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Digital Publishing Column: Yvonne Seale, “On Empathy in Editing”

06 Saturday Jun 2015

Posted by hortuluseditors in Digital Publishing Column

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digital publishing, editing, editing for the Web, online publishing

On Empathy in Editing

Yvonne Seale, Fall 2014 Assistant Editor

            You’d perhaps expect to learn a great deal about the craft of writing when working as the editor of a journal like Hortulus. It’s true. I learned to wrangle wayward apostrophes, to figure out where an argument needed to be shored up with a contextualizing paragraph, and the tricky art of unearthing topic sentences from where they’ve been buried mid-paragraph. But what I didn’t expect to learn was something more profound: that you are not what you write.

Getting to grips with the mechanical aspects of editing is an important thing for any aspiring academic to learn, one which benefits both the article on which you’re working and, ultimately, your own writing. I know from my experiences as an editor and as a peer reviewer that figuring out how to phrase the suggestions you want to make to an author, thinking through how to articulate a hunch you have about why that paragraph needs to be moved there, can help you to truly internalize writing rules you’ve been hearing for a long time. It may be an old adage, but it’s a true one—you only really understand something if you can explain it to someone else.

Yet this is not the most valuable aspect of the editorial experience. That lies in the way that working with someone else’s prose can change your own relationship with your writing. One of the most difficult things for a budding medievalist to learn in graduate school—or at least so it was for me—isn’t getting to grips with paleography, or the myriad uses of the Latin ablative, or even how to get through a lengthy comps exam reading list with relative speed. (Though each of these things carry their own special brand of frustration.) The most important thing is learning that you are not your work.

I know that may sound a little corny, and as the product of a stolid Irish farming family, I resisted fully understanding the maxim for quite some time. I was raised to believe that if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right, and that you should take pride in a job well done. There’s nothing inherently wrong with those ideas, but I think that how I internalized them led me to confuse the end-product with the process. Looking back at my undergraduate career, and even my time as a Master’s student, I can now see how that confusion led to a lot of stress, frustration, and anxiety. It’s possible to make a sincere effort with a paper or an article, to do the best you can with the information that you have, and still end up with a piece of work that doesn’t entirely do what you want it to do. And yet the most difficult thing turns out to be not looking that that draft that’s not what it should be, and figuring out how it needs to be fixed; it’s realizing that producing an imperfect draft isn’t a measure of your ability as a scholar.

What gives you a far better sense of your measure as a scholar is your ability to adapt your writing, to see the potential in your work, and to make something better of it. Working as an editor provides you with a good object lesson in the truth of this. Once an article has been accepted by a journal, an editor doesn’t work with just one version of it. At least during my stint at Hortulus, I got to see multiple versions of the same work: the original version (which was of course often itself the final iteration of many months of work), which I read through with an eye to identifying appropriate peer reviewers; the annotated versions which the reviewers return, marked up with what excited them or what they felt lacking; and then the revised version which the author returns, incorporating the reviewers’ suggestions. This version then goes through another round of line and structural edits before it’s ready for publication. The process allows you to see people making critiques, and then others taking those critiques and doing something with them—to see not just the polished final version, but also the various revisions of it along the way. Getting to observe this process at a remove helps to break down some of the fear that there are other scholars out there—the nebulous “good ones”—who are able to produce perfect work without so much as a bead of swear dampening their brow. When you get a seminar paper or a dissertation chapter back from an advisor and it’s liberally annotated with suggestions for further readings, queries about the framing of your argument, or even the occasional inscrutable ‘???’, it is in no way proof that you are less good than other graduate students, or that you are not working as hard as your peers. Critique is just one step in the process, one that will hopefully let you see the potential in your work.

Working as an editor also makes you see that you have something to offer as a scholar, that you have amassed a body of knowledge on your area of study on which you can draw. The work that you put into structuring the historiographical section of your master’s thesis—you can draw on that to provide advice to someone who’s struggling to make the framework of their article cohere. All that reading you did for your comps exams—that lets you come up with a reference to a journal article that will help to bolster the point that the author has made. As graduate students, there’s still so much for us to learn about the craft of being a historian or a literary scholar, but it’s not self-important for us to recognize that our own work is built upon a steadily expanding knowledge base.

Yet equally, to be a diligent editor also requires a recognition of the fallibility of critique, of the fact that those who review work are not omniscient. Their assessment may be wrong; they may want the author to have written a completely different manuscript. I know that when I edit something, I do so out of a sincere desire to help someone improve their work and the belief that my suggestions will help the author to do so. However, I don’t presume to think that my advice is always right just because it’s well-intentioned, nor am I so naïve as to think that all peer reviewers are working from the same good motivations. Having to critique others’ work has helped make it much clearer for me, that the critique which I receive on my work is something to be taken seriously and thoughtfully, but also as counsel rather than a final judgment.

Part of being a good editor is treating another’s work with empathy, mindful of the labor that has been put into it so far and looking always for its potential—and when you learn to do that with a colleague’s work, you learn to do the same with your own.

