Informe Faure e Informe Delors

CAPITULO II. LA INTELIGENCIA EMOCIONAL

2.1 Antecedentes de la Inteligencia Emocional

2.1.1 Informe Faure e Informe Delors

Consider this sentence:

While few would argue that nuclear weapons are a great evil, one can’t help but wonder about the state of the world had Hitler or the Soviets acquired such weapons and the US not.

Clearly, ‘argue’ here is intended to mean ‘dispute’ in the sense of ‘disagree with the proposion that’ (as opposed to ‘engage in an argument about’ or ‘give rea-sons for something’). Consult a variety of sources to determine whether ‘argue’

can have this meaning when it appears in this parcular syntacc structure (i.e.

followed by a that-clause).

Exercise 8.

Usage

Between about 1970 and 1985, social conservaves baled unsuccessfully to prevent ‘sexually aracted to members of the same sex’ from becoming an accepted meaning of the word ‘gay’ in standard wrien English. They claimed that there was already a perfectly acceptable word, namely ‘homosexual’. Their opponents said that ‘homosexual’ was a medical label imposed by those who thought same-sex aracon was a sickness, and that the self-descripon ‘gay’, which had a long history in spoken English, should be used instead. Imagine you are an editor in the late 1970s. Will you replace ‘homosexual’ with ‘gay’? Or will you replace ‘gay’ with ‘homosexual’? If the laer, what will you do with proper names such as ‘Gay Liberaon League’? How will the following factors bear on your decision: the publicaon? its readers? the writer whose work you are edit-ing? style sheets? diconary entries? your own views on sexual orientaon? Try to ﬁnd some documents from the period (diconaries, style manuals published by newspapers, leers to the editor) that bear on the queson.

Exercise 9. Usage

What policy would you as an editor adopt toward a writer’s use of ‘he’ to refer to any human being, as opposed to ‘he or she’ (i.e. overtly non-sexist), or ‘they’.

(For the purpose of this exercise ‘they’ covers all such neutral soluons to the problem of avoiding either ‘he’ or ‘he or she’.)

Would you (i) always leave whatever the writer uses? (ii) always replace

‘he’ with ‘he or she’? (iii) always replace ‘he’ with ‘they’ but leave ‘he or she’

(iv) always replace both ‘he’ and ‘he or she’ (whichever the writer uses) with

‘they’? If you would somemes use one approach, somemes another, state the circumstances.

Find out what two or three of the guides listed at the end of this chapter have to say on the subject.

If you would always use the neutralizing strategy (iv), how would you respond to the argument that you are engaging in censorship, that is, prevenng the writer from expressing the message (whatever that may be) which is conveyed by using ‘he’ or ‘he or she’?

Copyeding 61

Suppose you are eding a translaon into English, and you ﬁnd that the translator has not used an ‘equivalent’ strategy (i.e. has changed the ‘degree of gender neutrality’ in one direcon or the other). What would you do: cre-ate ‘equivalence’ with the source text? adopt one of the above strcre-ategies (ii) to (iv) regardless of what is in the source text? somemes adopt one approach, somemes another?

Exercise 10. Usage

Many usage authories require the so-called ‘serial comma’ (use of a comma before the ﬁnal ‘and’ or ‘or’ of a list, as in “height, width, or depth”). Others disap-prove of it, while sll others allow or recommend it under certain circumstances.

Read the Wikipedia arcle ‘Serial comma’, which lists the views of a considerable number of style guides. What is your opinion?

4. Stylisc Eding

In the last chapter, we looked at correcons that bring the text into conformance with pre-set rules. In this chapter we will look at two types of eding work that are more diﬃcult because they do not involve applying rules:

• Tailoring vocabulary and sentence structure to the parcular readers of a text and to the use they will make of it.

• Creang a smooth-flowing text by fixing problems such as poor inter-sentence connecons, wrong focus within inter-sentences, confusing verbosity, and awkward (difficult-to-follow) sentence structures.

Bear in mind that the style improvement principles described in this chapter pertain to English and may have no applicaon to other languages.

4.1 Tailoring language to readers

The readers of a text may be idenﬁed in two ways. They may be projected, that is, the author imagines (or is asked to imagine) a certain type of reader and then the editor ensures that the book is suited to this ideal reader (e.g. a middle-aged reader interested in exoc holidays, in the case of a travel book). Alternavely, the document may be aimed at a known set of real readers (e.g. the book-keepers in a company’s accounng department, in the case of a ﬁnancial manual). Tailoring for real readers is easier since more is known about their characteriscs, which we’ll now look at.

