Editors . . . Editing?

Randall Stephens

Last week Alex Clark wrote of the "Lost Art of Editing" in the Guardian. Presses have been cutting back for some time now. "Many speak of the trimming of budgets," notes Clark, "the increasingly regimented nature of book production and of the pressure on their time, which means they have to undertake detailed and labour-intensive editing work in the margins of their daily schedule rather than at its centre." A freelancer Clark consulted told him: "'big companies used to have whole copy-editing and proof-reading departments. Now you'll get one publisher and one editor running a whole imprint.'"

Clark's mostly talking about literary fiction here. But the cutting back on editing--line, copy, content--is something I've heard about repeatedly from historians and editors at university and trade presses.

You can do a thing or two to counter the trend. Have multiple historians, experts in your field, read your work. Getting far more than your two MS reviewers to take a look at your work will be a big plus. And, readers will probably be happy to have you return the favor for them at a later date.

See if you can get a second copy editor to go over your manuscript. I was able to work this out with Harvard Univ. Press for my first book, The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South. It helped. The two copy editors caught loads of grammatical infelicities, leaps in logic, spelling mistakes, etc. that I didn't have eyes to see. (It's even worth shelling out the money for an extra copy editor, if you can afford the $500 or so.)

And, finally, ask those at the press that you are speaking to if editors do much "editing." How will your editor help you shape your MS? Talk to authors who have worked with that editor in the past to see what goes into the process. Does she have a hands-off approach? Will she help you craft your argument and ask for important revisions?

On Writing and Editing

Randall Stephens

I took some time out of my large lecture course this week to talk to students about writing. Fresh on my mind was Rachel Toor's essay.

I always enjoy reading Toor "on writing" in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. This week's piece was especially interesting. Toor muses on the question: "So how do you learn to edit yourself?" True enough, seeing faults in your own work is sometimes harder than seeing them in the work of others. It's the splinter in his/her eye vs. the plank in yours.

Rachel Toor, "How Do You Learn to Edit Yourself?" Chronicle of Higher Education, September 27, 2010.

"Where do you go for help? The obvious first step is, of course, to acknowledge that you need help. Then go buy one of the zillions of books on writing well. They all say basically the same things. Find one that speaks to you in a way that you can hear.

Call me fusty and old-fashioned, but I heart Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, now in its 956th edition. My students receive it like a gift and tend to have two reactions: "How come no one ever told me to read this book?" And "OMG, I'm so embarrassed—I'm a terrible writer and make tons of mistakes." As Dorothy Parker said, "If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.">>>

See also,

Lewis Thomas, "Notes on Punctuation."

William Zinsser, "Writing English as a Second Language," American Scholar (Winter 2010).

Michael C. Munger, "10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly," Chronicle of Higher Education, September 6, 2010.

Heather Cox Richardson, "Richardson's Rules of Order, Part VId: Tips for Writing Research Papers for a College History Course," THS Blog, July 27, 2009.

Interview with George Huppert, Editor of the Journal of the Historical Society

Randall Stephens

Earlier in the month I spoke to George Huppert (University of Illinois at Chicago) about editing the Journal of the Historical Society. Huppert and associate

editor Scott Hovey aim to reach specialists and nonspecialists alike. The journal "presents fresh historical research in a non-pedantic way and provides a genuine opening to worldwide trends in historical research."

In the video embedded here I ask Huppert about the kinds of articles he seeks out and the models he looks to for the journal. He describes the ways in which the historian Lucien Febvre has informed his work and he notes the influence of the journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale.

Huppert is a social historian of early modern Europe. He has written extensively on the Renaissance, humanism, the history of philosophy, and the annales school. He is the author of a variety of articles and books, including The Idea of Perfect History: Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance France (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1970); Les Bourgeois Gentilshommes: An Essay on the Definition of Elites in Renaissance France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Public Schools in Renaissance France (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984); After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); and The Style of Paris: Renaissance Origins of the French Enlightenment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).