“I don’t know what you mean.”

My first professional copyediting gig was substantial: a University of Toronto college hired me to copyedit a dissertation for a PhD student. For confidentiality, let’s call him Student. Student, a gifted scholar, was struggling with a language barrier. English was not his first language. Most of his exposure to English had been through scholarly texts that didn’t really try to be comprehensible.

When I opened the file for the first chapter, I couldn’t even understand the opening paragraph. I panicked. Was I completely incapable of working on graduate-level writing? If I didn’t know what Student meant, how could I edit his dissertation? I paced around my living room, stared blankly at my laptop, and ate many snacks. But as the work went on, I learned a very useful lesson.

Not knowing what an author means has nothing to do with an editor’s intelligence (at least, not most of the time!). It is simply important information. The whole point of academic writing is to convey meaning. If it’s failing at that task, the author must know, and the editor is just the person to tell them.

However, I couldn’t just comment “I don’t know what you mean in this sentence” and expect Student to fix it. He would have no idea why his sentence didn’t make sense, and be even more frustrated than he already was. So for every piece of text that didn’t make sense for logical—rather than grammatical—reasons, I listed all the reasonable interpretations I could think of in a comment, so he could better understand what impact his language was having on an audience, and sharpen it accordingly.

Student passed that thesis defense.

And I have written “I don’t know what you mean” on documents I’m editing ever since.

So if you see one of those comments pop up on a document I’m editing for you, please don’t think I’m judging you. I’m not. I know that you have thought so much about your topic that your brain has developed a complex shorthand no other brain is capable of replicating. And as the representative of all your future readers, I have to flag the places where this shorthand is taking over, so that your writing ultimately has the impact you want it to have.

But I will never leave you hanging. I will always explain why something doesn’t make sense and detail the different meanings I’m finding in it, so you can rephrase it as precisely as possible.  

And if it’s pretty clear what you mean to say, I will typically make the changes myself, and flag the section with a simple “ok?” so you can double check my work. I will never be the final authority on what you mean. But sometimes, at its best, my job really can be to make yours easier.

Know what I mean?