Skip to main content

Researching the Editor

What exactly do editors do? And why do they do it?

Over the summer of 2022, a research group made up of editing faculty met for a three-day retreat to brainstorm and propose research topics. Led by Assistant Professor Matt Baker (Editing, Business Communication), the group formed when professors in the Department of Linguistics discovered that the editing-related data produced by BYU’s Faculty Publishing Service (FPS) could be used to research editing as a field of study.

FPS provides a range of publication-related services—including editing, formatting, indexing, and typesetting—for BYU faculty and staff, and it takes on about 350 projects every year. “We’ve felt some desire to integrate this service more into the instructional aims of BYU,” Baker says. The research group hopes to (1) integrate FPS more into pedagogical instruction and (2) integrate it more into faculty and student research. “The main goal for this group is to push forward on using [FPS] as a data source and as a research hub for our editing and publishing program.”

During the retreat, members of the editing research group presented five research projects that they will undertake in the upcoming year. Two projects involve creating corpora of editing comments and emendations (corrections or edits). Other projects include studying how to establish editing as a discipline, performing case studies of the editing programs at BYU and Portland State University, and analyzing how editors differ in their comments to first- and second-language writers.

The FPS research group has received generous support and funding from the BYU Humanities Center for the next three years. Their research will help faculty define editing and publishing as a discipline, further underscoring its value and relevance as a program in the College of Humanities. Updates on these projects will be published as the research is completed.