Author: Kate Epstein, of EpsteinWords
NCFDD does so much to help their members succeed. They help you plan out your route and set goals and meet them. But when you are journeying those last few miles toward getting one more line on your CV, an editor may be a really valuable companion.
If you think of editing as making your writing conform to a style guide, you might imagine you should wait to hire an editor for that very last mile, just before you release your work into the public. And that is a great time! But if work with an editor who goes deeper, you’ll find that there are other times when it can help. Here are seven I’ve noticed in my own editing practice, which has served hundreds of academics at every stage of their careers in many fields.
1. When you’re trying to put pen to paper. Imposter syndrome getting you down? When you sit down to write, don’t think of the demands of your advisor or your coauthor or the meanest people in your field: realize that an editor can be your first reader instead. All you have to do is get something on paper. If it’s essentially English, a good editor can try to make it better. (About half my clients are nonnative speakers, so I’ve worked on things that may have decidedly non-English syntax.)
In my own work, I remind clients that however bad their draft is, I have seen worse. I also find it useful—and I think this is true about many editors—that I’m not in my clients’ fields. That allows me to assume, while I’m working for you, that you are the best in your field and that my job is to ensure that you convey how significant your findings and analysis are. The point is to give you a path to improving your work so that when those mean people in your field read it, they will have to see the greatness that I know is there.
2. When you’re trying to make what’s on the page better. Revising can be just as daunting as writing. Where do you start? While you figure that out, your tenure clock keeps ticking. An editor’s marks give you a pathway. Accepting and rejecting those changes with a click of a mouse is less daunting than facing the edits without that tool. Maybe you leave the comments that are hard for the second read-through but you’ll have done something in the meantime. There’s nothing magical about it, but it gives you concrete tasks to do, and that can help you get going and keep moving.
3. When you get a revise and resubmit. R&Rs, of course, are cause for celebration. I also think they’re a lot of fun, because they take the guesswork out of editing. Even if reviewers are sometimes unreasonable, we no longer have to guess how to appease them. There’s certainly expert-level, discipline-specific things that reviewers ask for that I won’t understand. (This is the downside of hiring an editor without particular expertise in your field.) But an editor can give you an honest assessment as to whether you’ve done what a reviewer asks and comb the document for places where you can make changes that preserve your argument and make reviewers happy. An editor can also help you examine the tone of your response to reviewers. An outside view can help you convey to the journal’s editor (or, in the case of responding to reviewers’ critiques for your book, the acquiring editor) that you are being reasonable and hard-working—that you recognize the effort that reviewers and the editors themselves are making to improve your work! (I will also validate the ways that they make you crazy along the way!)
4. When you have to trim something to fit a particular length. I actually warn clients that my editing usually takes out about 10% anyway. (If you need to preserve length, I will bear that in mind and suggest things you can develop.) But an editor has distance from your work that you just can’t. Also, while you’re fulfilling all the varied demands that scholars face in today’s academic environment, full-time editors are spending most of their time mucking around with sentences. Shortening writing gets easy with practice. Whether you are trying to fit a particular word count or a particular page count (the two tasks demand a slightly different approach), an editor can probably do it faster than you can.
5. At the last minute. I can’t speak for all editors here, but I know that I’ll always try to help, and if I can’t I’ll try and find you a referral. I work a lot of hours in the week, and editing is my only job. (Except if you count raising teenagers, which, at least in the suburbs, is largely like being a cab driver. I bring along my laptop and work until they’re ready to go home.) I also find a tight deadline to be a great focusing device, so for me at least last-minute requests can be fun.
6. When you have something unconventional that needs editing. If a person can edit, they can probably edit whatever you have put to paper. I’ve worked on thank you notes and on survey questions and on a letter to an editor of an edited volume. Again, I can’t speak for all editors, but for substantive edits I have a no-job-is-too-small policy and no minimum charge. (For proofreading, I have a minimum charge of $33 because I subcontract that.)
7. When you just don’t have time. Isn’t that every day? It just makes sense to outsource what you can. For many scholars, if they had enough time, they could probably do everything an editor does. But hiring an editor saves you time for other things, whether the editor deals with the substance or does a final proofread or converts the references to a different style because you’re sending to a different journal, or anything else your publishing goals require.
However you use the time you get back when you hire an editor—more research, more time with family, service, time with friends, giving to your students, even Netflix (I love a good TV show myself)—I think you’ll find you’re glad you did. I think you’ll also find you have more lines on your CV, and perhaps more prestigious ones as well, as a result.
–Kate Epstein, EpsteinWords