AI won’t remove the need for human academic editing any time soon
Times Higher Education
Brian Bloch
December 30, 2024
One consequence of the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence is a growing belief among non-native speaking academics that they no longer need a real person to edit their work in English.
Not surprisingly, those who work as copy editors and in related fields are concerned, and there are reports of a major decline in demand for conventional editing. However, as someone who has worked as an academic editor for many years, you might expect me to caution academics against taking the hype about large language models (LLMs) at face value, particularly when it comes to academic writing. But my editing experience also allows me to say that with some authority.
It is a complex and sophisticated challenge to ensure that academic papers are written clearly and correctly, at the appropriate level and using the right style. To reach that standard, many articles require comprehensive editing, both linguistically and academically.
The latter can be done only partly by a computer, given that such software has clear limitations. Some word choices are extremely subtle and relate not just to the narrow context of the article but also to broader usage patterns in the particular academic field in question – or, for interdisciplinary papers, the various fields.
Moreover, good academic editing requires all sorts of corrections and improvements that entail not only linguistic skill and subject-related understanding but serious thinking and careful consideration. Many changes that a well-qualified editor makes are linguistic refinements in the interest of clarity, rather than corrections of actual English errors.
Here, is an example of a linguistically suboptimal sentence that native German speakers might come up with: “People have the possibility to get cheap loans”. While not grammatically wrong, the word possibility as used here is “Denglish” – one writes this way in German, but not in English. Furthermore, get is too colloquial for a formal academic article – as is, arguably, cheap. The optimal linguistic and economic solution would be the concise: “People are able to obtain low-cost loans”.
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