From the PhD to Professional Editing

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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

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

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!

Academia and Self-Care: Uneasy Partners

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Most of our clientele are academics, who face unique challenges with self-care. While we all need more self-care, typical advice around it doesn’t quite fit the academic context. So, let’s explore how to make it work!

(To be clear, we don’t think academics are the most in need of self-care. That probably goes to shift workers who don’t have as much representation in online discourse. Here we’re sticking with what we know.)

Structural Issues

Academics are embedded in social and institutional structures that devalue self-care. We are under ceaseless pressure to produce from a variety of sources and in a variety of contexts: publications, teaching, talks, experiments, and more. What makes achieving these many goals hard is that academic deadlines operate on multiple time-scales and often come unpredictably. This makes steady, constant work and the sense of self-efficacy it brings almost impossible to sustain. And so, academics are almost always behind on a variety of projects and have to pull them together with never quite enough time.

Perfectly balanced or just about to topple over? That’s the typical academic! Photo by Bekir Dönmez on Unsplash.

In psychology, this situation is known as a variable schedule of reinforcement, and it is the most efficient way to sculpt behaviour into locked-in, unbalanced patterns. (Think of a casino slot machine: it gives rewards in unpredictable bursts, and that’s what hacks the brain’s rewards systems to keep people gambling.) Academics are not usually tuned into rewards, but are avoiding possible punishments in the form of failure. So, in academia, almost all goals are pursued within a variable structure of crunch-times.

This variable schedule explains why it’s so hard to take time for self-care. Even when actively trying to unwind, academics have had their brains hacked by deadline anxiety. There’s also a layer of guilt over this anxiety since most academics got into the field because they love what they do, at least in a general sense. This situation is similar with teachers and social workers. Sadly, it’s a recipe for self-exploitation and burnout.

Navigating the Structure

The problems with academia can be addressed! Some people manage to thrive under this kind of system. Some solutions will have to be structural. But while we wait for those solutions, we can also do what we have to do to persist. The key, we think, is that successful academics have developed the capacity for gracefully overwhelmed work. We have to accept the situation to work within it.

There is no one-size-fits all way to find that gracefulness. Our academic coaching involves working with clients to break up and manage what can feel like all-consuming overwhelm. While each client has had unique issues, there are many universal themes in this work. There is often great empowerment in articulating those themes because they make intelligible a structure you live within. We did this and it saved our sanity. You can find more information about our academic coaching work here. The first meeting is free!

We also want to share what we have learned in our academic coaching journey. Stay tuned as we explore the multitude of ways in which we can improve the academic’s lot and leave enough room for self-care! We will explore self-efficacy, self-care, goal-setting, and compassion for yourself and others.

Artificial Intelligence, Writing, and Editing: GPT-3

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In an earlier post, we considered some general issues around artificial intelligence, writing, and editing. This topic is both technically and existentially interesting, so today we’ll focus in more on one well-known example of language AI: GPT-3. We’ll also revisit some anxieties that it’s raising for writers and why we think these anxieties are overblown.

What is GPT-3 and how does it Work?

GPT-3 stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer, 3rd generation”. It is a large neural network (at the time of its release, the largest neural network ever), with 175 billion (!) parameters. (For reference, GPT-1 and GPT-2 had 117 million and 1.5 billion parameters, respectively).

The future of writing? Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash.

A neural network is a computer architecture that works well for detecting hidden patterns in a large amount of input data. The network uses processes that mimic our brain’s own processing to gradually get better and better at pattern-detection during its training process. Importantly, for GPT-3 and modern neural networks, the programmer does not have to pre-specify the patterns in the data. As long as the sample is reasonably representative of the world, the neural network learns patterns automatically—and often impressively. Some neural networks, like GPT-3, can also generate common patterns they have learned.

GPT-3’s task is to generate human-like language outputs from text prompts. It was trained on about 450 GB of text data gathered from the internet. Because of its huge number of parameters, GPT-3 is capable of picking up on patterns in the text from the very fine-grained to the very general. Media reports emphasize the astonishing human-likeness and fluidity of the language it produces based on prompts (for a deep dive, see here). Furthermore, it also learns to learn based on the prompts, so it can tweak its output to the user’s commands.

