Editing Otherwise: Fresh Approaches to Stories and Settings

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 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’