Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ No, Copyediting Is Not "Stuck in the Past"

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

I thought at first that this was a defense of copyediting against the incursions of AI-based editors, but no (I want it to be called 'copy-editing' but the article uses it without a hyphen so I'll defer to that for now). Molly Rookwood is responding to Against Copyediting: Is It Time to Abolish the Department of Corrections?, written by Helen Betya Rubinstein, which "claims that copyediting is stodgy, stuck in the past, and based in white supremacy." I'm more sympathetic with Rubinstein's detailed argument than Rookwood's meagre reply, but then again, I want to correct the use of quotation marks around 'professional' (use single quotes to talk about a word, double quotes to actually quote and use it), and it bothers me that the page metadata lists "Editorial Arts Academy" as the "author", when it should be "Molly Rookwood". But all of this is moot. AIs (note: no apostraphe in a plural; it's not AI's) will soon take over copyediting, and we'll have to invent a symbol that instructs the AI to ignore linguistic convention for a given word or phrase.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: May 03, 2024 04:58 a.m.

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