Here at Clarity Doctors we turned to professional editing after finishing our PhDs. The transition from academia to editing is somewhat unusual, so we thought we’d share some of our story in the hopes that it helps someone out there who is searching for a life after the PhD.
PhD Skills
PhDs are variable in their content: a PhD in chemistry and archaeology have practically no overlapping shared knowledge, training, or attitudes. That said, we think that there are general skills almost everyone picks up in the course of getting the PhD. We speak from our experience, but we have had enough conversations over the course of grad school to know much of this is common across grad students.
We’re a two-person company run by PhDs—hence the name! In addition to research culminating in book-length dissertations, we also spent a lot of time teaching. We learned many things! And, more importantly, we got to practice what we learned for years and years. The key skills that made it possible for us to be editors are:
- dealing with huge amounts of complex, incomplete, ambiguous information,
- making, understanding, teaching, and refining arguments,
- understanding the structure of complex, dense, pieces of writing,
- working with minimal supervision, and
- writing complex texts under pressure and deadlines.
Getting good at those five skills took us both years of effort, experimentation, and quite a bit of failure. In many ways, learning a skill is failing repeatedly but a little less painfully each time, until you notice the pain’s not there any more! Without these skills we couldn’t have made the transition to editing.
From the PhD to Professional Editing
No transition is seamless. We had to learn many specific things as we developed our business, but we noticed early on that editor training is quite similar to academic research. Our job is to be well-versed in the specific demands of different writing genres and any relevant style guides that apply, as well as to have an overall aesthetic sense from which to make recommendations. As we found, the world of style guides is a lot like the world of research: standards differ, sometimes wildly, and what is rewarded is sheer perseverance rather than inspiration. Instead of getting overwhelmed and losing hope, we realized we had the mulish stubbornness to actually understand the mechanics of writing at a level that most people don’t need to. It turned out that learning a style guide is much easier than learning an esoteric field of research. And editing is collaborative: we don’t make recommendations until we have a good read on what our clients actually want to improve.
Two years after transitioning, we have found that editing is more satisfying than academia. One of the main reasons is quicker feedback and turn-around times. Compared to most academic projects, editing projects are short and allow for much clearer boundaries between client and editor. This is good for everyone! And good boundaries between work-mode and life-mode has drastically improved our quality of life. Besides, it’s satisfying to use hard-earned skills to help a person out with something they care a lot about. We know all too well (having written ourselves) how vulnerable getting edited is, so we strive to make the process a good one in whatever way our client needs.
In sum, PhDs make good editors because they have been tried by fire in a way that builds good fundamentals. Editing is a skill you pick up on the job, but PhDs can pick it up pretty efficiently. So consider joining us!