[ATTW-L] social justice in technical editing texts?

[ryan moeller]

hi all, 

i’m currently teaching USU’s graduate-level “Advanced Editing” course, and i’ve overhauled it to have a social justice focus. for example, we are talking about ways that an editor acts as a reader advocate or a user experience designer for texts of all sorts and across multiple modalities; instead of style guides, we are investigating social justice focused style guides <https://ideasonfire.net/journal-style-guide/>; and we are interrogating editing practices (like adherence to “correctness” or “rules") that have been shown not to help struggling writers improve their writing or have been shown to have fallen out of use or favor among various audiences. 

back in the before times when i was deciding on course textbooks, i chose Rude & Eaton’s Technical Editing, (5th Edition), for its emphasis on readers’ needs over correctness or grammar rules. the textbook publisher, Pearson, allowed me to place the book order from their website <https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/program/Rude-Technical-Editing-5th-Edition/PGM100003100757.html?tab=overview> (that in no way indicated then nor does it indicate now that the text has been discontinued), my bookstore didn’t have any problem adopting it, and my students haven’t had trouble purchasing the text. however, i requested an desk copy through the publisher’s website twice, and i received no response. when i contacted my Pearson publishing representative, they told me that since the book is out of date (2014), they would not send me a pdf or electronic version of the publication, nor would they request a desk copy or exam copy for me. their suggestion was to look for a more up-to-date textbook and sent me a link to Pearson’s entire catalog. 

leaving the problematics of customer service and maybe the error of my reliance on older publishing models whereby instructors didn’t have to purchase their own textbooks aside, the situation that i find myself in has me thinking that i may have missed some great resources on editing over the last few years. here’s a list of a few that i have become aware of and am using in class to supplement the Rude & Eaton text, but if you know of others, will you please DM me with those resources? i will happily compile a list in my course bibliography and share it with everyone who is interested. 

Anti-racist scholarly reviewing practices: A heuristic for editors, reviewers, and authors. (2021). Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/reviewheuristic <https://tinyurl.com/reviewheuristic>.
Baker, M.J., Nightingale, E.M., & Bills, S. (2021). An editing process for blind or visually impaired editors. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 64(3), 275–287.
Cabezas, P., Spinuzzi, C., Sabaj, O., & Varas, G. (2020). Editing the pitch: Patterns of editing strategies of written pitches in a Chilean accelerator program. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 63(4), 296–310.
Fisher Saller, C. (2016). The subversive copy editor (2nd ed.). The University of Chicago Press.
Itchuaqiyaq, C.U., & Walton, R. (2021). Reviewer as activist: Understanding academic review through Conocimiento. Rhetoric Review, 40(4), 378-394.
Jones, N.N., & Williams, M.F. (2017). The social justice of plain language: A critical approach to plain-language analysis. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 60(4), 412–429.
Meloncon, L. (2019). A Field-Wide View of Undergraduate and Graduate Editing Courses in Technical and Professional Communication Programs, in Editing in the Modern Classroom (pp. 171-191). 

i’m also considering whether turning these course materials into a textbook would be helpful to others of you, and whether anyone else is working on Editing for Social Justice projects that i can endorse or support or collaborate on?

thanks! 

ryan or rylish moeller

associate professor
technical communication & rhetoric
department of english
utah state university

pronouns: he.him.his


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://attw.org/pipermail/attw-l_attw.org/attachments/20220131/2a234976/attachment-0001.htm>