Everyone can benefit from using an editor, but the specific benefits depend on what each writer needs. To see other writing profiles, click here. The busy scholar can use an editor to accelerate the writing process.
Writing and revising is time consuming. A busy scholar may be managing teaching, research, writing, administrative duties, and mentoring. In the crunch of a busy schedule, you might find yourself rushing or skipping detailed revisions. (How often does an upcoming deadline cause you to shift your goal from producing a thoroughly polished draft to producing one that is merely complete?) An editor can take on some of the crucial but overlooked tasks of revision. These tasks make a distinct difference in the quality of a draft.
A line editor reads and revises with an eye towards your future readers, identifying places in the draft where they must resort to interpretive work—I think you are trying to say this here. (In most academic and nonfiction writing, authors do not want their reader having to undertake to this kind of guesswork.) An editor reads for consistent use of terms, effective use of verbs, pesky vague pronouns, and sentence structures that emphasize the key idea (just to name a few tasks of a line editor).
If you don’t have time to read your work for these details, an editor can take care of them for you.
An editor can even accelerate the writing process by moving the draft forward while you are taking a break from it. You can come back to it with areas flagged for your further attention. In more intensive edits, you’ll receive a draft to review with sentences that are clarified and changed for you to accept, change, or reject.
An editor can accelerate the writing process.
An editor does some of the work you do not have time to do, elevating the craft of your writing to present the best possible version of your ideas.
The Writing is Thinking Editing approach recognizes that attention requires time, and you can buy time by hiring an editor. An editor will give your words the attention that you and your reader cannot afford to give them. Scholars with research budgets and those without this resource find editing services worth the expense.
The problem most writers face isn’t writing.
Verlyn Klinkenborg, several short sentences about writing, pg 49
It’s consciousness.
Attention.
Noticing.
That includes noticing language.
The fundamental act of revision is literally becoming conscious of the sentence.
Seeing it for what it is, word for word, as a shape, and in relation to all the other sentences in the piece.