Is it Time to Worry?

GPT-3’s achievements are a big deal. Are human writers doomed? Are the machines coming for our jobs sooner than we expected? We think not, and for very specific technical reasons.

We need to unpack the idea of “generating human-like language”. To do this, GPT-3 works in a step-by-step fashion—it picks the first word after the prompt, then the second, then the third, and so on. This allows it to generate strings of text very quickly, leveraging its pattern-detecting superpowers at every step of the process. However, this technical feature limits GPT-3’s usefulness for building coherent long texts—those that develop a theme, take asides but respect a basic simplicity of the narrative, and stay internally consistent. (To be fair, humans have trouble with this too, and GPT-3 does deal with context reasonably well, but the ways it deals with context is not very human-like.)

GPT-3 doesn’t Understand

There’s also a deeper limitation to GPT-3. Put simply, although GPT-3 outputs remarkably human-like language, it doesn’t really understand how the world works, what its words mean, or the general cohesion of its writing. This is not a limitation of computing power. The problem is that GPT-3 has an impoverished relationship to the world; it merely represents the world, and doesn’t engage it.

We humans, whether writers or editors, don’t have that problem. We are always already engaged with the world, and our language is responsive to that world. Human writers have other problems, like our relatively slow output, limited energy, and fleeting motivation. But because we are engaged, we usually have some grasp on a topic. Our language use is exquisitely context-sensitive in a way that GPT-3 cannot yet match. (This article discusses some of GPT-3’s failures of context-sensitivity.) This makes us resilient, to an extent, to automation-induced unemployment, at least for the foreseeable future.

Of course, there are many, many nuances here. We will pick up on them in later posts. Stay tuned!

Self-Regulation: Writing on the Hardest Days

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We have written a fair amount about self-regulation in relation to writing. We have discussed strategies for starting, ways to persevere, ways to navigate around procrastination, and the joy of hitting the zone. There is always room to expand this discussion, and that’s what we’ll do today!

Some days writing is easy, and other days it’s very hard. Sometimes we can start with Draft 1. Sometimes we have to start writing at Draft 0. But on days when writing is hardest we need to scale down our expectations even further. This brings us to Draft -1.

Draft -1: The Workaround for Hard Days

As the name suggests, writing Draft -1 is an even lower-stakes task than writing Draft 0, which is pretty low-stakes already. Whereas in Draft 0 we’re trying to put words down on a page, in Draft -1 we’re not even writing. Draft -1 is about pre-writing. The goal is to accumulate something: maybe some ideas, or snippets. Sometimes Draft -1 is not even in verbal form: doodles, symbols, swoops and swirls. The hope is that these somethings will coalesce into thoughts, ideas, or cleaner words.

The basic attitude behind Draft -1 is that discipline is a myth. On good or average days, we’re able to gather our powers and get a few things done even though some part of us may resist doing the thing. We use our discipline, such as it is, to get the task done. On days that call for Draft -1, no such powering-through is available—it may even be actively harmful to you. So we have to work with what we have. We have to sidestep our incapacity without disciplining ourselves!

Some writing days are just like this. Photo by Christian Bruno on Unsplash.

How? The answer gets very hazy. There’s no definite Draft -1 toolkit, only suggestions that may or may not work. This is because Draft -1 helps us pull from an unconscious horizon of tacit knowledge and sense-making. Let’s unpack this a little.

Most of our writing skill is unconscious; we don’t experience the full details of where words, sentences, and paragraphs come from. Words, sentences, and paragraphs come together against a giant background of tacit knowledge, because all language users have achieved expertise in a huge range of skills just to use language properly, much less well. Sense-making is just a process of crunching down vagueness and complexity into something we can work with. For writers, it’s crunching down the complexity of all the things you could write into the linear(ish) simplicity of things you do write.

Dealing with the unconscious is a tricky, indirect business.

Tools and Tricks for Draft -1

Some people have had decent success by starting with mind-maps. If you’re totally lost on what to write, write keywords. Circle them, or draw arrows between them. Or just lines between them. Maybe group them. Maybe a cluster of meaning will emerge from this. Perhaps something you can turn into a thought or an observation.

