At my core, I am a teacher. After 20 years of working in education I can’t just shuffle off that professional shell and scuttle into a new one. On the contrary: teaching is at the heart of what I want to do with Limestone Editorial and with this blog. What follows is both origin story and mission statement, a summary of what I want to offer to clients and a larger community of folks who might make their way here.
I’ve devoted my professional life to the study and teaching of writing and literature. I worked for years as a high school and community college teacher, helping students to develop confidence in their reading and writing skills. For the past decade I’ve worked as a scholar of Renaissance Literature, navigating the fearsome world of academic publishing. The choice to transition from academia to editing was one that I came to gradually, over the course of a year or so (more about that in a future post). There’s a lot of talk about there these days about what the humanities might look like in a post-academia future, and this discourse gave me the courage to imagine how I might continue to work in the humanities in an unconventional way. My north star during the uncertainty of that transition was that I knew I had a lot of expertise to offer fellow writers, and I wanted a job that allowed me to continue being an advocate for the value of human creativity and original, thoughtful writing. Editing was a logical fit.
From the beginning, I knew that my approach would be informed by the pedagogical practices that I’ve cultivated over two decades in the classroom. When it works well, pedagogy feels like a magic trick: guiding students through a series of lessons and exercises, trusting that you’ve created a sequence that will build their skills before anyone realizes what’s happened. Of course, like any magic trick, these involve some trial and error: sequencing lessons so that each builds logically off the previous one, teaching a new skill just so, learning to phrase feedback in a particular way, anticipating the pitfalls that writers will encounter as they develop a piece.
Through this pedagogical trial and error, I’ve learned a lot about the mental experience of writing and how to guide someone along that path when they can’t seem to find their way. I’ve learned how to read a piece of writing and identify the hallmarks of particular habits of research, note-taking, thinking, and drafting. I can point these quirks out to a writer and suggest not only how they can polish their draft, but how they can improve their process. Feedback that critiques without offering guidance tends to demoralize students, leading them to believe they are terminally bad at writing. I believe in feedback that cultivates growth and confidence.
This pedagogical approach is one of the things I’m most excited to offer as a developmental editor and writing coach. While editing should certainly involve correction that helps an author to fully articulate their voice, I believe that editing should also help an author see why certain changes are effective as well as how to approach writing in the future in order to achieve those changes on their own. Properly done then, developmental feedback is not just about improving a single manuscript, but about helping the author to acquire something even more valuable: a greater command of their craft.
How does the blog fit into this?
Like any good millennial, I’ve dabbled in blogs over the years. Perhaps, reader, you too recall the heady sensation of seeing your own brilliant words reflected back at you from the internet in the early 2000s. This time around my goal is less about self-indulgent creative nonfiction and more about sharing what I’ve learned about writing in twenty years as a teacher and ten years as a scholar. As I developed my plans for my freelance practice, I got excited about using my practice as a platform for sharing my knowledge of wordcraft with a larger community. The pressure to market on social media is relentless, and of course as a freelancer I want to tell people about my business. The blog and @editrix.phd are important tools for spreading the word. But they are also opportunities for me to demystify writing, to talk about the joys of beautiful prose and the importance of human-produced arts and crafts. Here on the blog, I hope to answer questions you might have about writing, editing, academia, and what I’ve learned from my years teaching writing. I hope the blog will be a resource for you to learn about what I offer as an editor and for getting actionable, practical tips for improving your writing and editing your own work even if you’re not quite ready to hire an editor for yourself.
