My Approach

My style is supportive and encouraging. I want to help you unlock your gifts, connect with your sense of purpose, hone your craft, become a more efficient writer, and enjoy the incredible privilege of working with ideas and contributing to the storehouse of human knowledge. Although many academic writers struggle, our work is vital! It matters!

I am a fellow writer, not just an editor, so I know what writers need. I like to get down in the trenches with you, and I believe in excellent communication. Unlike most developmental editors, my work product is not a lengthy, beautiful essay about what you could change in your manuscript, sandwiched between two brief conversations. Maybe that works for fiction, but the point is to improve your writing, not to show off mine. Instead, we will have lengthy conversations about your project on a regular basis. My preference is to combine developmental editing—the big picture—with structural editing—the organizational piece. And when I make a suggestion for a change, I will actually make the change, for you to accept or reject. The idea is not to give you an overwhelming set of assignments or to rewrite your project in my voice, but to make your life easier and to hone your own voice and your project’s presentation to be as effective as possible.

While I am conversant with a full range of theory, and have taught graduate-level theory classes, I am a strong believer that complex ideas can be explained in language that is precise and easy to understand. As an expert in qualitative and archival research, I can help craft research plans and evaluate the strength and quality of your research and secondary source analysis, while suggesting literature and ideas that might strengthen your arguments.

In terms of craft, I can help you, stylistically and substantively, present your work more effectively and achieve greater impact. As much as we teach “signposting” an argument to our students, it is amazing how many academic books and articles forget about signposting entirely. It is also important to be very selective in supplying evidence, and to pick both what to highlight and what to leave out; what belongs in the body of the work and what would be better left in footnotes; and how to maintain flow and narrative pulse while avoiding tangents yet providing necessary background.

I am a practitioner of creative nonfiction, and can suggest a host of ways to add literary panache to your writing, whether through anecdotes, character development, similes, thick description, or narrative pulse. I also believe that chronology is usually helpful, but sometimes it is effective to break it to grab a reader’s attention. I help graduate students complete dissertations and shepherd scholars in converting dissertations into books. I can put my experience to work for you by helping to draft and revise fellowship applications. I have had great success in applying for fellowships, with two Mellon Foundation fellowships, one NEH fellowship, and two American Council of Learned Societies fellowships. Fellowship applications are generally quite brief, so they demand highly compressed writing with strong argumentation throughout.

I do not use AI at any stage of the editing process, other than minor changes made by spellcheck. AI is quite amazing in what it can accomplish with information on the Internet, but AI has never read a book since books lie behind a moat of copyright law. It also has a maddening tendency to give bad advice with great self-confidence. As a result, AI has no frame of reference and no ability to evaluate popular nonfiction books, let alone scholarly ones. I bring thirty-four years of experience in higher education, including eighteen years as a tenure-track professor of History, American Studies, and Race and Ethnic Studies. I have imbibed secondary sources and scholarly theories, designed research plans, conducted research in more than twenty-five archives, collected tens of thousands of archival images, analyzed that evidence, conducted oral histories, and published more than 500,000 words. I know what it is like to be a grad student, an assistant professor, and a tenured professor. AI doesn’t.