Welcome to 5-minute writing tips – answers to questions that clients ask me that can help you be a better/happier/more efficient writer in 5 minutes, 500 words or less
Today’s question: “Who needs an editor? ”
Adapted from this 12/2022 blogpost
12. You have a book! Sort of! But it needs a lot of work, and you want to get it into shape before you start submitting it. Here, two rounds of editing – a developmental edit followed by a line or stylistic edit – can help (you want to do it in two rounds so you’re not editing sentences that might change during the development process).
11. You produce a lot of content pretty fast for a blog, newsletter, website, etc and need an extra set of eyes before a billion people email you because you used “there” instead of “their” – you need a proofreader/copyeditor!
10. You suspect that your conference paper is actually three different papers and need a developmental editor to help you figure out what your argument actually is and what can be cut and put into a different paper.
9. You’re on the job market for the first (or fifth) time and need help conveying to hiring committees why your nontraditional path actually makes you an awesome person to hire. A developmental/stylistic combo can help you get the arguments right and nail the language for the documents. Often times, people also want another set of eyes on their job market paper as well.
8. You have a great idea for a book, but want to write it for a popular/crossover audience instead of a scholarly one—how do you get people excited about this topic?? A developmental editor can help you craft an idea for a book and work on the book proposal to get it right.
7. You have a zombie paper that has been sitting on your hard drive since before the pandemic that you need someone to take a look at so it can be sent out into the world. Sometimes two rounds of edits can get a paper where you want it to be: a developmental edit followed by a stylistic edit can get the paper ready for submissions.
6. You’re a wiz at data analysis but writing up results is hard! How do you narrativize data so that people care? This is where developmental editing can come into play.
5. You’ve spent so many hours staring at the screen your eyes are about to bleed but people are still telling you that there are commas in the wrong place and to write in active instead of passive voice -- and you’re just done with it. Hire a copyeditor and go back to working on what you enjoy!
4. You have a dissertation that needs to become a book or a few articles that you want to turn into a book. How do you reorganize your ideas so that they read like a book? These kind of structural challenges are perfect for developmental editors.
3. You got an exciting R and R, or particularly tough comments from reviewer 2, or comments from reviewers 1, 2, and 3 that seem to be off the wall – you need someone to help craft the reviewer letter and make sure the paper actually addresses the substance of reviewer critiques. That’s developmental editing.
2. Tenure and promotion are looming but everything feels like bragging and you need to figure out how all of the documents the committee wants can work together. A developmental and stylistic edit can really help these documents get you tenure and promoted.
1. You’re writing a grant with particular requirements, and you need an extra set of eyes to make sure you meet the requirements – that’s copyediting.
Need help getting unstuck? Book a coaching session with me!