I began my presentation with a land acknowledgement, and I used native-land.ca to learn more about the Indigenous people on whose lands we have met. I work to begin to repay part of the debt that I owe as a settler by donating to Indspire, who provide financial support to Indigenous students so they can complete their education, become self-sufficient, enhance their ability to support their families, and give back to their communities.
My column for University Affairs, “Ask Dr. Editor,” has lots of advice on writing effective grant applications. I’ve also published a number of blog posts for Editors Canada, including:
- The Ethics of Online Portfolios: How Should Editors Showcase their Skills and Experience?
- Reflections on Kindness from Early-Career Editors
- How (And Why) I Developed a Digital Tool for My Freelance Clients — And Then Gave It Away for Free
Confession / Request: I’m camera-shy but I want to have photos of myself presenting! If you’d be willing to please take a photo of me speaking today (or tomorrow at the academic editing panel), could you please upload that photo to this Google Drive folder? Thank you so much.
00 | Introduction
I shared a pair of tweets from @LisaPoisso that can be found within this thread, part of Lisa’s discussion of acceptable error rates in editing. Lisa’s Substack is a useful resource and model of high-quality content marketing.
To generate a list of changes made in a Word doc that has tracked changes, click on the “”review” tab, and then on the “reviewing” button (on my screen, this is to the right of the “tracking” button), and, on the left of your screen, you’ll be provided with a short list of your revisions:
However, for the reasons I describe below, these aren’t the kinds of metrics that I usually share with clients.
01 | The Subversive Copy Editor
I learned how to edit from a number of different courses, books, resources, and mentors, but, primarily, I learned to be an editor from Carol Fisher Saller’s excellent The Subversive Copyeditor. Its one of my recommended books for editors. If you’re in the US and you purchase from bookshop.org, I’ll make a small commission; purchasing from bookshop.org rather than from Amazon also helps support your local independent book shops.
I learned about the concept of credence goods from the book How Clients Buy. I discuss this concept in depth in my webinar “Anti-Hustle: Marketing Against Greed.”
02 | Writing Well is Hard
I created writingwellishard.com as a free resource to help people to compare the writing patterns that underlie two different texts. Here are some more details on how the tool works:
I made writingwellishard.com because I’m not persuaded there’s only one way to write well, and I don’t like that the norms of “good” writing are too often white, cis, male, and dead. I want academics to be able to edit their own work strategically and with intentionality, modelling their work on whatever writer or writing they decide is good.
So while, like other digital tools, writingwellishard.com aspires to help you to write clearly, persuasively, and succicently, it also allows you to set the bar as to what constitutes clear, persuasive, succicent, and good for your audience and your context.
I’ve written about this tool for a few different publications, including in my University Affairs column:
- “Writing well is hard: how to write like the best writers in your discipline”
- “Zombie-proof your writing: tips for making the conceptual concrete”
I use writingwellishard.com to get metrics that I include in my letter of editorial notes that I send with each edited document — download my template editorial letter as a Word doc. See also sample editorial letters from The Masters Review, Julie Klein, and Fresh Ink Book Editing; see also “The Art of the Author Memo” by Adrienne Montgomery.
03 | Sales Psychology & Behavioural Insights
Behavioural insights were kickstarted with the publication of Nudge in 2008. Nudge: The Final Edition was published in 2021.
The article “How to nudge drivers to reduce speed: The case of the left-digit effect” is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trf.2021.02.018
The full list of 98 cognitive biases is available at thedecisionlab.com/biases. While their list is substantial, it’s missing the left-digit effect, meaning that it’s an incomplete list–still, its one of the most comprehensive out there.
Closing Comments
If you enjoyed today’s presentation, you might also like the course that I’ve developed called “Strategic Marketing for Consultants & Freelancers.” If you’re interested in taking that course, please use this coupon for $50CDN off the price of the course: QUANTIFYING.
Everything for Editors, All in One Place
I put together a list of fourteen resources, blog posts, and free and for-pay webinars, and two free workbooks for business retreats, all for editors from any field — and then I also added seven other resources specifically for editors of academic writing. I’ll email this list to you, if you like.
Bonus Content
I’m not sure if I’ll have the time to get into it in my presentation, but for a brief while, last autumn, I tried keeping weeknotes. Weeknotes come from the public sector in the UK; they’re a way to track and share what you accomplished during the week. They can take the form of bullet points, journaling, or metric. Not matter what shape they take, the idea behind weeknotes is that the author shares what they do in a week, in part to reflect on their accomplishments, and in part to demystify the ins-and-outs of their profession for people who wouldn’t otherwise have the access to networks to learn about these jobs.
I ended up not keeping up with the weeknotes because, well, they just didn’t fit into my routine.
However, they can be a simple way to account for what you’ve accomplished while also making the profession of editing more accessible to diverse groups of prospective and emerging editors.
My weeknotes looked like this:
I created these weeknotes using the ‘track changes’ metrics from Microsoft Word. If you’d like to adapt my Canva weeknotes template, you can find it here.