Developmental Editing

DE Blog on Hiatus

2010-04-04T15:15:00.000-07:00

This blog is now officially on hiatus. Followers will note that I haven't posted since November. This is for two reasons. First, I have taken a new position at UC Press that requires my full attention. And second, I feel that I've said as much as I have to say--for now, at least--about developmental editing.

I will be sure to announce when the handbook is available in paperback. And I hope to someday have time to develop materials for a seminar and a course to be taught out of the handbook. For now, I must turn my attention to the challenges and opportunities that we book publishers face today as we gallop headlong into the era of digital books.

Thank you for following, for commenting on my posts, and for submitting your stories to the DE History Project.

Happy editing!

DEs Who Love Rushes

2009-11-22T19:53:00.000-08:00

Our fourth entry in the DE History Project comes to us from Spain. Christine reminds us that not all DEs are the “calm, thorough, steady people” that we may assume them to be. There are DEs with those traits, to be sure, but there are also those, like her, who prefer the excitement of the rush schedule.

In my experience, these “high-energy” editors tend to focus on the Big Picture, helping authors to straighten out their narratives and arguments but leaving the minor lapses for copyeditors to mop up. These editors remind me of script doctors called in to “save” Hollywood films at the eleventh hour. They thrive on pressure; they can midwife the “instant book” that a publisher requires in time for Election Day or some other major event.

Christine’s entry is a valentine to the work of freelance editing. She reminds me why I got into the business. An in-house manager now, I’m a bit jealous of her, and not only because of her access to all those delicious Spanish dishes.

My Sprinting Personality Turns Out to Be Perfect for the Type of DE I Do

2009-11-22T19:44:00.000-08:00

Entry 4: November 21, 2009

By Christine

I started working in publishing out of college, first as a sales rep, then as an acquisitions editor. I worked in-house until my husband finished grad school and got his first job in Spain. It had never occurred to me to try the “other” editor jobs; in my company it all seemed very clear who was cut out for what. The developmental editors I worked with were very calm, thorough, steady people and I tend more towards high energy for short sprints.

Our plan had been to stay in Spain for one year and that I would not work, but it was quite boring and lonely, so I started teaching English. One of my students worked at an EU organization and hired me to be on site 2 hours a day to edit the speeches and essays and articles her staff was responsible for preparing. They all spoke English, but as a second (or third, or fourth) language, and everything they produced had to be written in English. This morphed into more editing work, and then one day a friend of mine who is a professor in the US asked me to edit a chapter she was writing for a book. She then recommended me to another friend, and from there my business was born.

My high-energy sprinting personality turns out to be perfect for the type of developmental editing I do because it seems everything arrives a week before the deadline. I suppose I am not a traditional DE as I get things long after they should have been organized. I am like a hired gun DE, taking something complexly academic, convoluted, and generally written by a non-native English speaker and turning it into something readable, understandable, and compelling.

I love the work. Things are constantly new. I learn about all sorts of things: translation of literature from Persian, cultural politics, the sociology of the Lebanese in Mexico, the history of aerospace technology in Spain. I work on theses, dissertations, articles, essays, and book manuscripts and the occasional business document or presentation. I have three little children and can work around their schedules. I have to be very organized to get it all done but I like being busy and the people I work with are also extremely pressed for time, so there is a sense of collegiality though I do all my work over the internet.

Are You Out There?

2009-10-11T18:44:00.000-07:00

Our third entry in the DE History Project raises an intriguing question. Like many of us, Amy “fell into editing” after initially aspiring to a tenured professorship in English. What’s unusual about her story is that she’s created a niche for herself on the campus of a well-respected university promoting the goals of developmental editing among scholarly writers.

At the University of California Press, we are finding that changes in the nature of book publishing are giving rise to new experiments in the writing, editing, and publication of scholarship. Research projects that formerly would have “self-published” the results of their labors are now partnering with us to reach larger audiences. Tenure committees are becoming more open than ever to dissertations that have been written with an eye toward publication as books. Debates about open access to electronically published scholarship are raging, and libraries and presses are collaborating to make scholarship available online.

My question: Are there other DEs out there in academia, like Amy, who are forging new relationships between scholarship and publishing? If so, I’d love to hear from you: please send your story to dehandbook@comcast.net.

