Editing Otherwise: Fresh Approaches to Stories and Settings

This blog post is about how to organize your arguments and develop a narrative arc in your cultural anthropology monograph. In academic writing, scholars make arguments and work with concepts and themes. Arguments and unique concepts form the "currency" of intellectual exchange, and so it's worth taking the time to reflect on and uncover what arguments lie in your ethnography and anthropological theorizing. It's common for arguments to be buried, not developed clearly enough,

Anthropologists use vignettes to tell stories about other people, but they aren't usually trained in the mechanics of how a first-person point of view works. This blog post explains the basics, so anthropologists can make informed decisions about which kind of first-person point of view is the best fit for a given project. What is POV? Point of view (POV) is the mode in which a story is told. The basic choice is between a first-person point of view (an "I" perspective) and a

A review of Scott Norton's book on developmental editing. Scott Norton's book is now a classic tome on many editors' bookcases. I first learned about developmental editing many years ago when setting up my editorial business, and this book spoke to me! I read chapters early each morning in bed. My background in fieldwork and anthropology made the case study approach come alive to me, and I quickly started applying this book in my practice and soon offered developmental editi

If you’re an academic critical of capitalism, you might hesitate over hiring a developmental editor. Developmental editors, after all, operate in a commercial environment outside of academia. Might such editors flatten your arguments and prose to open your text up to a wider audience? Is there even such a thing as an anticapitalist developmental editor? It’s undeniable that developmental editing is partly about enhancing the commercial potential of a book. Publishers of all k

A few weeks ago, I spoke with an academic who had never heard of developmental editing and didn’t understand it. Isn’t that cheating, they said? And doesn’t peer review provide all the feedback an academic author needs? The confusion came from not knowing how academic publishing workflows actually operate—and I’ve been there myself. When I wrote my first academic monograph, I didn’t know what developmental editing was at all. And I didn't know that I could source help from ou

When writing a journal article or book, scholars are often very (too?) close to their writing. In cultural anthropology, this is compounded by the fieldwork experience. You probably heard the advice about leaving your field notes alone for a few weeks after completing fieldwork, and taking a break or even a holiday if possible. The same applies when you’ve been working intensively on an article or book chapter. Leaving a text in a metaphorical drawer for a few weeks is someti

Academic developmental editors provide big-picture feedback on a manuscript to ensure it’s presented in an optimal way for readers. They bridge the gap between what the writer thinks the book is doing, and how that appears to readers. Academic writers are usually very close to their material and may not notice relationships between arguments, that one argument or idea is out of place, etc. Academic developmental editors are therefore usually editors who know the conventions o

As a developmental editor specializing in cultural anthropology, I often work with scholars who are revising their first book from a dissertation. In my work, I often encounter the same mistakes over and over again, so I made this blog post to help writers working on their first academic book. Common dissertation-to-book problems include: Writing too defensively Buried arguments Chapters that still follow thesis structure Why a Dissertation Is Not the Same as a Book The postd

Anthropologists are often insecure about using dialogue in ethnographic vignettes and revert to familiar academic formats, such as block quotations. This is partly for good reason: They don’t want to misrepresent an actual conversation that occurred. This is not something fiction writers worry about. And there is a tension in anthropology between writing notes or a report, which might be dry but has the veneer of truth about it, and narrative. A well-told story might be much

As a writer, editor, and business owner, it’s important to let you—my friends, colleagues, and (potential) clients—know how I use AI in my editing business. The short answer is that I don’t. Let me clarify that as a policy: I don’t use generative AI tools to generate or assist my work as a developmental editor, consultant, line/copyeditor, or creative writer. Here are some of the reasons why: I’ve experimented with various tools and found them unreliable for copyediting They’

Have you ever started a year with good intentions for writing, set up a routine, and then just stopped? Many of us have been there at some point! It can be hard to set up and stick to a new routine, especially if your mind craves novelty and switching things up every so often. And even if you don't crave novelty, all it takes is for something else to get in the way and the best made plans come crashing down. So don’t be harsh on yourself if a routine breaks down – I recommend

Ethnographers often shift between different languages and cultural contexts. In this process, anthropologists often learn new languages or recalibrate their relationship with ones they already speak. Yet anthropologists typically receive no training in how linguistic translation works, or in the effects of different translation strategies. One small typographical decision—whether to use italics in ethnographic writing for non-English ones, if the ethnography is written in Eng