Native-speaking (NS) editors’ amendments and corrections to texts written by non-native-speaking (NNS) graduate students were analyzed in light of two theoretical stances: revision and editor’s authority. Proofreading and editing studies have given much attention to editors’ role in detecting imperfections in NNS scholarly writing against a set of conventions and standards. However, the native-speaking editor’s role in providing idealized versions of text, even when there are few language errors, has often been overlooked.
NS editors’ changes to a corpus of about 22000 words of academic writing by NNS Saudi graduate students were analyzed. The analysis was informed by parameters set by previous studies on revision and proofreading while, at the same time, using a taxonomy specifically developed for the purpose of this research. The analysis resulted in categorizing most revisions as mechanic, morpho-syntactic, lexical and discourse. However, the analysis detected revisions that do not fit into any of these categories. More than one third of the revisions made were classified as restating grammatically correct English sentences or parts of sentences. These changes were found to be related to ideas and meaning, or organization. Editors’ amendments to grammatically correct texts were accordingly classified into two categories: reorganizing content and modifying meaning.
Findings of this study call for revisiting the long existing debate on correctness, and appropriateness of scholarly texts written by NNS academics. More importantly, however, this study aims to highlight the issue of the NS editor’s authority, and raise questions on how dependent NNS scholars are on NS editors.

Authors:
Fatimah M A Alghamdi, King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Fatimah Alghamdi is a University Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer at King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia

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