The Editor is Not Your Enemy

Good post from Inside Higher Education by Rob Weir that explains the difference between copy editing and developmental editing, and especially how an author should react to editor feedback.

The Editor is Not Your Enemy

Spoiler alert: Chucking the whole project is not the solution.

Rob is talking about book publishing, but the same advice applies to theses and dissertations, just change "editor" to "supervisor" in the article, and it applies.

Greetings at Joe Mahoney Book Launch

I was the acquisition and developmental editor on Joe Mahoney's book, A Time and A Place for Five Rivers Publishing. Neither the publisher, Lorina Stevens, nor I were able to attend the Toronto book launch, so we made brief selfie-video greetings to be shown in our absence. If you want a glimpse of my boss at Five Rivers, and hear me talk about my role as an acquisition editor and developmental editor on the book, watch this three minute video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-v06fHzxMg&list=PLYyla3aTwM9R5f3nVHfTficSyOHajIIZj

An editor's view of clients

A good depiction of an editor's view of clients for Halloween: Boo! These Are the 10 Monsters Your Book Editor Fears the Most by Blake Atwood.

Blake concludes by saying "Now, this isn’t a complaint article about editing clients. Rather, it’s meant as a curtain-parting glimpse into what editors deal with in terms of unprepared, underprepared, or naive clients. It’s what not to do when working with an editor."

He goes on to say, "Additionally, many of these 'monsters' come by it honestly. Because they don’t live, breathe and eat writing and publishing as editors do, they just don’t know what’s conventional or expected. Most editors understand this and are glad to help new authors learn the ropes—so long as the author is receptive to expert advice."

Of course, most clients are not like those described. Most are reasonable people looking for expert advice on their manuscript and open to input to ensure their manuscript is as good as it can be. They are happy to learn about the process and to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their writing so they can eliminate any bad habits for next time, and pleasantly surprised how good their writing is after an editor as been over it. The editor-client relationship is almost always positive, Blake's occasional monster notwithstanding.