Stories of Three Editors

Thompson, Isabelle K and Joyce M. Rothschild. “Stories of Three Editors: A Qualitative Study of Editing in the Workplace.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 9.2 (1995): 139-169. PDF.

In their qualitative study, Thompson and Rothschild observed three editors in a government publications agency to find an answer to the question, “What is the role and responsibility of an editor in a corporation?” In the beginning of their essay, they show that most of the research about writing is from a composition studies perspective and that little information exists about the editing process. Thus, their research is designed to understand more about the complexities of editing.

Since their primary concern is the editing process itself, they decided to study this process by focusing on three editors who make up the entire editing unit of their company. The authors chose these editors because of their “extensive and varied experience in editing and because the organizational characteristics of the unit are well documented” (141). The authors do not share why they chose this specific publications agency. Because of the observational nature of their research, these subjects offer valid insight into the editing process. One editor is a publications specialist and the other two are assistant editors. However, each editor holds the sole responsibility for the texts given to her. So while they share similar jobs, they are independent of each other. The authors use this relationship to help in generalizing data. As Thompson and Rothschild point out, the generalizations only relate to this one government agency but they may provide new hypotheses to test with further research.

They collected data in three phases. First, they collected publications from the agency and edited samples from the editors. They also chose an open-ended interview style to question each editor. Second, they “analyzed changes in the edited documents and conducted a focused interview with each editor to determine the reasons for some of the changes” (142). Finally, they created descriptions based of the material gathered and interpreted and checked them with each editor. In order to analyze the changes made on specific documents, Thompson and Rothschild used an “informal classification system” (142), which included the categories of content, format, arrangement, syntax, correctness, and consistency with styles guides. These categories helped them to generalize about the thought-process behind each change made by the editors. In order to make sure their open-ended questions would produce the most definitive answers, they checked the questions with an editing specialist who had worked for at least 10 years in this agency.

Although the information they were interested in is very informal and experimental, the study could have been improved with a random sample. The subjects were all female, and Thompson and Rothschild made the generalization that the editors were treated as more of support-role staff because of their gender. However, as Winsor points out in her article “Engineering Writing/Writing Engineering,” many technical writers are viewed by design specialists as supporters rather than contributors as well, so perhaps gender does not play as large a part in this view as the role itself. A random sample including males could have changed this generalization.

While it is unclear which theories directly guided the authors’ research, they referred to Ann Berthoff’s study concerning composition and Flower et al. and Hayes et al.’s “diagnose/revise” and “detect/rewrite” strategies in their generalizations. These two studies may or may not have instigated the study, but Thompson and Rothschild’s findings were in line with these theories.

The authors’ generalizations are very basic to this specific study. For example, they found that although the editors do not view themselves as creative, they actually exercise a large amount of creativity and personal expression in what they choose to change. But this information is relevant only to the group studied. As mentioned earlier, the authors hope that their discoveries will shed light on the editing process and prompt further research, but they make no assumptions that their research can be generalized beyond these three editors in this government publications agency.