A matter of style?*

Editing another person’s work and having your own work edited by someone else is an interesting project. Two different people’s writing styles and habits come into contact with each other in the editing process, and the question then becomes, “whose style wins out?”

I suppose a precursor question to that one is “what constitutes style?”

Everyone has their own way of doing things. This of course extends to writing as well. But there are different levels of expertise in writing too. Some people are better at it than others. So how do you tell the difference between an editor’s suggestion coming from the fact that they are better at what they do than you, and when it is just a stylistic preference?

In my MA thesis, my the members of my committee were provided with copies of the thesis before my defense, and of course after the defense, they each had suggestions for things that needed to be done before they would accept the thesis as complete. Most of the suggestions were about content, but one of my committee members had covered the pages of the thesis in commas. She was suggesting throughout the thesis that my commas were not properly placed.

I started editing the thesis, inserting all those commas in, but stopped halfway through because I realized that this was just a stylistic difference. Her writing used more commas than mine, but it wasn’t any more “right” than my style of writing. (Of course commas are the most flexible form of punctuation to use and styles range from almost nothing to insertion between every phrase.) In that case, the suggested comma inserts were a stylistic difference and by not inserting them, I don’t think I produced a poorer quality thesis.

But now I’m faced with a similar editing comment. I’ve been told my style in employing citations is faulty. It wasn’t that the MLA citation style was wrong; the comment was that I don’t do enough to set up quotations before inserting them into my writing. The suggestion for changing it felt artificial to me, like how you set up quotations when you’re first learning how to do so, but the advice was coming from a good place, so I took a look at my citations.

Now at first I accepted this advice and revised the way I embedded citations in my writing. But what’s making me wonder if this is simply a stylistic difference is that I’ve been reading other people’s writing, and realized that there is a wide variation in writing. In particular I’m reading Walter Benjamin, who was really big on citation. He seems to employ citation in a way similar to how I do, but contrary to how my editor indicated it should be done.

The quoting changes have already been made, and I’m happy to leave then as such in the essay, but now I’m left puzzling over whether I need to work on this, or whether it is just a stylistic difference for the next time I sit down to write something. I really don’t know.

*blog post originally written Aug 24th.