To say that Anne Coulter and I wouldn’t see eye to eye on many political platforms would be an accurate conclusion. But to understand that as an editor, that bias shouldn’t matter, was something I discovered and worked through in completing this assignment. It was probably an underlying challenge I accepted in choosing this particular article to edit because I didn’t agree with much. I needed to look at her discourse from an unattached, unbiased stand point and try to differentiate between edits to content because of political bias and those that would add to the overall quality and ethics of the text. I needed to maintain the integrity of her argument and not lose that voice in rearranging and editing her work.
It took reading and rereading the article in order for me to see beyond the text and into the framework she had provided for her discourse. As far as Bazerman’s intertextuality, she drew mostly on the shared beliefs, values and ideals shared by Conservative Republicans, which to her intended audience was appropriate. In reading her bio listed on her website, she is a well established critic and writer in the political sphere. With that, her readers would already respect and take her text as a credited work. Unlike other texts we have analyzed, she didn’t draw on multi-leveled intertext to establish this authority as an author. She could draw on the ideals she shared with her intended audience and they would receive the work regardless if she was citing other authorities on the matter. Her perspective was something that unified her readers and persuaded them to share her opinions of the “democratic mob”. This level of intertext worked for the nature of her platform. However, as a reader that didn’t identify as wholly to this demographic, it was lacking some credibility for those outside of her intended audience. It was in this void that as an editor, I tried to structure her argument to build off of Fahnestock/Secor theory of stases.
Many of my rearranging of paragraphs, ideas, and sentence structure were the result of trying to reformat her use of stases more clearly. There wasn't much definition and fact, or use of the lower level stases. Much of her argument was based on cause and effect; between the action and reactions addressed between parties. These contrasting ideas were originally broken up between paragraphs, with breaks that didn't add to her overall argument. In these situations, I kept most of the original text the same but would change where it appeared in the article; where it would make the most rhetorical sense. For instance, I noticed some of her shorter paragraphs would be related to the same topic but not found sequentially in the text. It wasn't that the discourse was irrelevant; it was just not reaching its rhetorical potential from where it was originally used. After the cause and effect stasis had been established, the value stasis, building off of this idea of a shared Republican opinion, was implemented. I think it was these two higher level stases that had the most influence in framing Coulter’s platform; a foundation in comparison and parallels and the support of shared core values.
I noticed also that she utilized Jones’ syllogism and deductive reasoning to give structure to her argument. I found myself organizing my edit notes on a gradient scale from least specific, generalized concerns to very specific and detail orientated claims, as Jones’ pyramid of deductive reasoning would frame. When I first read through the article, I noticed that she was building on these generalizations and ultimately ended up at a well developed thesis on why Liberals act and think the way they do. But it was the gradual progression from one end of the argument to the other that helped to guide the reader into making similar inferences as the author.
By far the most challenging of assignments for me, I had not realized the magnitude of my uncertainty as an editor. As an over-arching theme, I struggled with the line between losing the author’s intent of the text and as the editor, how I felt it should be written. I found myself imposing my own biased views into her discourse, and consequently was changing the tone of her argument. In order to counteract this, I started at the basics; sentences I thought that ran on too long were condensed, phrases were reworded and words that weren't necessary were edited out. I tried to keep in mind the sentence start- stop idea that our chapter in Style had mentioned; maintaining that sense of cohesion and coherence. When making these edits, I tried to group them together so that the article would naturally flow and the argument might develop by linking the end of one idea to the beginning of another.
The balance of the article was made possible by constructing an argument that supported Coulter’s strong political conviction. She had a tendency to get carried away with examples and bias claims that began to deviate from her original intent of the article. In editing this text, I needed to keep in mind what the centrality of the argument was and whether or not the original text supported that idea. If that was not the case, I took liberties in rephrasing and editing to reshape the text to fit this guiding principle. I realized I have a long way to go as an editor and the responsibilities that come with it. I appreciated the opportunity to take a step back and evaluate my own strengths and weaknesses through this meta-discourse analysis.
Short Assignment #3 Reflection
