Allen Esterson wrote:
Has anyone else had the experience of having a copy editor changing the tenses throughout an article?
Always. But APA copy editors are notorious for being not only utterly robotic about "APA form" (genuflect here), but also completely humorless and (I'm afraid) not terribly well educated. When I submitted the manuscript for a book I was editing a couple years ago, the copy editors had changed the initial letter of every single German noun (there were lots) to the lower case! They had also changed some references to the "subjects" of 19th-cenutry phrenologists (as in "the phrenologist described his subject as being...") to "participants." In additrion, they had "corrected" every instance of the subjunctive form to the past tense (e.g., "he would become Premier" to "he became Premier," as though it had happened *prior* to the events being described). In another article I wrote, I discovered they had changed a QUOTATION that they didn't particularly like for some obscure reason. In a commentary that I sent to _American Psychologist_, the copy editor decided that he didn't like my reference to myself as "I" and to psychologists as "we" and so changed them all to third person forms, until I pointed out that I was actually contrasting "we" psychologists" to "they" physicists and his "correction" actually made things confusing. I ultimately convinced him to restore my original words. It goes on and on... Occasionally I find myself simply writing in the margin "Please let the author write the article."
<flame off> :-) -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] phone: 416-736-5115 ext. 66164 fax: 416-736-5814 http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ ============================ .
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