I Saw the Need for DE Deepening on University Campuses

2009-10-11T18:17:00.000-07:00

Entry 3: October 11, 2009

By Amy

I fell into editing as a graduate student as a part-time job, working for a professor, and enjoyed it. When tenure-track jobs in my own field (English) evaporated after I graduated, I saw the need for developmental editing deepening on university campuses as presses seemed able to provide less and less of it. I had taught writing for years and published my own book by then and was able to translate that into a job working with faculty on developmental editing issues. I also facilitate lectures and discussions around issues in publishing on campus. So that's my bit for your project. What I'm curious about now is how the field will change with more on-line projects and various styles and genres of writing that academics do online.

Developmental Briefs

2009-08-08T11:26:00.000-07:00

This past week at the University of California Press, we’ve undertaken a new initiative: to provide consistent early editorial and production assessments of draft manuscripts, which we are calling “EDP briefs” (the acronym is short for “editing, design, and production”). This brief addresses many narrow questions (e.g., length of manuscript, number of pieces of art), but it also prompts the in-house editor to note broader developmental problems. In this sense, the assessments are similar to the “developmental briefs” I’ve seen used by trade publishers and book packagers.

But isn’t the phrase “developmental brief” oxymoronic? In my handbook on developmental editing, Chapter 6 provides a format for writing a full “developmental plan” of five to ten pages in length. A brief, in contrast, merely identifies developmental issues in a bulleted list, though it may also gesture toward possible solutions for the author and publisher to consider. A developmental brief should be one to two pages long and take no more than four hours to complete.

As publishers’ budgets get tighter and tighter, we need to be increasingly strategic in our developmental interventions. Thus, a three-step screening process of brief, full plan, and full edit can help us to ensure that our limited resources go to projects that will truly benefit from them. If a project’s brief is convincing, then we may move on to developing a full plan; if the plan passes muster with all stakeholders, then we’ll undertake the full developmental edit.

I’ll report on the success of this new initiative in future posts. No doubt, the proliferation of assessments will generate plenty of material for this blog!

A Course Packet Is Not a Book

2009-07-11T10:20:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has taught or attended college in the past three decades knows how much the teaching world has become dominated by the course packet. When students first arrive in class, they receive directions to the local Kinko’s that sells the instructor’s packet (or instructions for downloading it onto their computers). These packets contain selections from various published sources (reproduced with permission), usually interleaved with unpublished material by the instructor. If the instructor teaches the same course for many years, she may gradually replace most or all of the borrowed material with her own work.

Such packets can have real potential for acquisition by a publisher. After all, they have been created to fill a need not met by existing textbooks, and they’ve been tested in the classroom for effectiveness over many years. But they can also contain developmental issues that are difficult to rout. First, packets invariably bear the stamp of the instructor’s personality—quirks that can be entertaining and effective in the classroom but that may not translate well to the written page. Second, because packets are often devised to distinguish an instructor’s approach to the subject, other instructors may be unwilling to abandon their own packets in favor of someone else’s. Third, the course itself may be an interdisciplinary hybrid with few counterparts on other campuses.

But the most challenging aspect of the packet-turned-book, from the DE’s perspective, is a pervasive lack of transitions providing context. Effective teachers like to surprise their students at the beginning of each class with a change of subject, then eventually demonstrate how the new topic fits in with topics discussed in previous sessions. Much of this relevance is purposely withheld from the written packet to enhance the drama of the “reveal” during class. But a book version needs to supply that missing context. Therefore, the author of a textbook derived from a course packet needs to revise to consciously integrate her lecture and discussion material with her required reading.

The scope of the challenge is not unlike that of revising a dissertation for publication (see Beth Luey, ed., Revising Your Dissertation: Advice from Leading Editors, updated edition, UC Press, 2007). But it can be harder: the instructor has lived with the packet so long, she may have difficulty seeing its deficiencies as a book. DEs, authors, and publishers alike do well to acknowledge these special challenges before attempting to transform a course packet into the backlist staple they desire.

How Do You Like Your Kindle 2?

2009-06-28T10:40:00.000-07:00

At UC Press, I am one of the few staff members who actually lunches in our lunchroom. It’s an unattractive place with no windows and stained furniture, many of the stains contributed by me. Eating there gets me away from my desk, and the oppressive décor keeps me from lingering. Invariably, as colleagues arrive to prepare their own lunches, they peek at the cover of the book I’m reading and offer mini-reviews until the microwave dings. So when my partner surprised me with the very generous gift of a Kindle 2, I had a dilemma: Do I bring it into the lunchroom?