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Digital Publishing Column: Paul A. Brazinski on “Smile for the journal :) Emoticons and their use in online publishing”

30 Saturday May 2015

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digital publishing, editing for the Web, Netiquette, online publishing

“Smile for the journal 🙂 Emoticons and their use in online publishing”

In January 2014, I took a university course (with a different but credible institution) to get my certificate to teach online college courses; naturally, the class was online. In the first module, we were taught about “netiquette”, the proper manners for communicating with others in an online service or forum.[1] For example, the professor showed us how to USE CAPITALS WHEN MAKING A POINT, which I understood and accepted. i also understood how using abbr, as when txting or typos, wood take away from ur argument. However, he taught other points, such as the use emoticons to display our emotions to our students, which I was at first skeptical about. For me, the instructor’s constant use of “:)” and “:(” made the course seem unprofessional and I viewed the feedback as unauthentic. I understand where the professor was coming from, but it did not resonate well with me.
            As the Chief Reviews Editor with Hortulus, the experience made me reflect on how I incorporate emotions in feedback in our reviews process, since I rarely meet in person with my reviewers. So I did my research and was surprised at what I found. First, emoticons have been in use for over 31 years.[2] The first emoticon in an online forum was used in a message board about a fake mercury spill at Carnegie Mellon University. The faculty there used the emoticon to differentiate real messages from jocular content in the forum. Although it is hard to pinpoint the first use of an emoticon in written English, the earliest example might be an 1862 transcript of a speech President Lincoln wrote.[3] Needless to say, emoticons have a much longer history than I expected. As I kept researching, I found that major publishing houses, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Houston Chronical have printed issues on this new incorporation of emoticons in the business and professional world.[4] So perhaps I was behind the times, as might also be reflected in the fact that I still use a “dumb” phone. Nevertheless, I am still skeptical and have used other means to display my feedback for reviews, which is the point of this brief entry. In what follows, I will state what I use at Hortulus to give feedback, which I have found successful thus far.
           First, as a Chief Reviews Editor, I made a hierarchy of status updates, which I stick closely to when giving feedback; they are subpar, poor, decent, ok, good, great, excellent, tremendous, and perfect. In giving feedback, I really think that being warm and direct is best. Giving the right level of feedback is crucial or else something might get lost in translation. For example, if I tell a reviewer that their piece is perfect in an email but attach a draft for revisions that has thirty in-depth comments and numerous grammatical corrections, confusion or minimal edits could ensure, as I have witnessed first-hand. The same is true for the opposite scenario – negativity for a stellar review could result in a reviewer pulling their piece mid-process, as I have heard from colleagues but not experienced personally. Thus, honesty is the best policy and I have a rubric that I use to give feedback. I have found that reviewers that receive the appropriate amount of feedback are more likely to make the proper edits and meet their deadlines.
            Second, I try to prove a personal message with every email response. For example, I try to comment in emails on particular phrases or wordings that I found superb from the reviews. I also like to ask “How is your semester coming along?” and similar questions to open my emails. I do this for two reasons. First, I do this to establish professional relationships with my reviewers. Since I have taken this position, I have met three of my reviewers in person at conferences and other academic events, which has always made the occasions more enjoyable for us all. Secondly, I do this in order to understand their schedules. For example, if reviewers reply saying a family event has them swamped this weekend or that they are giving a major presentation soon (as some do), then I try to accommodate their busy schedules in our deadlines if I have leeway. Naturally, most reviewers do not reply to these opening questions, while others state something neutral like “all is well here.” But, I find that giving people the opportunity to open up or state any conflicts they have as very beneficial in getting reviewers to meet their deadlines and to make the process less stressful.
           The internet has often been criticized as being a “faceless forum”, where many openly attack one another, hiding behind false identities.[5] Some people use emoticons to take the ambiguity away from their joking/unprofessional messages, however, I do not. Although my tactics in employing emotions in feedback are not perfect, I think my use of a strict hierarchy of statuses, proving direct and warm feedback, and opening emails with a personal greeting are steps in the right direction. These steps keep my feedback straightforward and positive. Moreover, I have enjoy the personal touches as my time as Chief Reviews Editor. However, I am open and eager to hear what others do. Please let us know what you do in giving feedback in emails. Feel free to use an emoticon if you want. 😉

[1]For the rules of Netiquette, see the official network website at http://www.networketiquette.net/. ↩
[2] Houston, Keith, “Smile! A History of Emoticons” The Wall Street Journal (27 September 2013). ↩
[3] Houston 2013. ↩
[4] Newman, Judith, “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Must I Know, Too?” The New York Times (21 October 2011); Vulcan, Nicole, “How Should the Use of Emoticons be Conveyed in Business Communication?” The Houston Chronicle. ↩
[5] Milman, David, “Schoolyard bullies branch out over the Internet,” Computer World (20 October 2010). ↩

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  • The Reliquary Triptych, the Arms of Christ, and the Visual Language of the Relic Thesaurus ca. 1160–By Julia Oswald
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Kungamakten och lagen. En jämförelse mellan Danmark, Norge och Sverige under högmedeltiden (Kingship and Law: A Comparison between Denmark, Norway and Sweden in the High Middle Ages)—Review by Beñat Elortza Larrea
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Walter Map and the Matter of Britain—Review by Thomas Sawyer

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