Some people try just talking at an inanimate object or a pet. The pets and objects will not care, of course, but the talking will be very, very low-stakes.

Some people have had decent success by throwing in some chaotic search terms into Google image search and taking some inspiration from what shows up. A good potential way to get out of a verbal blockage is to immerse yourself in something non-verbal but interesting. Random images do that for some people.

An extension of the previous idea is throwing in some phrases or sentences related to your (maybe half-baked) idea into an online AI-driven image generator like Dall-E Mini (now known as Craiyon).

These methods may not work quickly, but at the very least they’ll take away some energy from that part of us that really wants to (or needs to) procrastinate! And sometimes distracting ourselves from procrastination while (kind of) staying on task is all we need to do until the energy comes back.

Draft 1 and the Crafting of Clarity from Abundant Chaos

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We’ve already written a good deal about what it’s like to get stuck with writing, some strategies for overcoming stuckness, and what unstuck writing tends to feel like. Recently, we also discussed the very important strategy of starting with draft 0 instead of with draft 1 when stuck.

Today we will explore the transition between draft 0 and draft 1. The essence of the transition is that in draft 0 we invite in abundant chaos—the goal is to write without regard for external standards of quality—but now that the initial burst has happened, we have use our judgment to turn our glorious mess into something which will stand up to external scrutiny. There are four pieces of this process.

Draft 0: a wild garden. Photo by Sarah Kilian on Unsplash.

First, before we begin to write draft 1 we need to sort out what  in draft 0 worked and what didn’t. Ideally, after finishing draft 0, you should put it aside for some time so that after coming back to it you should be able to notice which parts still make sense to you and which parts don’t. This is our tweak of a method that composers use to write melodies. For composers, the best measure of whether a melody is any good is whether it gets stuck in the composer’s head; if a melody does this, there’s something there worth developing. The same goes for writing! A good, clear, or compelling idea will quite naturally live inside us and will be recognizable even after we’ve put down the writing. What survives this process of forgetting is what you will develop.

Second, we need to fix the organization of draft 0. As we think through writing, our basic idea might appear (and reappear) anywhere in draft 0. Typically, in draft 0s the key point only emerges towards the end of the writing. This is a natural way to develop an idea, but it’s not a good way to present it to an audience. So typically we find ourselves needing to push the main idea closer to the top.

Third, we typically need to do some sentence-by-sentence cleanup. Chances are good that at least some sentences written during draft 0 are too long, too fragmented, or too garbled to make it into draft 1. This happens because thinking from scratch just is overlong, garbled, and fragmented; in draft 0 we are thinking, and often overthinking; putting down any words at all is already quite an achievement! But in draft 1 some of those words will not pass external scrutiny.

Draft 1: directed growth. Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.

Fourth, we need to clean up paragraphs. This process is guided by the previous three steps. Those steps will tell us what to cut, what to rearrange, what to develop, and what to rewrite. Here you may find yourself going back and forth between organization, sentences, and paragraphs. Just know that not all paragraphs will survive this process.

The transition between draft 0 and draft 1 is sometimes an unhappy one. The feeling of energized inspiration that draft 0 produces now has to face the relatively harsh glare of external standards. We hope that these four steps can help you break down the process into manageable steps.

Artificial Intelligence, Writing, and Editing

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We live in interesting times. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is developing rapidly, and there is intense speculation and worry abound around its impact on work. Editing work is subject to these worries like any other job. So let’s do some speculating today!

We think that editors don’t need to fear the machines yet, but we do have reasons to fear our fear. Let’s unpack that claim.

What are the important AI systems for editors? There are two major classes of AI technologies that will surely impact the editing market. First, there are AI engines like GPT-3 that have gotten good at generating natural-language text. Second, there are AI-driven engines for editing text, which are more speculative. Today, we’ll focus on the GPT-3, otherwise this post might get unwieldy.

The future of writing and editing? Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.

There’s a well-known article that was written by GPT-3 for The Guardian. It’s interesting. But the details matter. GPT-3 was given a fairly substantive opening, and then generated eight versions of the article, which was stitched together by the Guardian editorial staff. As the post-script to the article states: “editing GPT-3’s op-ed was no different to editing a human op-ed. We cut lines and paragraphs, and rearranged the order of them in some places. Overall, it took less time to edit than many human op-eds.” Editing was still absolutely central to the process.

