Editing and the Mother Tongue, Broken English

摘要

I wish to share some thoughts on editing that may not seem consistently related to broken English. Although my comments are biased towards editing for Veterinary Pathology, the concepts are not specific to this journal. I believe two types of editingare necessary for scientific journals, scientific editing and grammatical editing. By scientific editing, I mean editing that directly improves the communication of scientific findings. By grammatical editing, I mean, obviously, editing that improves thewriting so that it follows the peculiar set of grammatical and spelling rules specific to American English. In this paper, I will focus primarily on suggestions for improving manuscripts from the viewpoint of scientific editing, and finish with a briefdiscussion of the difficulties and intricacies of grammatical editing.