The academic didactic style is characterized by communicative precision and clarity of academic contents that have a scientific foundation, and can usually be demonstrated. By nature, and except for special cases, this style must avoid vagueness, obscurity of expression and unjustified subjectivity.
For didactic reasons, the edit must be easy to understand. That is because it is difficult enough for the student to understand the new contents and information in a lesson, so he oughtn’t to also make an effort to cull the information from an incomplete, confuse, macaronic text full of mistakes and inconsistencies. Linguistic expression, seen as a means of communication, has to facilitate the comprehension of the contents, not to add unnecessary and unjustified complexity.
The style is also determined by the strategies of communication with didactic purposes, previously chosen by the author and the production team. This can vary from the use of an impersonal style, very distant and objective, to the use of a direct tone that would catch the reader. Whatever the case, the copy editor will have to opt for a coherent application of the chosen style, in all its formal aspects.
The complexity level of the writing also depends on the level of study and the characteristics of the target audience. The copy editor has to check the level of the course or program that the work belongs to, in order to identify possible problems of expression that might require editing.
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