What does this incident suggest? GPT-3 might impact the editing market positively, driving up demand for editors, because it will increase the volume of text that needs editing. It might be true that GPT-3 can write about as well as the average human, but editing work is not mainly focused around average writing—it’s about making the writing more than acceptable! If we drill down a bit, GPT-3 might decrease demand for copyediting and proofreading, since here its computing power gives it an obvious advantage over human writers, but it is likely to increase demand for developmental and stylistic editing. This is because GPT-3’s output is coherent at the sentence and paragraph level, but starts getting wonky for larger writing structures, as suggested by the making of the Guardian piece. Perhaps in the near future clients may start a writing project with AI-assisted writing and then may find that they need editorial intervention to make the text more coherent at large scales like arguments, chapters, rhetorical framing, and through-lines.

So, where editing is concerned, there may be changes coming in the near future, but worries about the collapse of demand for editors is premature. One take-away is that editors might want to focus their professional development on high-level editing.

However, there is one worry around AI and editing that we take very seriously. We think that anxieties like “machines will take our jobs” might trigger editors to prematurely make themselves cheaper, triggering a race to the bottom. The antidote to this possibility is to look under the hood of these AI systems and have a working knowledge of what they can and can’t do. We think that both dismissing AI and over-inflating its powers are errors. There are real worries, but we need to be measured about them. As usual, more education will help everyone. Stay tuned as we explore these ideas in a bit more detail in future posts.

Editing and (a Bit of) Philosophy: Meaning and Form

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One of us (Alex) trained in philosophy, so it is natural that we apply some of this training to refining our editing work. Today, we’ll run through a gentle example of how this works.

Philosophy

Very briefly, philosophy is inquiry into the big questions of life. It’s traditionally broken down into four sub-fields: ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, and metaphysics. Ethics concerns how we should live. Aesthetics concerns the nature of experience: sensation, feeling, beauty, ugliness. Epistemology concerns the nature of knowledge. Metaphysics asks how things are in the most general sense: what exists, what doesn’t, how are different kinds of things related to each other, what things are, and so on. All four fields are linked, and rivers of ink have been spilled debating them in sometimes absurdly intricate detail.

Is this doing philosophy? A classic philosophical question. Photo by Milan Popovic on Unsplash.

Philosophers usually proceed by taking a simple question and making it horrendously complex in the hope that grinding through the complexity will give us deeper, hard-won simplicity. When this goes well it is satisfying, but often it doesn’t go so well. So be warned!

Recently, we found ourselves wondering where the ethical line is between editing a client’s work and doing the writing for them. We are committed to avoiding even the suggestion that we do our clients’ writing for them. so it’s important to get clear on where the line is. Sometimes people approach us quite indirectly to do the writing for them, and we aim to be very direct with our boundaries.

There’s a simple answer here, of course. Skilled and ethical editors know the line, and the line is applied on a case-by-case basis. But this isn’t a satisfying general account. And without a general account, the odds of being taken in by an indirect approach increase. So (Alex thinks), some philosophy might help here!

Meaning, Form, and Surface Form

When it comes to any piece of writing, we can distinguish three levels at which editors engage it. The deepest of these is meaning: what the author intends to convey through writing. The second level is form. It packages the meaning. Form indicates the way the sentences work together (or not) to convey the meaning. An author might know exactly what they mean, yet if the form is inadequate, the reader will not get the meaning. The third level is surface form. This involves the stylistic details of punctuation, word choice, and the like to emphasize shades of the meaning and the form. This is the level that’s easiest to clean up, since if meaning and form are clear, improving surface form is a matter of polishing the writing.

Much more could be said here, and the editor blogosphere and twittersphere are filled with endlessly nuanced analysis. For our purposes, editors typically work on the second and third levels, but not the first. Where the meaning is clear we polish the form and surface form to convey meaning as directly as possible. Where meaning is unclear, we offer suggestions about what we take the author to have meant—and here we have to acknowledge guesswork much of the time.

