SA #3 (20 points) "Fearless Editing"
due 2/14/13 by 11:00 a.m., submitted to BB "Assignments" and posted to your blog
The Rhetorical Situation
Just like our course title, Short Assignment #3 asks you to consider editing in its fullest sense—from
ethical appropriateness to linguistic clarity to material beauty. Holding aside the philosophical question of whether all texts are material, almost all texts have some materiality, which Carolyn Dale and Tim Pilgrim describe as the “presentation of
material in a manner that appeals to the aesthetic senses of the intended
audiences” (Fearless Editing, 2004, p. 11). In other words, we approach every “text” with a guided and trained “aesthetic sense,” which allows us to judge the integrity of the argument, the quality and character of the writing (9), and the success of its delivery through a particular medium (10). For Dale and
Pilgrim, this means that “editing” clarifies the relationship between situation, intention, logic, and style; it doesn't occur only on the surface.
The Assignment
This assignment has two parts:
- your editing of a single (alpha-numeric) text;
- an analysis of your own editing process (what editors fondly call “meta-discourse”).
First, select one text from the Blackboard folder called “Texts for Editing.” The texts in this folder all act as arguments in some way—positing claims, forwarding evidence, and employing highly intertextual examples. However, each of the texts most likely crosses a line from clarity to obscurity, from transparency to opacity, from complex to reductive, and from order to shapelessness. Your job as an editor is to do whatever it takes to reclaim a sense of clarity, transparency, complexity, and order. This will likely involve some reorganization, rewording, mitigation of tone, and line-editing for clarity and punctuation.
I will provide some context for each argument so that you can approach the editing task in an informed way. As long as your editing choices are justifiable and guided by the principles we are studying, you can feel free to make changes to your text. However, please keep in mind that your overarching goal is to help restore a sense of balance to the text (or to its discourse situation), so you should first try to recover the text's viable or plausible meanings, before deciding what content should be changed. Your job as an editor is to help the text make meaning, not to evaluate the position held by the argument in the text. What this means, is that your task may be different depending upon the text you select: some offer violations of what Williams/Colomb call "ethical style," some require more clarification of or connection between claims, some rely on value terms that need to be unpacked, while others may contain logical fallacies, etc.
Tools for Editing
Your best sources of editing knowledge will likely be the following, all of which we have discussed (or will soon discuss) in class:
- Fahnestock/Secor “Stases”
- Kaufer “A Plan for Policy Arguments”
- Jones “Finding the Good Argument”
- WWC “Punctuation: Graceful Movements, Confident Stops”
- Style “Actions” and “Cohesion and Coherence” and “The Ethics of Style”
However, you may also draw on other sources as auxiliaries to the above. I will ask you to do all editing in Microsoft Word, and to “track changes,” inserting comment boxes where necessary, and ensuring that strike-outs remain visible in the text.
Please upload both Text A (the un-edited version) and Text B (your edited version) to Blackboard “Assignments” under SA #3.
Tools for Your Editing Analysis (a.k.a., Meta-Discourse)
For your Analysis, please draw heavily on at least 3 of the following critical texts to explain the choices you made:
- Fahnestock/Secor “Stases”
- Kaufer “A Plan for Policy Arguments”
- Jones “Finding the Good Argument”
- WWC “Punctuation: Graceful Movements, Confident Stops”
- Style “Actions” and “Cohesion and Coherence” and “The Ethics of Style”
(If you need more options, feel free to draw on Bazerman and Grant-Davie, but I will ask you to use the other critical texts first, since those will challenge you to employ the language of editing.)
The purpose of this Analysis is for you to diagnose the overarching problems of the original un-edited text, and to describe and illustrate the general principles that guided you in making the text more ethical, active, and coherent. What kinds of changes did you make to help the text regain its balance? What liberties did you take in order to strengthen the complexity of its argument? What overall patterns of language or punctuation did you find you had to correct? What did you discover to be your own strengths or weaknesses as an editor?
Feel free to categorize the kinds of editorial changes you made, and to illustrate each category by discussing one or more specific examples of your editing. In past semesters, some students have captured screen shots of a particular page (or part of a page) where their editing was the most labor-intensive. While this kind of illustration is not necessary, those students wanted to show themselves in action and so they uploaded the screen shot as a .jpg directly into their Analysis.
Please compose your Editing Analysis as a post to your own blog.
Evaluation Criteria
- Quality and Completeness of Editing – your editing of the text is justifiable and grounded in course principles, but moreover, it shows your comfort and competency with a series of editing tasks; your editing of the text is sufficient to regain its clarity and balance
- Content of Editing Analysis – your Analysis is interesting, and it explains your editing process with at least 3 critical texts (beyond merely using some of their key terms)
- Coherence of Editing Analysis – your Analysis categorizes your editorial changes in an organized fashion
- Evidence and Justification of Editing – your Analysis provides specific examples from your editing to illustrate each category
- Clarity of Editing Analysis – as always, the paragraphs in your Analysis are well focused, your sentences grammatically sound
- Blogging Guidelines – your Analysis not only follows these, but uses them to your advantage
Have fun with it!
-Prof. Graban