After all, one might be forgiven for thinking of Kindle as the enemy of the printed book. With slumping sales, budget cuts, and reduced staffing, the atmosphere in publishing houses today ranges from fear to fatalism. The book industry hasn’t yet decided how it will enter the electronic future, and our careers hang in the balance. Was I abandoning the troops by downloading my books instead of hunting them down in the increasingly rare independent bookstores of the Bay Area?

As a practical matter, I couldn’t see reading an e-book at home and carrying a print book to work. One of the real benefits of a Kindle is that you need never run out of reading material while commuting or traveling—I’ll never again have to lunch over the catalogs of other university presses.

So I sheepishly showed up with the offending instrument, and it’s been a conversation piece ever since. Some colleagues are excited by the prospect of downloading audio books; designers are alarmed by the gap-toothed justification of typeset lines that results from Kindle’s no-hyphenation policy. (Actually, there are plenty of hyphens left in place, mid-line, from the print editions.) Most agree with me that the tiny keyboard at the bottom should have been sacrificed so that the display could more closely approximate the trim dimensions of the standard paperback.

Two months in, I’m grateful for the gift because it has pushed me to begin engaging personally with the future of the book. Although I’m still not ready for what may come. One colleague saw the device and said, “That obsolete thing? My kids are reading their YA [Young Adult] books on their cell phones.” Meanwhile, with my middle-aged eyesight, I celebrate my favorite Kindle feature: type enlargement.

DE for a Copyeditor’s Pay

2009-06-06T10:29:00.000-07:00

Our first two contributions to the DE History Project share a major theme. Anonymous tells of her relationship with a small medically oriented academic press, which she once served as managing editor and retains as a freelance client. Nancy, also a freelancer, focuses on her work with a mid-sized publisher of how-to books in arts and crafts. Both editors report their clients’ general lack of awareness of what developmental editing is and how much their projects need it. These editors find themselves doing developmental editing for a copyeditor’s pay because their professional training emphasized “sense, organization, and content cohesiveness” as “vital aspects of ‘just’ editing,” and because they feel “as much responsibility to the reader” as to the author and publisher.

In my handbook, I advise freelancers to be clear with clients about the difference between copyediting and developmental editing and to charge a higher rate for the latter. This is easier said than done. Freelancers are understandably loath to turn away projects that ensure income; their major clients are often former employers with whom they have close and complicated relationships; and the line between heavy line-editing and developmental editing can be fuzzy. With a steady client, the freelancer may need to educate the publisher by summarizing the developmental work she’s done on each project as she returns it completed. Over time, she may be able to shift toward expressing separate copyediting and developmental components in her initial bids.

A freelancer may start by charging her developmental rate only on projects for new or “one-off” clients: the risk of financial loss is smaller should a client reject the bid. Once she’s been paid her developmental rate a few times, the freelancer should create a formal rate sheet, along with a list of books she’s edited that distinguishes the developmental jobs from the straight editing jobs. She’ll then have that material handy when new clients call.

As a former freelancer, I realize that self promotion does not come naturally to most of us. We editors are modest types who would prefer that our employers notice our fine work without our having to point it out—and remunerate accordingly. But publishers are struggling to cut costs and will pay as little as they can. So long as we keep the exchange upbeat in tone and constructive in nature, we should look for opportunities to introduce the subject of a developmental pay rate.

I Feel as Much Responsibility to the Reader as I Do to the Author and the Publisher

2009-06-06T10:26:00.000-07:00

Entry 2: June 1, 2009

By Nancy

I do a lot of freelance copyediting for a mid-size publishing company that specializes in how-to books for artists and crafters. The company's staff editors find potential authors from contacts made at art shows, craft fairs and various artists' associations. Once an artist agrees to produce a book for the company, the editor coaches them through the writing process, suggesting ways to organize and develop instructional material based on the methods they use to create their visual artworks. Although these editorial staff members might be described as "developmental editors," many of the manuscripts they turn over to me for copyediting indicate that they are more interested in developing a saleable product than developing a readable, engaging text. 

The authors of the books this company publishes include successful professional artists, television personalities, popular workshop instructors and respected university professors. I don't doubt that they are good at what they do, but many of them are not so good at explaining what they do; and, once the manuscript is beyond the outline stage, the staff editors generally aren't much good at helping them clarify their explanations. Thus it often falls to me—the copyeditor who is supposed to simply make sure that the text is styled consistently and doesn't contain any glaring errors—to determine what the author was actually trying to say, and then figure out how to say it in a way that the reader will be able to understand. (I can't tell you how many times I have had to rewrite entire chapters that purport to explain the mysteries of perspective.) Because I feel as much responsibility to the reader as I do to the author and the publisher, I often find myself doing as much substantive editing as copyediting.  