There is one important gray area in this scheme having to do with non-native writers in English. With non-native speakers, sometimes unclear meanings are a function of not having thought the idea through, but other times there is a clear idea that happens to be executed in a slightly garbled way, usually because of still-developing grasp of surface form. In those situations, it is not always clear how much filling-in of meaning an editor should do.

Our solution is to restrict ourselves to offering suggestions and comments in this situation. The one exception here is if there are discernible patterns of divergence in surface form that are characteristic of the non-native speaker’s native language. An experienced specialized editor usually has a good grasp of these. For example, subject-verb agreement is often not a salient feature for many speakers of Mandarin, and errors persist even in fluent English writing. Or for people who come to English from more case-marked languages often order their words slightly oddly.

So, after having complicated the boundary between proper editing (working with form) and improper editing (changing or inserting meaning), we have returned to simplicity. We editors shouldn’t touch meaning; we should offer suggestions according to our best judgment. And maybe going somewhat deep has made it a little more clear what meaning is. (If you’re interested in going deeper, the question of the meaning of meaning is wide open. Fair warning!)

Draft 0 and the Joy of Just Starting to Write

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We’ve already written a fair deal about what it’s like to get stuck with writing, some strategies for overcoming stuckness, and what unstuck writing tends to feel like. Today, let’s simplify and focus on a useful concept for getting unstuck: draft 0. Draft 0 has been transformative for us. So much so that we extoll its virtues in our info sheet on effective writing.

The main idea is this: sometimes we get stuck with writing because we’re trying to write draft 1–but sometimes leaping into draft 1 is a leap too far! So what should we do? We need to lower the stakes. This means changing our goal from draft 1 to draft 0.

With draft 1, the goal is to produce a rough piece of writing that’s more or less readable. With draft 0, however, the goal is to use writing more simply as a tool for thinking. In other words, draft 1 is for an audience, whereas draft 0 is for you. We can sketch three key differences between these two goals.

Make the start as low-stakes as possible. Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

First, whereas draft 1 writing is guided by structure, argument, or flow, draft 0 isn’t. Draft 1 is often written from a basic outline, and tries to stay on track. In contrast, writing draft 0 means letting associations and serendipity take the wheel. If you’ve written a rough outline beforehand, you’re treating this outline as more of a suggestion than as a hard-and-fast structure for your draft 0. For this reason, you’re likely to end up in somewhat surprising places as you write draft 0. This takes a considerable amount of trust in yourself and in the fact that you know what you are doing. It’s worthwhile to build that trust!

Second, whereas draft 1 is usually written in rough language, draft 0 doesn’t even need to be written in Standard English! In draft 0, feel free to indulge those run-on sentences, sentence fragments, comma splices, unusual word choices, shameless overuse and misuse of semicolons, dashes, and other fun bits of punctuation. Chances are that this weirdness is more suitable to your particular train of thought in this moment. So go for it! Every single user of language uses it idiosyncratically, and this is especially apparent in playful, familiar, and otherwise safe contexts. You want that sense of safety and familiarity to drive you onwards! Remember: draft 0 is for you and you only.

Third, whereas in draft 1, the goal is constrained by the medium in which you’re writing, for draft 0, it doesn’t particularly matter if you jump around between notebook, laptop, or scrap paper. With draft 1, you want to finish that letter, fill that page, or get to the end of that blog post. With draft 0, you can switch from sentences to point-form, from laptop to notebook, from print to cursive, from writing to talking it out, and back again. Some research (that we’ve summarized here) shows that switching things up in this way energizes us. Writers have always known the value of changing settings and contexts, and this includes the context of the writing technology itself. Since the goal is to write your draft 0 in the service of thinking, if your brain wants to make a leap elsewhere, you should follow that as far as is reasonable.

In sum, draft 0 is more of an attitude than a set of rules to follow. The key point is: working on draft 0 is enacting the connection between writing and thinking. You want to bypass your Editor Brain as much as possible and just write. You will iron out the wrinkles later, but the draft 0 mindset will help you produce material, and the more you produce, the better and easier writing will get, regardless of content and genre.

So get on it and bang out the thing you need to do! Do it for yourself and nobody else, at least initially.

