I’ve seen some texts that would’ve been pretty decent had they stuck to the material and not tried to emphasize (to the point of overshadowing the actual subject matter) that there are women computer geeks.
It’s not like the authors just used ‘she’ instead of ‘he’ a few times. Instead they danced around the fact that there were ever male engineers who did anything relating to computers (and they had a fuck of a time explaining Charles Babbage).
It never mattered to me. I went through books that used ‘he’, books that used ‘she’, books that didn’t use any third person pronouns, and everybody in the classes suffered out the same workload. I watched people (men and women) quit because the work was hard, because they were failing, or because they hated it, but I never heard anyone say in any of my classes ‘I’m quitting because they don’t write enough of these books with female perspectives.’
Yue: If you are reading an engineering text, you aren’t a grade-school wilting flower deciding ‘what you want to do when you grow up’. You are probably in college or a vocational-technical school and have decided on a career path, and if you can be dissuaded from a path by something as inane as the pronouns a single text uses maybe you don’t have what it takes to hack it anyway. Especially as mentally demanding a career as engineering.
So, tell me again what the point of your argument is?
Editing is a process. An editor suggests changes, we don’t dictate changes. An author is always free to reject the changes – this may or may not lead to the editor saying they don’t want the work.
No decent editor will change the meaning and insist on the changes standing. An editor works with a writer to clarify meaning, not to change meaning. catsix, have you ever worked with an editor? Of the several publishing houses I’ve had dealings with, not one editor has insisted on changing meaning.
I bet you that if catsix sent me some of his/her self-published stuff I could find mistakes. It’s very hard to proof, edit, copy-edit and prepare copy for printing without an outside eye.
Yeah, I have worked ‘with’ editors. I’ve had them tell me I chose the wrong words, that I should change this and change that, and then get irate when I refused to alter my work because doing so would remove the original meaning.
My stuff goes out exactly the way I want it. What someone else considers a ‘mistake’ is the result of weeks or months of debating over whether or not to use that word in that sentence with that context.
And after putting that amount of time and effort into making sure my words say exactly what I want them to, I definitely don’t want someone to read it for an hour and tell me that it’s full of ‘mistakes’ because I didn’t make the stylistic choices they would have.
Must resist impulse to make corrections to catsix’s post lest someone accuse me of being a grammar nazi…
It’s ‘within that context’ not ‘with that context’.
When I edit a piece, what matters is whether or not the reader understands what is meant. It really doesn’t matter a pinch of shit if the writer insists that what he/she wrote is exactly what they meant if the reader doesn’t understand it.
Who do you write for? Can you be 100% sure that everyone who’s going to read your stuff shares your unique mindset? If an editor doesn’t think your work means what you think it means, chances are readers won’t, either. Editors are not out to get you, or to push their own agenda. They want to make sure your work will be well-received. To that end, they make suggestions.
I think you should take an objective attitude towards your work. A criticism of your story or poem is not a condemnation of you, personally. Think of an editor as a coach. Is a coach insulting his player when he tells him he has to be quicker off the snap?
I’ve been using “they” as a non-specific gender neutral pronoun ever since high school (where it was the source of some interesting arguments with my English teachers). It doesn’t break up the flow of the sentence like “he or she” does, it conveys (IMO) a sense of generic identity (i.e. it could refer to any one person or various individuals), and it doesn’t require the creation of a new word.
And if anyone doesn’t agree with that, they can kiss my ass.
I think if we survived the losses of “thou,” “thee” and “ye,” we can probably survive a little adjustment in the usage of the third personal singular pronoun. And “English” should be initial-capped.
I will not have my writing mauled by somebody who didn’t invest time and energy into creating it because that person thinks that a reader might understand it better if they hacked away at it and changed a few words here and there.
It has been my experience that editors have done things to my writing that, had I allowed the changes to stand, would’ve made me embarassed to put my name on the page.