Movaon

The intended readers of a document may or may not have a prior movaon to read it. If they are movated (as when they are extremely interested in the topic), they will have greater tolerance for poorly edited text, though obviously there are limits beyond which they will be le with an unfavourable impression of writer and publisher. If the intended readers are not already movated, then one task of the editor may be to liven up the wring in order to make the reading experience more enjoyable, to make the document physically more aracve, in short, to make the message more ‘receivable’.

Knowledgeability

To what extent are the readers familiar with the concepts, terms and phrases of the parcular ﬁeld with which the text is concerned? Texts wrien by and for specialists in a ﬁeld must contain the ‘hard words’, peculiar usages and odd turns of phrase specialists use, or else the readers will wonder if the author is really one of them. Also, texts aimed at specialists should be less redundant

64 Brian Mossop

and less explicit than a text aimed at a non-specialist readership. Specialists will not feel they are being addressed if concepts familiar to them are repeated and spelled out.

Redundancy – the repeon of concepts – is important to make a text readable by people with no specialized knowledge of a subject. It will oen be helpful to repeat concepts using synonyms and paraphrases; that way, a reader who did not understand the first wording may understand the second one. The same applies to explicitness; with a general readership, you need to make sure concepts are spelled out the first me they are invoked: not ‘document readability checker’ but ‘soware for assigning a score to documents in order to indicate how easy they are to read’, or more briefly ‘ulity for checking the readability of a document’.

Where the readership needs a high level of redundancy and explicitness, that will obviously place a limit on conciseness. We oen hear that texts should be concise, the implicaon being that editors should remove excess verbiage.

But the shortest way will not always be the best, in parcular for non-specialist readers.

Some documents will be for a mixed readership – both specialists and non-specialists will read them. For example, an engineering project document may have an execuve summary, a secon on ﬁnancing and a scheduling secon aimed at non-engineers, as well as several much more technical secons aimed at engineers. Alternavely, all parts of the document may be aimed at both spe-cialists and non-spespe-cialists. For example, this chapter you are now reading was wrien mainly for translaon students who are learning to edit, but it may also be read by experienced translators who have never actually formulated their ideas about stylisc eding, and may ﬁnd something of interest here as well.

Generally speaking, eding for non-expert readers is much harder than eding for experts, who because of their subject-maer knowledge will oen be able to puzzle out the meaning of poor wring.

Eding for the knowledgeability factor overlaps with content eding, i.e.

not just the language but the coverage of the topic needs to be suited to the knowledge of the readers.

Educaon

Readers without post-secondary educaon will generally ﬁnd it harder to read texts full of very long sentences with many subordinate clauses (and clauses within clauses); nominal structures (‘in the event of your being evicted’ instead of the verbal structure ‘if you are evicted’), and words derived from Lan and Greek (e.g. ‘cognion’ rather than ‘thought’). This factor is to be disnguished from the knowledgeability factor discussed above. People without higher

educa-on who are specialists in their ﬁeld (a trade such as plumbing for example) will know its terms even if they are derived from Lan and Greek.

If the text will have a mass readership – one that includes people with

rela-vely low literacy – the editor must ensure that all intended readers will in fact

Stylisc Eding 65

be able to read it, especially if it contains crucial informaon (e.g. public health documents). It might be useful to test the edited version on some members of the intended readership.

Language

If a text is intended for an audience that includes recent immigrants who are not yet good readers of the language in which the text is wrien, then editors may want to seek advice from specialists in second-language learning, who will know which sorts of wordings in a text are likely to prove diﬃcult. An English example would be phrasal verbs, the meaning of which is not predictable from the meanings of the parts: “She ran into Professor Plum on campus yesterday”

does not mean that she was running across the campus and crashed into Profes-sor Plum. This could be changed to “She met ProfesProfes-sor Plum…”, or (since ‘ran into’ implies that the meeng was accidental rather than by appointment) “She happened to meet Professor Plum…”.

Other texts are for internaonal audiences who have a very good reading knowledge of the language but may not be familiar with the informal spoken language, recent expressions, or local culture. For this type of readership, editors will want to eliminate, for example, metaphors that draw on local sports: ‘those suggesons are really out in le ﬁeld’ (baseball); ‘she got knocked for six at the supermarket’ (cricket); ‘they sckhandled their way out of a situaon that could have been disastrous’ (hockey).

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