International Journal of Language & Literature

Dynamics of Editorial Changes in American Editions of Harry Potter Books
Wesley E. Freiman

Abstract
The paper compares editorial substitutions in the early American editions of the first book to the penultimate book of the Harry Potter series, namely, Sorcerer’s Stone and The Half-Blood Prince. Specifically, at the hub are the changes that American editors made based on the grammar, vocabulary, morphology, and spelling. A frequency count is employed to extract the rates of substitutions in individual units of text, which are subsequently converted into percentages and contrasted with the substitution rates of the same units in the two texts. The analysis shows three vectors of alteration dynamic: decline, steadiness, and rise. Furthermore, of all the variations in both pairs of editions, orthographic changes remain the most consistent, maintained at one hundred percent in both early and late books, while vocabulary substitutions are found to have largely disappeared in the later sequels.

Full Text: PDF      DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v9n2a3