And who is an editor to assume that because he can’t understand the meaning of the work, everyone else who reads it will also be completely lost? You’ve pointed the finger at me for supposing that unless an editor understands exactly what I meant, no one else will. How do you know that editor just doesn’t understand? Maybe he’s the one person in a thousand who will read that piece over and over again and never really grasp what it’s about, but some teenage kid in a grocery store will read it once and understand every thought.
When it comes down to it, an editor can’t tell me that no one will understand my work unless I make changes. All an editor can tell me is that he doesn’t understand it. Since I don’t write for the purpose of making everyone understand me, I also don’t give a rat’s ass about changing my work so that the meaning is spoon-fed to the editor.
I also don’t spend hours checking the message board posts I make. Shame on me, I just don’t do it. I have, on occasion, shaken my head at an editor who wanted me to ‘make the meaning easier to grasp’ and told him that it was intended to be difficult. Poetry does not spoon feed; it makes the reader think.
Where the hell did this idea of people quitting because they’re textbooks aren’t gender neutral come from? Oh, right, catsix threw it in as a strawman, along with textbooks that are female-biased instead of male-biased and distort the facts. No one was talking about those things.
No one’s going to quit over it. But why does everyone resist the change so much? It’s small change that does no one harm and would make some people happy. What reason besides pure spite is there not to do it? Or to put it positively, why should all the generic statements in a textbook assume the person doing it is male?
Because I won’t change months of work due to an editor who picked up the poems ten minutes ago and can’t flesh out the deepest meanings of them in under sixty seconds?
Would you particularly like it if someone went after an anthology it took you years to write with a pen, happily crossing out your ideas and words saying that they just want to make it better?
I invest a great deal in my writing, especially my poetry, so that my meaning goes in and each unique reader can mull over it and get a unique interpretation out. If I make the changes that editors suggest (or more often insist upon), it can so drastically alter the work that the original thought provoking piece has turned into a literary rice cake devoid of all flavor.
The instant society may want everything explained to them in the most simple terms with the quickest delivery, but that would reduce my poems from the art that they are. I won’t let that happen to my work. I won’t let an editor’s ‘it’s just one word’ destroy an entire experience. If that makes me an asshole, I’ll proudly reside in sphincterville.
As for the readers who want my poems to be easy and not open to the individual interpretation of the reader, well, they won’t get it. They won’t buy the book. Those who do want something to jar their minds and paradigms will read the poems, and they’ll take away from it a unique experience all their own because I wrote the poem to do just that. I won’t have 30 people all get the same canned impression because an editor told me ‘More people will understand it if you change those words.’
Or do you think I should sacrifice the thoughts and feelings that I put into the poem, that I experienced, because an editor will make the poem ‘better’ so it sells more copies?
catsix, I find it hard to believe that every editor you’ve encountered has been a moron. Who are these 30 people? Are you saying that if you make the changes an editor suggests, you’ll have 30 readers, whereas if you publish your work yourself, you’ll have only one? What does that tell you?
No, what I said was that if out of 30 people who read my work at any given time, all 30 should come up with their own unique impression of how it affected each of them.
Not that ‘only 30 people’ would read it.
Once again, slowly:
For every 30 people who read one of my poems, I should get at least 30 different answers to the question ‘What does this poem say to you?’
I’m not alone! You’re not alone anymore! Finally, someone who understands!
As a 45-year-old woman I have seen so many changes as a result of feminist activism but the one that frosts me the most is the one where women whine about not feeling “included” unless they see the words “she” or “person”. I have never, never, never felt excluded by the word he, or mankind. Never.
It drives me crazy when hymns in church are changed to be inclusive. It drives me crazy when I hear the word chairperson. In fact, I feel a bit embarassed when I read things that are so obviously trying to be inclusive…it makes me feel like people are sitting somewhere saying, “oh, we’d better put a she in here so that little Suzy doesn’t have a hissy fit.” It drives me crazy when a female minister friend of mine refers so God as “She” with such a smirky tone in her voice that implies that all men are crap…including her husband.
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