Happy Lunar New Year this weekend! May it inaugurate a time of greater peace, balance, and wholesome achievement! As we wrote last week, let your aspirations fly! We’re here to help you to convert aspiration into action.
We know that many of you want to write more, more effectively, and with less friction. We are here to help in two general ways. First, we provide a full-stack editing experience. No matter the level or polish of your writing, we can help to improve it. Second, we provide coaching so that you can make writing happen in a more existentially wholesome way. Today we’ll reflect on the existential pleasures of being edited and coached.
Getting Edited
Everybody thinks of getting edited as a negative experience. It’s important to acknowledge that. Depending on how attached we are to our writing, getting edited feels somewhere between mildly and extremely vulnerable. It’s like going to the dentist. We know it’s good for us, but even if the dentist is kind, careful, and courteous, you’re still going to deal with some mix of awkwardness, pain, or discomfort.
We’ve been there, which is why we take great care to make editing as painless as possible. To push the dental analogy further: not every experience at the dentist is equally awkward or painful. A checkup is easier than getting a cavity filled, which is easier than getting a root canal. Different kinds of editing affect the writing ego differently. Proofreads are the easiest. Copyedits are a bit harder. Structural edits are harder, and developmental edits are the hardest of all. But, just like with dentistry, deep interventions can fix a lot of pain. And the deeper we go, the more care we take not to strike those nerves.
That said, getting edited can be deeply fulfilling. Getting edited is also like taking music or art lessons. While lessons bring out all the ways in which our skills are limited, they also provide a roadmap so that, bit by bit, we no longer need lessons. Editing creates opportunities for building awareness of our tendencies, for learning how to intervene on those tendencies, for growing as writers, for learning humility before the endless task of communicating well.
These are not the only pleasures of getting edited. Sometimes, all we need as writers is another person to notice and validate us. Editor validation is a fairly straightforward thing: while we often focus on the negative tendencies, we also notice what’s working. Working with a supportive editor is an investment in getting clearer about what you want out of writing, and, perhaps, making connections and reflecting on your writing.
Getting Coached
Our academic coaching is a direct outgrowth of our experience as editors, educators, and academics. Fundamentally, coaching is about scaffolding our client’s growth in the medium-to-long term. It’s been a rewarding process for our clients and for us.
Scaffolding growth looks very different across our clients, because their circumstances are quite different. In general, we are here to provide clear and honest feedback about where they seem stuck, and to offer solutions that might work, both from our experience and from general principles and research. Ideally, we gear our feedback to help clients fail better. This sounds more harsh than it is: failure is an excellent teacher, perhaps the best teacher. Its lessons stick in a uniquely long-lasting way. If a client has the mental space to indulge in a growth mindset, this is the direction we take: we go to the pain, to the stuck spots, and spend some careful time there.
Of course, clients often aren’t in ideal circumstances. Clients typically have specific goals in mind with their projects, in which case we have to moderate the pure growth mindset approach. To do this well, we aim to be as clear as we can on our clients’ attitudes—for both our sakes. Getting coached brings up issues, but they should never feel overwhelming. We aim to support people in the way they want to be supported.
In sum, there’s considerable pleasure to be found in getting feedback, whether that comes as editing or coaching. We’re all conditioned to tense up around feedback, but the very process of persevering with it is wonderful growth. We aim to make the experience of getting edited hard but rewarding, like many of the best things in life. As coaches, we also work to instil a positive attitude to hard things, so that you can grow more effectively.