Convenience Editing in Medical Sciences: Professional Expertise vis-à-vis Linguistic Virtuosity

Document Type : مقالات علمی پژوهشی

Authors
1 Assistant Professor, Department of English Language, Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Maragheh, Maragheh, Iran
2 Associate Professor, Department of English Language, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran
3 Associate Professor, Faculty of Multimedia, Tabriz Islamic Art University, Tabriz, Iran
4 Professor, Department of English Language, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Urmia University, Urmia, Iran
Abstract
This study strived to specify and particularize Iranian medical field specialists and EFL teachers’ predominant and overriding textual interventions, which fall within the ambit of convenience editing. To this end, we required 20 field specialists and 20 EFL instructors to edit the unedited versions of 80 published medical research articles in a way that rendered them apt for publication in quality medical journals. We categorized the obtained data of the edited articles using an editing strategy framework that distinguished four editing micro-strategies and five macro-strategies. The findings revealed that medical specialists and EFL teachers’ micro-editing strategies outnumbered their macro-editing ones. Furthermore, there were significant differences between the editing micro-strategy uses of the above-mentioned groups of the participants. The results highlighted the need for a synergic collaboration between the medical field specialists and the EFL teachers to ameliorate medical articles’ formal, stylistic, and genre-related features and to expedite their publication process.

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