Editing is a lot of things, but one of them is an endless series of minor improvements in phrasing. While I was in the field, I often wished I could observe how academics made this kind of minor textual improvements, but it was next to impossible to see that sort of work first-hand. Nothing’s stopping me from giving examples from my own editing process, though. Here’s one.
Original:
An enormous amount of research, beginning in France perhaps with Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), has emphasized practices that subvert and evade the forms of social domination that Bourdieu had documented.
Revised version (trying to make things clearer, and more direct):
An enormous amount of research, beginning in France perhaps with Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), has emphasized how Bourdieuian forms of social domination get subverted and evaded.
I guess it’s up to the reader to say whether the latter is actually more understandable, but I can at least remark that it is far more concise. Making this change probably took me around ten seconds, but any long writing project involves thousands and thousands of these little editorial improvements.
