Sometimes when I look at an old post, say, this one, a review of Benjamin Dreyer’s Dreyer’s English, I wonder how I could have missed what now seems so obvious.
My original sentence:
It’s ready for the next stage in the publication process.“The publication process,” like “the writing process,” is a ponderous, empty phrase. Newly revised:
It’s ready for the next step toward publication.Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard)
[This post is no. 91 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose, including my own. The writing process has no necessary end.]
comments: 2
I wondered about this one a lot - bearing in mind I come not only from a UK-E perspective but also a mathematical background - and it seems to me that there is a fundamental difference between the two versions. Speaking of "the publication process" emphasises the aspect of flow, and of dynamic progress. Process is foregrounded.
Speaking of "[a] step towards publication", in contrast, emphasises a fixed goal which one has either achieved or not. Process is backgrounded, and goal-orientation is in focus.
Personally, I'm not convinced that publication is quite so binary a thing as that. To be sure, there is a point in time where a first printed copy might emerge, and historically that might have been a defining moment. However, in a world of digital production everything is more blurred. I can produce interim Kindle or ebook copies of something from day 1, to test deployment, send to beta readers, or whatever. Process is more in the picture than a fixed goal.
Or so it seems to me, anyway - maybe its a UK-E vs US-E thing?
Thanks, Richard, for your thoughts here. I’d stick up for the revision by pointing to the word “step,” which I think pretty clearly suggests a process. In the original context (which perhaps I should have added to the post), there is a set goal, with a publisher’s editors working on a manuscript.
I’m not sure about UK–US. An odd point: the Google Ngram viewer shows “the writing process” with no entries for American English until 1969. The phrase peaks in 1993. For British English, nothing at all, which might mean nothing more than an absence of UK textbooks from Google Books. When I taught, I liked to refer to “the work of writing,” but to make the same point “the writing process” makes — that writing requires many kinds of work, and not all at once.
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