The people who buy how-to books expect them to provide clear, easy-to-follow instructions, but unless a dedicated developmental or substantive editor has been involved, such books may fail to meet that expectation. It has been my experience that some publishing companies lack the resources—or, perhaps, the will—to provide that kind of dedicated service.

Clients Call It Copyediting, But They Want DE

2009-06-06T10:23:00.000-07:00

Entry 1: June 1, 2009

By Anonymous

I was hired as the “editor” of a small Southern California-based medically oriented academic press in 1983. In essence, I was the Editorial/Production chief. I asked for and received the title of managing editor.

I hold a B.S. in Journalism, having been graduated with honors in my subject. In addition to taking courses in editing, I was an editor for the campus student-written newspaper and broadcast news. My training as an editor included proofing, style, spelling, punctuation, and other routine copyediting. In addition, sense, organization, and content cohesiveness were, to me, vital aspects of “just” editing. I find that the final list is now, more often than not, considered developmental editing.

Before 1983, I had worked as a community newspaper reporter and editor and was a local publicist for 10 years as an account executive for an agency with clients in medical, financial, and entertainment fields.

Before joining the academic press, I spoke with a senior editor with the local office of a major trade/academic publisher. A close paraphrase of his response to my journalism degree. “Forget about it. I am grandfathered in. They don’t want people who know and care about written language communication anymore. They only hire editors who are only knowledgeable in subjects.” The same week at a community potluck dinner, I met a recent physics graduate who was thrilled to no longer have to write school papers. She had just been hired as an editor with the local office of the major trade/academic publisher.

My eventual employer had been criticized for poor editing by its board of directors just before I walked into the door.

I thought I was copyediting. I was really developmental editing. My work was highly praised and not well-paid. Eventually, I left the staff and became a freelancer. The small academic press continues as a major client.

I primarily write indexes. I have just been talked back into editing. Clients call it copyediting, but they want developmental editing. I am somewhat better paid now than when I exchanged an emphasis on editing to one of indexing. Indexing still pays better.

The Tao of DE

2009-05-16T08:39:00.000-07:00

According to Lao Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher and author of the Tao Te Ching (or Way of Ways), inaction can be as powerful as action. Experienced editors know this to be true. Copyeditors asked to give a manuscript a “light edit” must notice all of the language problems that they would if assigned a “heavy edit.” When encountering a infelicity of diction, for example, the editor asks herself, Is this really a problem worth fixing? Her considered decision to leave alone, or “stet,” the author’s phrase may be as much an exercise of editorial skill as a deft rewrite.

Many editors resist “light edit” assignments, arguing that it takes longer to decide not to make a change than simply to go ahead and make it. This stance seems sensible if one considers only the initial editing pass. But it doesn’t take into account subsequent stages of editing: a proposed change may prompt a further authorial revision, which itself may need editing, which in turn requires further review by the author. This iterative tying up of loose ends can fatten a cleanup budget and cause schedule delays. Often, these complications are unseen by the freelance copyeditor because an inhouse production editor handles the mopping up.

Therefore, the most experienced copyeditors are those who are mindful of the cascade of events that each delete mark and insertion can unleash. This principle is all the more true for developmental editors. We must “pick our battles” sentence by sentence, page by page. This restraint can mean replacing an elaborate reorganization plan with a simpler one, or developing only the opening and closing chapters, or developing only opening passages of each chapter. In an age of shrinking freelance budgets, DEs must be ever more strategic in their interventions, doing what is necessary, avoiding what is not. And knowing that they are better editors for their discretion.

The Future of the Book

2009-05-03T08:48:00.000-07:00

My mother returns from each visit to the local library with four or five thick hardbacks, the thicker the better. No matter how much she enjoys a book, if it’s under 400 printed pages, she feels cheated. I have a hard time convincing her to read short story collections: she enjoys the writing, but their brevity gets on her nerves.

I think of my mother when I consider the future of the book. No other form of human expression can create an entire world of thought and feeling as subtly, deeply, and thoroughly as a book-length text. Maybe the closest analog is the television series, which can—at its best, in cases like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under—develop great richness and complexity, with plots tangling and characters evolving as we watch. But that experience is so much more external than the opportunity afforded by a text, whose words occur as though in the reader’s own mind. Feature films, plays, paintings, poems, songs, ballets, even symphonies—these forms, glorious as they are, cannot induce an audience member to slip free of herself so completely and for such a duration.

