Straightforward explanation

Authors are such lucid and beautiful writers when they don't realize they are writing.

One of the great joys of editing work in fields I know nothing about is asking questions of my clients. The answers, over email or over Skype, are unfailingly clear, logical, and fascinating. 

There is something about explaining deeply understood concepts to someone smart but without expertise that brings out the best in writers. Their prose becomes so clear and so verb driven (see Lanham's Revising Prose for more on verb-driven prose). I think this is probably what lies behind the academic tradition of having researchers teach, in fact--explaining complex concepts to neophytes is a fantastic way to distill your own understanding down to perfect clarity.

Some helpful MS Word tips for authors

This is a good basic primer on how to use Word more efficiently. 

Using revision tracking in Word.

What to do with an edited Word file (from a fellow editor).

Finally, how Track Changes works.

While I am more than happy to do the scut work of, for example, hand-converting simple typed footnotes into Word's linked, auto-numbering notes, or creating a document structure using styles to create a table of contents, having those basic things in place means I spend more time on your glorious prose!

Eight Steps of Editing

I recently read a blog post about Jim Taylor's eight-step editing method, and I thought it gave a helpful overview of some of the changes editors make to improve prose. (Taylor offers workshops on this method; I've never taken one, but I read a fantastic review of one of the workshops, and am taking my list of the steps from Haagsma's post.)

1. Shorten sentences. One of the easiest ways to improve readability is to break long sentences into two or more shorter sentences.
2. Take out the trash. Wherever possible, remove unnecessary words and phrases that slow readers down, or replace them with simpler words.
3. Overcome the negatives. Negatives inhibit comprehension because they force readers to work through two mental stages: first to imagine something, and then to imagine its opposite. Use the positive to ease readers’ understanding.
4. Deflate pomposity. Improve clarity by breaking down words and phrases to get at what is actually being said.
5. Eliminate the equations. Equating verbs (also known as linking verbs) lower the energy of a sentence because they do not convey any action. Find the action and replace the verb.
6. Activate the passives. Passive voice adds complexity by reversing the expected flow of action. Use active voice to aid comprehension and add energy.
7. Lead with strength. Find the most interesting and important information, and move it to the beginning (of the sentence, paragraph, chapter, etc.).
8. Parade your paragraphs. Start a new paragraph for each new idea; ideally, the first sentence of each paragraph should tell the entire story.

Taylor developed these steps specifically for business writing—which addresses a very different audience than scholarly writing. Number 1, for example, is sometimes useful for academic writing, but I find that pulling the grammatical subject and verb closer together to be much more crucial for these highly competent and motivated readers than simply shortening sentences.

Still, many of these recommendations are very useful: 2 and 3 reduce wordiness and streamline your prose; 5 and 6 increase narrative drive and help pull the reader through your compelling argument. 8 is simple good sense.

7, though, I think is incorrect for academic writing. Conveying complex ideas through writing requires real attention to your audience; I believe that Joseph Williams and George Gopen have it right for academic writing. They tell us to use the openings of sentences for transitional material that connects back to previous material and to save sentence endings for new ideas and material that should be emphasized. (This can be very subtle; for example, the opener of the previous clause—"this"—and of this one—"for example"—are both examples of transitional material.)

If you'd like an overview of the kind of structural rhetorical thinking that both Williams and Gopen engage in, Gopen published (with Judith Swan) an article that lays out his basic principles of reader awareness. That article, "The Science of Scientific Writing," is available free online. I've introduced many colleagues to this article and they've always found it transformational!

Attention: gating, choking, and pushing your reader's attention

I've been thinking a lot about how writing resembles picking pockets.  

I used to make my writing classes watch this video of famous pickpocket Apollo Robbins explaining how he directs his victim's attention to where he wants it (and away from where he doesn't want it, like your wallet).

Turns out that attention is almost like a liquid: it can only be in one place at a time, and it can be directed. The principles behind Robbins' abilities are the same as the principles of good writing and editing (although obviously the methods of directing that attention flow differ). 

Readerly attention can be gated (stopped completely), choked (the attention channel is narrowed, slowing the flow of comprehension), and pushed (the floodgates are opened wide and the attention tumbles ahead breathlessly). 

Generally, when readerly attention is gated, it's by mistake. These are often errors that bring your reader to a halt, forcing them to read and re-read a sentence in order to make sense of it. For especially sensitive readers, even a misspelling or a grammatical error stop attention from moving forward. This is rarely a good thing; each stop causes the reader to doubt the author's credibility a little more, and at some point most readers will simply walk away.

Choking the reader's attention can be done deliberately or accidentally. When deliberately done, it's a useful element of pacing in both fictional and nonfictional narratives. (See, for example, Eric Hayot's work on the shape of paragraphs and sections, and the peaks and valleys of attention created by those shapes, in humanities writing.) When it's done by accident, you risk slowing the reader down in spots where she should forge ahead. Several things can cause this. Multiple shifts of sentences' grammatical subjects within a single paragraph slow down your reader; besides violating one of my most cherished of Joseph Williams' style principles, this forces the reader to do the work of figuring out how these seemingly disconnected sentences link up. (This is so, so common in literature reviews.) Another slowing device is using very long sentence and clause units, which are difficult to parse. Generally, the longer and more complex the syntactical unit, and the more complicated its relation to other parts of the sentence, the more slowly the reader moves through it.

Pushing the reader's attention forward can also be accomplished in many ways—punctuation affects it (breathless-sounding sentences, separated by few full stops and employing lots of connecting devices like dashes and commas, pull the reader's attention along with them), and these are usually intentionally used by authors. Sometimes short sentences do it. You can also keep the reader's attention speeding along the surface of the stuff you want them to pay attention to by "shadowing"  any information that you do not want spotlighted. Anything in subordinated parts of the sentence—which clauses, parentheticals, etc.—is treated as less weighty. By putting less-important information in grammatically subordinated elements of the sentence, you can help the reader know what to pay attention to and what they can safely skim.

These techniques are difficult to articulate, but I think this is one of my greatest strengths as an editor. I can intuit what ideas or elements are crucial to your piece (thank you, decade of graduate school in literary studies, for making me a freakishly sensitive reader) and then shape the prose's pace to shadow the details and highlight the central bits. I love helping authors de-emphasize the things that don't matter and focus the reader's attention on the essential elements.