Friday, January 27, 2023

What crap …

Against Copyediting: Is It Time to Abolish the Department of Corrections? (Hat tip, Dave Lull.) 

It’s clear that copyediting as it’s typically practiced is a white supremacist project, that is, not only for the particular linguistic forms it favors and upholds, which belong to the cultures of whiteness and power, but for how it excludes or erases the voices and styles of those who don’t or won’t perform this culture. Beginning with an elementary school teacher’s red pen, and continuing with agents, publishers, and university faculty who on principle turn away work that arrives on their desk in unconventionally grammatical or imperfectly punctuated form, voices that don’t mimic dominance are muffled when they get to the page and also before they get there—as schools, publishers, and their henchmen entrench the idea that those writing outside convention are not writing “well,” and therefore ought not set their voices to paper at all.

This is called categorism. Instead of thinking of something on its own terms, you fit it into a category, in this case, I guess, so-called critical race theory. 

 

 

 

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