METM18 presentation 

On being edited: how authors respond


Sally Burgess & Clara Curull, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain 

Awareness of the affective dimension in author editing contributes to more satisfactory relationships between authors’ editors and their clients. This presentation focuses on authors’ responses to being edited. We will draw on both our own experiences of editing and being edited as well as those of students and colleagues. We will explore authors’ expectations of how much and at what level others should intervene in their texts, their reasons for accepting or rejecting these interventions, and their sometimes emotional reactions to being edited. Interview data will provide evidence for a relationship we posit between authors’ responses and their relationship with the editor, specifically whether the editing was explicitly sought or arose as the result of a collaborative process of text production. While our main focus will be on contexts where there is a contractual relationship between author and editor, we will also give due attention to co-authors or contributors editing one another’s texts, collaborative literary translation, and supervisor editing of student authors.
[Listen to a podcast about the presentation.]

About the presenters

Sally Burgess teaches in the English and German Philology Department at the University of La Laguna. Her main research interests are academic publishing and genre analysis of academic spoken and written texts.

Clara Curell teaches in the French and Romance Philology Department at the University of La Laguna. Her research interests lie in Translation Studies and Lexicology. Both presenters are members of the University of La Laguna’s Literary Translation Workshop.