Editing Contributed Scholarly Articles from a Language Management Perspective

Taking language management as its initial perspective, this paper examines some of the sorts of linguistic problems that second language writers of English face when contributing to scholarly journals and some of the issues that editors face when working with authors on those problems. Language management theory (hereafter LMT) is briefly explained. Drawing on a substantial corpus (slightly less than 500,000 words), illustrations of various categories of problem types are provided. One finding shows that it is difficult, in practice, to differentiate between simple language management issues and organized language management issues, because what may appear to be simple management issues may in fact have extended implications. Some problem types are not unique to non-native speakers, but appear with different frequency and distribution in non-native speaker texts as compared with native-speaker texts. Some ethical questions implicit in editing non-native speaker texts are explored