Author’s editing services are widely used in English-medium journal publishing. Sometimes authors receive negative language-quality-related referee comments for already author’s edited papers. I employ the text history methodology to investigate how the academic and language brokers arrive at unaligned assessments over the quality of the language in a manuscript.
Author's editors producing language quality in English-medium journal articles: a text historyanalysis To aid in the publication of English-medium journal articles, some institutions offer language support services in the form of author's editing. In ethnographic research conducted in the Language regulation in academia project (www.helsinki.fi/project/lara), I study English language editors offering such services in a Finnish university. In my data, author's editors typically introduce interventions such as sentence-level corrections and modifications. However, sometimes authors receive feedback from peer review which forces the author's editor to redefine and negotiate their role in the publishing process. During fieldwork I encountered scenarios where the author's editor revised an English-medium manuscript written by a Finnish researcher, but the journal article still received negative language-quality-related referee comments (cf. Lillis & Curry 2015). To understand how the academic and language brokers (Lillis & Curry 2010) could arrive at such an unaligned assessment over the quality of the language I analyzed one such case. I analyzed both the interventions the author's editor introduced during each editing round and the comments the author received from the referees and editors. The analysis investigated whether the types of interventions changed during the process as a result of the referee feedback. In this paper, I suggest that the text history methodology (Lillis & Curry 2010), with a special focus on the contributions of the author's editor, reveals that academic and language brokers might hold incongruent normative expectations for research writing in English and how their evaluations can, at times, become unaligned. Lillis, T. & Curry, M. J. (2010). Academic writing in global context. London/ NY: Routledge. Lillis, T. & Curry, M. J. (2015). The Politics of English, Language and Uptake: The Case of International Academic Journal Article Reviews. AILA Review, 28(1), 127-150. doi:10.1075/aila.28.06lil
