Effectively Asking for Feedback
Do you struggle with asking for feedback on your writing from your peers and mentors? Writers often seek my support for developmental editing because they’re scared to ask for feedback from scholars in their field. In my conversations with clients, I’ve discovered there are four reasons writers hesitate in asking for feedback. In this […]
Asking For Feedback: Do You Know What You Need?
Short story: I had a colleague in a workshop who offered generous feedback on my work. At the end of each workshop, they’d hand me a draft with all sorts of comments, questions, suggestions, and recommendations for future reading. There would also be grammar corrections throughout the document. For some reason, this copyediting infuriated me. […]
Taking the Stress Out of the Revise and Resubmit
A revise and resubmit is no joke. It may be the piece of writing that begets the most procrastination and anxiety. I think this is because you are not writing just for yourself and an imagined audience, but rather for a real audience of readers who just offered you a critique that was at times […]
Behind the Words: A New Interview Series
I’m so excited to begin a new series on the blog! Behind the Words is an interview series with academic writers. One of my frustrations with academic writing as a practice has always been that as much as we give advice to writers, and lament about the writing process (then complain about the poor […]
Are You Standing In Your Own Way?
Have you ever dreaded doing something that you thought would be hard, only to realize it wasn’t nearly as hard as you thought it would be? There are many reasons we claim that something is hard to do. For academics (and mostly everyone) thinking something is hard means believing it to be complicated, or […]
Asking for Help, Without Shame
A common misconception I face in my work is that I work exclusively with “bad” writers. I’ve been told time and time again that my clients must be very bad at writing, because why would a good writer need an editor? Well, there are plenty of reasons, which I will explain below. First, I […]