Editing and the Style Guide: Between Flexibility and Consistency

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Language is a beautiful, diverse, and evolving thing. This is the fundamental attitude we bring to our editing work. Because of this, we aim to clarify our clients’ voices within the constraints of good style. This means working in the gray areas between flexibility and consistency. (For fun, we have hyperlinked some stylistic controversies that apply to this very blog post.)

Consistency is great, especially within a text. But different texts have different audiences, with different expectations. And what might be expected with one audience can come across as either too sloppy or too buttoned-up with another audience. One piece of our job is to be sensitive to this.

Of course, we all need some ground rules. In the world of editing this is done by style guides. There are many different style guides out there for different purposes. For example, the Associated Press StyleGuide is popular in journalism and is sometimes used (in modified ways) for writing internet content. The Chicago Manual of Style is used for book publishing and in some academic writing. There are many others.

Consistent, perhaps. But flexible? Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash.

While useful, style guides should not be treated with too much reverence. They change from edition to edition. Some style guides are somewhat out of touch with popular usage. This is not by itself a problem, but here at Clarity Doctors we are sensitive to the politics of holding too rigidly to grammatical rules which have historically been associated with snobbery and exclusion. Our stance there is to fervently support flexibility.

The value of style guides is not necessarily in the stance they take. rather in sensitizing writers and editors to potential ambiguities. Their suggestions are reasonable for certain purposes, and might come across as inflexible in other situations. Indeed, most style guides acknowledge the limitations of their rules explicitly—but we humans tend to forget this when in the trenches of writing and editing.

If you are interested in exploring the vast world of style guides, associated controversies, and other gray areas, you can start, here, here, here, and here. This is guaranteed to improve your sensitivity to ambiguity over time. Of course, having an editor also helps.

Tools of the Trade: Microsoft Word’s Modern Comments Debacle

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Academia and the editing world are close companions, and share a great number of tools. Most of these tools are software-based and make our skill-sets quite portable, which is a great privilege. But this privilege can sometimes make the tools invisible. Until they break, that is. This is a little story about how Microsoft almost broke editing in Word.

If you’re an academic, chances are you have a sophisticated (and perhaps complicated) relationship to Microsoft Word and its commenting functions. Back in April of 2021, Microsoft decided to unilaterally roll out changes to how comments were added to Word files. It did not go well, to say the least. Two small changes broke commenting functionality enough to slow editing work to a crawl. By some people’s accounts, their editing workflow became 50% less efficient!

You see, commenting functionality in Word, while not perfect, has been good enough across many software updates. But in the latest update, Microsoft made two changes. First, the little call-out rectangles were now no longer directly linked to specific pieces of text. (Technically, they still were, but it wasn’t visually obvious.) And second, in order to complete a comment, one had to click a “post” button.

Ah: perfectly adequate functionality.

These two changes drew the ire of editors and academics. The need to mouse over and click “post” completely broke many people’s workflow, because Word, in its infinite wisdom, did not allow one to move on from a comment unless it had been “posted”. This inserted an annoying delay in most editors’ and academics’ workflow.

Posted to what? This question illustrates how Microsoft misread the way that most people use comments. We did not want Word to become indistinguishable from Google Docs. (Docs have their place, but not for intensive editing.) Also, most editors do not work in hyper-collaborative online spaces; we value this time away from the hyper-connected online world.

Furthermore, the connection between comments and specific lines on the text became more tenuous. We can’t even think of why this is a good idea. Is it so marked-up papers will look “cleaner”. This goes for everyone. Word made a mistake in prioritizing aesthetics at the cost of basic functionality. A heavily marked-up piece of writing is just inherently un-aesthetic: it’s a waystation between two clean-looking pieces of writing.

New but not improved.

For a great overview of the backlash, see this article, and this thread on the Microsoft support forums.

At least the story has a somewhat decent ending. After a couple of months, Microsoft eventually back-pedalled, and now you can revert to the old comment functionality. So the editors won! Don’t annoy editors. We may not be a powerful bunch, but we will collectively fight Microsoft to a standstill. We are not averse to digital tool improvement, but the changes should be actual improvements!