Structural Issues in Academia
From the outside, academia seems like a rarefied space that supports the life of the mind. The reality on the inside is more complex. This disconnect isn’t new or unique […]
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Self-Care and Community Care in Academia
We’re written quite a bit about self-care over the last year. It underlies many of our discussions of writing, motivation, craft, and editing. But good advice that doesn’t define its […]
The Plain Language Ideal
This week, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) released their plain-language standard for written communication. This marks the first internationally accepted statement of what clear communication means. The movement towards […]
Working with “Ugh”
We want writers to live happy and productive lives, for several reasons. Among these, it’s just good to be happy and engaged with writing. But also, it means more writing […]
Our Clients’ Voices are Inviolable
There’s a common attitude that editors aim to standardize a writer’s words so they sound like everyone else’s. We don’t do this. Most editors don’t. Our main goal as editors […]
Structural Issues and Academic Work
Here in Canada, May Day is a relatively neglectezd holiday because the labour movement is in a historic rut. But we think it’s important to recognize its contribution to improving […]
Attention, Writing, and Editing (Part 2): Nudging Attention into the Right Shape
We’ve been thinking about attention, writing, and editing for quite a while now, either explicitly, or implicitly in a few places. Understandably, we’ve been pretty writing-focused. Today we’re going to […]
How to Keep Trying in the Stuck Places
Writing is hard. Learning to write is hard, and the more we learn the more sensitive we get to ways we could improve. Learning and growing is magical and wonderful, […]
Artificial Intelligence, Writing, and Editing (Part 6): Mediocre Computing and Excellent Writing
The discourse around large language models (LLMs) continues to pick up steam, and shows no signs of slowing down. Just this week, we have the launch of GPT-4, which will […]
Attention, Writing, and Editing
Following from last week’s post on deep work, we’ve been thinking a bit more about attention. Skill in writing is, among other things, skill with subtleties of attention. So let’s […]