Native-speaking editors’ changes to a corpus of about 22000 words of English academic writing by Saudi emerging scholars were analyzed. More than one third of the revisions made were found to be restating grammatically correct sentences. Meaning enhancement and meaning modification were the most recurring reasons for editors’ amendments
Native-speaking editors’ response to advance nonnative speakers’ (NNS) writing flaws in this study is viewed from two perspectives. Editors’ role in detecting discrepancies between NNS written product and a native-like alternative has gained much attention in previous proofreading and editing studies. However, their role in providing idealized versions of prose, even in the absence of classical language errors have received less attention. Using a taxonomy specifically developed for the purpose of this investigation Native-speaking editors’ changes to a corpus of about 22000 words of academic writing by NNS Saudi emerging scholars were analyzed. The analysis shows that editors made amendments that can be categories as mechanic, morpho-syntactic, lexical and discourse. Moreover, the analysis detected amendments that can hardly be placed in any of these categories. More than one third of the revisions made were classified as restating grammatically correct English sentences or parts of sentences. Meaning enhancement, meaning modification, and meaning clarification were found to be the most recurring reasons for editors’ amendments to grammatically correct texts. Findings of this study calls for revisiting the long existing debates on correctness, and appropriateness of scholarly texts written by NNS academics. More importantly, however, this study aims to highlight the issue of the native speaker authority and raise questions on how dependent nonnative speaking scholars are on native-speaking editors.
