To be or… Well you know the rest

I have been helping my Chinese partner rewrite some of her students essays.  When I first started, I felt like I was throwing my ethics out the window.  I was helping students get a better grade in exchange for money.  Well, not a lot of money any way.  Maybe that is why I felt so awful about throwing out my ethics.  But, let’s save that for another post.

I would argue with her that I was not going to do it if the student was going to hand it in.  I mean “really” argue.  Heated tempers, not so veiled threats, the whole thing.  I had just finished my second degree, and had taken too many ethics classes to have my work being the reason some student gets an A or expelled if they should get caught.

In the end, she had to promise that the essays I was correcting was not used to get ahead in anything, but for educational opportunities she could share with her students.  Well, that’s what she said anyway.  After all, I’m in America and she’s in China.  Somewhere along the way, I have to put a little trust into my work.

As a by-product to this step forward in my editing morality, I’ve found that I feel better about my editing if I only make what was written sound like authentic English.  My partner can teach all she wants, and I’ve not changed the voice of the writer.  There, that is the key phrase, right there.  Not changing the writer’s voice.  Besides, a bad writer is not going to get a better grade.

I’m not sure where I learned this.  Maybe when it was another teacher that I worked for and it was her hallmark moto as well.  So I struggle with this every essay that comes my way.  I don’t think that my Chinese partner even knows how much harder it is to not drown out the author’s voice.  In fact, I know she doesn’t.

For example, she has a student who used the phrase, “sorrows and happiness”.  Not the standard cliche phrase, but good English.  It’s the author’s voice.  My partner wanted to change it to, “joys and sorrows”.  Sure, it’s a little more pleasing to the ear because it’s a cliche.  We don’t have to think about it to understand what the author is saying.  But it’s not the author’s voice.  The author’s voice is about to be drowned out by centuries of overuse of this simple thought.

What if Shakespeare had an editor that did the same thing?  We might not have pithy little phrases to kick around.  To live or to die.  Ugh.  Sounds horrible, and it takes all the other subtexts away from the moment.  Don’t let cliches steal your voice.