not imply condescending to the reader; a text may be difficult, but should be difficult for the right reasons — not for avoidable obscurities, but for the complexity of its ideas, and the scale of its ambition.