This post should come in the form of a fun quiz:
- How much time do you have to dedicate to your writing each week?
- When is your next deadline and how close are you to meeting it?
- What stage of your career are you in?
- What stage is your current draft in?
- What are the last three books you read? (And, what genres do they belong to?)
- Who do you talk to most about your ideas:
- colleagues in your niche specialty,
- colleagues in neighboring disciplines,
- your actual neighbors,
- internet strangers?
I’d tally your results and declare—ta-da: you are the busy scholar, the curious writer, the intellectual in the weeds.
Everyone can benefit from using an editor, but the specific benefits depend on what each writer needs.
Benefits can vary, from freeing up your limited time to increasing your self-awareness about your writing tendencies to growing your audience of readers. (And you are never educated past the point of benefitting from an editor).
An editor can do the things that you are capable of doing but don’t have time to do—dusting the blinds and cleaning the gutters of writing, like cutting passive voice, eliminating ambiguous pronouns, and identifying your quirky recurring phrases.
And an editor can do things for your writing that you cannot do, like read it with fresh eyes as a new reader will. Or show you what it’s like to read your work as a non-expert that has not read your cited sources.
Take a look at a few common profiles, and discover how each writer can benefit from hiring an editor. (Links to each profile will become active as the series is published).
- The busy scholar
- The intellectual in the weeds
- The writer looking to reach readers
- The curious, developing writer
- The writer at a formative career stage
- Graduate and postgraduate students
- Early tenure track scholars
- Ambitious undergraduate students