Before I Was an Editor, I Was the Classmate Everyone Sent Their Papers To

Before I was an editor, I was the classmate everyone sent their papers to.

Long before I had a Ph.D., a business, or a book of my own, I was the one my graduate cohort emailed the night before a paper was due. “Can you just look at this?” I always could. And I loved it — the puzzle of a muddled paragraph, the click when someone’s real argument finally surfaced, the relief on their face when the thing they’d been wrestling with suddenly read like them, only clearer. With APA polish, too! I’ve seen four version changes of APA over the years, and even helped my own teachers transition their book from APA 5 to APA 6 (Rosemarie Anderson and William Braud’s Transforming Self and Others Through Research---they named my contribution in the acknowledgments of their book, which I also indexed).

At the time, even doing the work on Dr. Anderson and Dr. Braud’s book, I didn’t think of it as a career. I thought of it as helping. But I started freelancing in 2008, editing for strangers on top of friends over on a site called elance (now upwork.com) and slowly the through-line came into focus: I was the one who could see what a piece of writing was trying to become — and help it get there without taking it over. I realized that one of my life’s values is to serve wisdom and knowledge and to help it move into the world as coherently as possible.

“I was the one who could see what a piece was trying to become — and help it get there without taking it over.”

That distinction turns out to be the craft of editing. A good editor doesn’t rewrite your voice into theirs. They listen for the argument underneath hedging phrases, protect what’s working, and clear away what’s in the way — so the reader meets your idea in its best form.

Seventeen years later, the work hasn’t really changed since those late-night cohort emails. Dissertation, journal article, or a book headed to a university press: hold the standard, protect the writer, and help the work become the clearest version of itself. The stakes are higher now — committees, peer reviewers, acquisitions editors — but the human part is identical. Someone hands me pages they’ve poured themselves into and asks, quietly, “Is this any good?” The honest, useful answer is almost always: yes, and here’s where it can be stronger.

If you were “that person” for your program — the one everyone sent their drafts to — you already know this feeling from the inside. And if you’re looking for that person now, for your dissertation or your book, that’s still exactly what I do.

— Who was the trusted reader in your cohort? Tell me in the comments. And if you’d like that kind of reader for your current project, here’s where to start.