4 Comments
Feb 15, 2023Liked by Randy Au

I relate to a lot of what you said about the art of giving feedback. I found two things to be helpful:

1) establishing trust with the author. It’s both more effective and efficient when I can be quite direct without spending too much time on “how should I word this so that this doesn’t come across badly” and the author can take the guess out of the equation as well “what did they mean by? was it me? Was this personal?” Etc . Of course it takes time to foster that kind of trust between people.

2) a culture of reviewing / editing among the team. In my first industry job at a market research firm, we always have two people on a project, one primary and one project lead. The project lead mainly does the review (codes, models, and reports). And we rotate the primary and project lead so everyone more or less gets to experience both sides. We produced client facing work so reviews were very harsh to ensure quality. I learned a lot from getting and giving feedback from that experience.

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Feb 14, 2023Liked by Randy Au

I probably edited about 8 books and dozens of technical papers. I remember one paper in particular, written by an Italian scientist, that I had to almost rewrite, the grammar was so terrible. If it hadn't been such an excellent paper I would have rejected it. But you are absolutely correct, it is a tricky balancing act. My mantra was to always allow the authors voice to shine through, and try to keep my edits focussed on improving clarity (and technical correctness!). Easier said than done. We did have some editors who seemed to want to change the voice to theirs, but I always tried to walk that balance. The other aspect that came up a few times (which I am not very good at) was acting as a coach. Especially with books, sometimes the author needs a lot of encouragement and emotional support to keep going. After editing a few books, I am in awe of anyone who can muster the sustained energy needed to write a book.

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