Editing Otherwise: Fresh Approaches to Stories and Settings

In my work as an academic developmental editor, and as a cultural anthropologist before that, I've noticed that anthropologists are often insecure about using dialogue in ethnographic vignettes and revert to familiar academic formats, such as block quotations. This happens for a few reasons. First, the vast majority of anthropologists don’t want to misrepresent an actual conversation that occurred. This is not something that fiction writers worry about—or many memoir writers,