IAMNA: I AM Not An Editor

Although I am not an editor per trade, I am student studying the foundations and practices of editing. I have chosen to exert this practice on the document “IANAL: I Am Not A Lawyer” (DigiRhet, 2008). This text is written by a group of actively involved internet activists who promote the involvement of academic institutions in the debates of intellectual property in our digital age. They embody and support the idea of copyleftism, the idea of “open sourcing, fair use, and file-sharing are working to protect the digital commons” (DigiRhet, 2008).  With their goals and values in mind, I have edited this text to organize their ideas and claims into a easier-to-read order for their audience to understand.

This text functions in Fahnestock and Sector’s stases of definition and value. At the introduction, the text works solely in the stases of definition in order to define to the public who they are and define the rhetorical situation. The text successfully does this if the audience reads it via their website. The multimodal components of the web page provide the audience with the context that the text alone does not. The masthead of the website promotes DigiRhet and their logo, however in the introduction of the text the authors immediately jump into “We are not lawyers…” without telling the audience who the “we” is (DigiRhet, 2008). This begins the text with a sense of obscurity and may confuse the audience if the text is shared printed. Changing the opening to “At DigiRhet, we are not lawyers…” provides an explanation that the text is coming from a group or organization. After that, the following paragraphs explain exactly who DigiRhet is in tune with the stases of definition. This is also in tune with Joseph M. Williams and Gregory G. Colomb’s principle of character in Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace. They emphasize the importance of clarifying the subject in a sentence and before the edit; it was unclear whom they were referring to.

After the introduction the remaining paragraphs explain who the group is and what their goals are. However, in the organization scheme these paragraphs do not transition smoothly or present the audience with a clear order of the importance of the group’s goals. The authors provide too much information in a disorganized manner that can confuse the readers and cause them to lose interest in the topic at hand. There is no original  “flow” of the text and that is why as a student editor I chose to delete some of the introductory pieces where they list a handful of issues they are concerned with (Williams & Gregory, 2012). For the rest of the article, the group focuses on the debate of intellectual property and its relevance toward academics, not the other topics discussed. These wordy topics included “computer-mediated communication (CMC), human-computer interaction (HCI), digital literacy, information and communication technologies (ICTs), and digital rhetoric” which is verbose language in its nature and not aesthetically appealing for a reader either. Once the introduction was simplified, it was important to move a paragraph that introduced the relevancy the group has in today’s age from the middle of the article toward the top. The paragraph “We write this at a time…” was brought to the top to introduce to the reader why the group’s goals are important in today’s digital environment. This juxtapositions helps the reader understand the situation that the author’s are trying to define, allowing them to digest the rest of the information more easily.  By rearranging these pieces of the text, the text provides more cohesion and clarity for the reader (Williams & Gregory, 2012).

Some other issues that were addressed follow the guidelines of punctuation outlined in When Worlds Collide, written by Lauren Kessler and Duncan McDonald. When the authors list the four issues of copyright that they focus in, they encounter some trouble with the proper use of a period, or lack thereof. In the second point, the authors create a run-on sentence due to the lack of punctuation. By turning a run-on sentence into three shorter sentences the point is easier to read and allows the audience to digest each bit of information without being overwhelmed with it. Other than a few missing commas the rest of the text was not edited heavily for punctuation. However, in this particular instance I believe the use of proper punctuation helped restore balance to the list by adding graceful stops in the lists.