This degree of absorption is not limited to narrative. A deft writer can draw us into the subtle involutions of an argument so that we experience the author’s intellectual process as our own.

I’m agnostic about how longs books will remain physical objects: I suspect a nostalgia for ink and paper will keep the presses going for a few more generations, but much of the book industry’s nonfiction content will have migrated to electronic form long before then. My deeper concern is whether the fragmented, multi-tasking nature of our new information technologies will erode the human capacity for extended narrative and argument. Then I think of my mom, and the millions of readers like her, and I am encouraged: surely there will always be an appetite that can be satiated only by a good, long book.

The Perfect Editor

2009-04-25T09:11:00.000-07:00

I once had an author who railed at me for not finding an “appropriate” copyeditor for her manuscript. Her book explored how to interpret Latin American political history using game theory. She expressed dismay that her copyeditor was not an expert in these two fields, and moreover had no Portuguese and only rudimentary Spanish. I explained to her, as tactfully as possible, that a person with mastery of those four domains was not likely to choose freelance copyediting as a career.

Authors, the perfect editor is not necessarily one who shares all of your interests and enthusiasms. An editor who is a carbon copy of yourself is useful if you are interested in preaching only to the converted. If you hope to change minds about your subject, or to reach an audience unfamiliar with it, a generalist editor will be of greater service. The perfect editor is not the closest colleague in your field but a person who keeps in mind the concerns of the full breadth of your potential readership.

A Primordial Muddle

2009-04-18T09:10:00.000-07:00

The advent of DNA technology has radically changed how scientists perceive the evolutionary relationships of the plants and animals on our planet. Species thought to be closely related turn out to be distant relatives, and vice versa. These new discoveries have demolished the old-fashioned edifice of taxonomical hierarchy, which conveniently placed each species in a genus, each genus in a family, and so on. This hierarchy was a useful way to organize field guides and reference works. Nowadays, authors are loath to organize their texts in this manner—doing so, they fear, implies that they are oblivious to the paradigm shift that has occurred in their field. But science has yet to settle on a new set of conventions for organizing taxonomical information in text, and the result is that many manuscripts are coming to publishers in a primordial muddle.

Science authors, don’t abandon the use of taxonomical hierarchy in your texts just yet. It remains a useful tool for readers’ navigation of your books. The taxo hierarchy readily converts into a typographical hierarchy, which is what allows readers to keep track of their position in your material. All books contain such arbitrary schemes: a memoirist narrates her life in chapters, but her experiences weren’t so tidily organized. Remember that your primary purpose in writing a book is to communicate effectively, not to mirror the messy complexity of life.

The DE Catch-22

2009-04-11T07:53:00.000-07:00

When acquisitions editors propose a new edition of a book, they may account for soft sales of a previous edition by saying it was published in the “wrong” trim size, in paperback when it should have been hardcover (or vice versa), or with too few illustrations. They bolster their argument by analyzing comparable titles with better sales performance, often citing works by other publishers. In such matters of format, data is not hard to come by. But because publishers do not advertise which of their books have been developmentally edited, any similar analysis of comparable titles is restricted to the publisher’s own previous experiments. The result is a Catch-22: publishers steer clear of developmental editing because they have no supportive data showing it works, thus perpetuating the paucity of data.

The Cloak of Invisibility

2009-04-04T09:36:00.000-07:00

It is natural for editors to feel unappreciated. When done well, our work is invisible, and authors have a vested interest in keeping our contribution hush hush. In my experience, it is the authors who have needed my assistance least who are most effusive in their praise on the acknowledgments page, while those whose carcasses I’ve hauled out of the fire say nary a word of thanks. DEs, in particular, may feel as though they have been thrust unwillingly under Harry Potter’s mantle of invisibility.

At these times, a DE must ask herself about her own motivations. If she is in the DE business for praise and appreciation, she should probably find another calling. If, however, she enjoys the intellectual puzzle that a disorganized manuscript presents and wants to spend her work hours with her mind fully and creatively engaged, then she should accept her invisibility as a gift, a kind of superpower. After all, developmental editing offers the thrill of creativity without the very real burdens that go with authorship: the birthing of the central concept, the risk of one’s reputation, the uncertainty of income.

For an honest and entertaining account of a ghost writer negotiating the fluid border between editorship and authorship, I recommend Jennie Erdal’s Ghosting: A Double Life.

Willful Misreading

2009-03-29T14:10:00.000-07:00

A good DE is an active listener. Rather than cite rules of grammar or style, the DE tries to show the author how her text’s message can be misheard: “This is what this paragraph says to me…” Often, the DE is so close to the text that she understands what the author is trying to say but realizes that most readers will not. In those cases, the DE must engage in “willful misreading.” If an author hears that her own editor is getting a different message than the one she intends, she will usually be “scared straight” and try a fresh approach.

Blog as Brainstorm

2009-03-21T12:18:00.000-07:00

The fact that I find myself writing a blog is ironic. I have never commented on a post in another blog, and I have greeted the advent of this new form with a pronounced lack of enthusiasm. After all, blogs often exhibit the flaws of manuscripts that require developmental editing: they tend to lack organizational structure, offer opinions without supportive evidence, and reduce complex topics to sound bytes.

Recently, I aired these prejudices before a class of aspiring DEs. One of the students, herself a professional teacher of writing, set me straight. She described how her blog engages her students in brainstorming for writing topics. Doh! My DE handbook often advises the DE and author to brainstorm for key elements of the revision plan: main thesis statements, working titles, narrative strategies, expository strategies, and so on. Thanks to Leslie, I have seen the light.

The Cost of DE

2009-03-14T11:07:00.000-07:00

Publishers will want to know, How can we justify the extra time and money required by developmental editing? How much does the work of a DE increase the sales of a book, or enhance its critical reception? These valid questions are hard to answer in dollars, but the lack of metrics should not keep a publisher from delving into developmental editing. After all, there are plenty of qualitative factors widely believed to determine the success or failure of a book. We publishers have no tangible proof that strong cover designs increase sales, yet we assign an almost totemic power to the arrangement of image, color, and type.

Authors Editing Themselves

2009-03-06T16:36:00.000-08:00

I remember how once a large publisher decided its copyediting staff was expendable. A cost-benefit analysis had concluded that no fewer titles would be sold if they went unedited, so dozens of in-house copyeditors were laid off, and staff authors were charged with “editing themselves.” Within a year, many of the copyeditors had been hired back as freelance consultants, sitting in their old cubicle spaces. It turned out that only they knew how to keep the flow of production going from raw manuscript to published title. A jaded editor might be forgiven for suspecting that the publisher knew all along it would rehire the copyeditors and was simply maneuvering to strip them of their benefits packages.

Spousal Support

2009-02-28T09:33:00.001-08:00

When an author balks at an editorial suggestion I’ve made, it is not uncommon for her to cite the opinion of her spouse or colleagues. We publishers get this unsolicited “survey” feedback all the time. An author will say, “I showed your cover design to everyone in my office and we all agree that it’s an ugly shade of blue.” The very fact that you’ve approached a colleague with the cover implies that you’re unhappy with it, and she will probably respond by telling you what you want to hear. Your spouse has even more to lose by disagreeing. This is called tainting the jury pool. Authors, think twice before discounting your publisher’s decisions in favor of those of your friends and loved ones.

DE as Coach

2009-02-21T09:43:00.000-08:00

“If an author doesn’t know how to write, there’s nothing that an editor can do to help.” I’ve heard this opinion expressed by colleagues whose editorial judgment I deeply respect. It is true that a manuscript aspiring to literary heights cannot be lifted there by editing. But most authors of nonfiction wish only to communicate clearly, and an editor can certainly help a willing author to improve those skills. The DE is the author’s public speaking coach; her podium, the printed page.

Those Who Can't Write, Edit

2009-02-14T10:25:00.000-08:00

For many of us, editing is a vocation in its own right, not a fallback career. The assertion “Those who can’t write, edit” is as false as “Those who can’t do, teach.” Like teachers, we editors have a special calling to bring out the best in others, to facilitate their growth and productivity. We master a complex set of skills over many years, adhere to a well-defined set of ethical standards, and provide services crucial to the success of our industry.

Stop Editing Me

2009-02-07T14:50:00.000-08:00

“Stop editing me, please.” This statement, phrased in various ways, has punctuated the history of my personal relationships. My good-natured life partner—who equates my editing fervor with my housekeeping mania —leaves the premises when I begin cleaning so that he won’t “get swept up and left out on the curb.” For better or worse, editing is more than a profession—it is a personal disposition, a compulsive desire for order, a need to find patterns of meaning in a random world.