Dissertation and Academic Editing

Congratulations on reaching this part of your dissertation process. Perhaps you’ve already combined your best efforts at research, analysis, and writing, and you’re ready to put the final touches on your dissertation. Or perhaps you’re not quite that far along in the process.

In either case, professional dissertation editing is likely going to be necessary to create the end result you need. As professional dissertation editors, we’re familiar with every element of a professional academic dissertation. We work with hundreds of students each year and we know what separates an average dissertation from a great one, and what secrets are guaranteed to get yours accepted.

The professionals at Open Book Editors are intimately familiar with the research and writing processes. We understand what an excellent dissertation looks like and what types of mistakes lead to rejection. In the end, professors and students agree that professional editing is the most important step in turning your work into an excellent research paper.

Great editing is not simply about clean copy or proper grammar. A great dissertation requires countless standards of research, analysis, expertise, and composition, all combining to raise the level of the literature on the subject. The experts at Open Book Editors are passionate about those standards and dedicated to helping students like you produce excellent dissertations that get great results.

This One Cool Trick

How many links have you clicked on that promised a new body or a million dollars by following one cool trick? Of course, you wouldn’t click on those. Nobody does that. Nothing worth having could ever be the result of following one cool truck, right? Strong, marketable writing is no different. There are no easy tricks to make your writing jump off the page. If there were, we’d all be lining up with the next American novel.

But in fact, there is one cool trick most writers could use to make their text shine: starting sentences with strong nouns and verbs. In my years as an editor, the failure to employ this one trick – which really isn’t a trick at all – is one of the most common mistakes emerging writers make. It is very common for writers to want to pack sentences with thoughts and ideas, dazzling the reader with command of the language and a lofty narrative arc.

In fact, the best writers make sure that their best words are the nouns and verbs that start their sentences. If your writing seems to not be as crisp as you’d like it, or if some of your sentences seem convoluted, it might be time to focus on this one simple trick. Avoid the $20 adjectives and abandon the similes. Make your focused nouns and your strong action verbs the star of the show and watch what happens to your manuscript.

In the strong, lean text that sells, every single word has meaning. This is what professional editors are for: to get rid of the fat and tighten up a manuscript. But if you’re looking to make the most progress as a writer with the least amount of work, start by committing to strong nouns and verbs. You might be surprised how this one simple trick and transform your text.

Professional Editing: The Edge Your Manuscript Needs

The differences between editing from a professional and getting a little help from a friend who was an English major in college are profound. Writers who have invested hours, days, months, and even years in their manuscript are typically looking for a payoff for their work. It is very difficult to find that payoff – whether the goal is book sales, an artistic splash, or simply getting a great story down on paper – without professional editing.

Of course, most of us are aware that professional editing is the key to publishing success. But why is this so?

Transform the Writer

The biggest difference is that professional editing transforms both the manuscript and the writer. A writer benefits from seeing how a professional tackles the same challenges he’s been grappling with. A writer who absorbs a professional editor’s changes will in turn become a stronger writer going forward, impacting his future work for years to come.

 

Industry Experience

A professional editor knows what types of manuscripts are selling and what publishers are looking for. This can make all the difference when trying to maximize distribution and exposure upon publication.

 

Make Every Word Count

A professional editor makes sure every single word counts. This is critical for emphasizing well-developed characters and rising conflict, allowing them to leap off the page the way they should.

 

Objective Analysis

Sadly, in the publishing business, the advice of friends and family members does not count. If it did, we’d all be great writers and our moms would be the best critics on the planet. The only recommendations that matter for writers with high aspirations come from third-party editors, and there’s no avoiding the fact that the best ones are full-time professionals with years of experience.

In the end, the difference between editing from a professional and from an amateur is night and day in terms of conciseness, focus, and experience. If you’re like most writers who’ve poured countless hours into your manuscript, the only solution is a professional one.

How Real Writers Deal with Failure

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” - Thomas A. Edison

It is common knowledge that the writing life is hard, but it takes a dedicated writer to know why. Good writing is not about coming up with ideas or waiting for inspiration. It’s about failure. Cold, hard failure – the kind that comes from having your work rejected a thousand times or realizing the greatest idea you had for a story is actually terrible. The act of writing is like any other public display of your personal views. It leaves you totally exposed to personal rejection. If this sounds hard it’s because it is, especially when that rejection is attached to the manuscript you’ve worked so hard on.

Ultimately, the successful writers come to learn that failure is really a precursor of success. If you or your writing are on the brink of success – or just a step or two away from the finish line – it might be time to rethink your concept of failure. For most writers, failure occurs in two ways, over and over again. Failure happens from bad writing and from getting rejected. Both types of failure are a natural consequence of trying to become a successful writer, and both can take the starch right out of your collar.

But the fact is that both types of failure are milestones on the path to success. Thinking this way forces writers to develop a perverted concept of failure, thinking about it as something that must happen before achieving success. Many of the great stories of our times followed some really crappy writing, during which the author ironed out the story and worked to translate great ideas to the written page. Many of these great stories also followed countless rejection letters, receiving them one at a time and eating at the writer’s soul before success finally arrived.

The fact is that the great writers are not the most talented or the smartest. They have the mental and emotional make-up for the writing life, which involves building up a resistance to failure. If you’re struggling to find the audience your work deserves, it may be time to reconsider the way you think about failure as a writer.

There are several reasons that professional editing is far superior to editing from an amateur or friend in most cases. Many of the reasons for this are fairly obvious.  Of course, professional editing is far more thorough and rigorous than editing from an amateur. Professional editing follows both traditional rules of grammar and standards of style based on a style guide such as the Chicago or AP manuals. This is critical for building text that is seamless and direct, which allows the characters, tone, voice, and narrative arc to truly jump off the page. Professional editing pays close attention to factors such as narrative consistency and effective sentence structure that are difficult for an amateur to pick up on. This difficulty is not because an amateur editor isn’t smart or talented; it’s because it takes years of editing experience and familiarity with the publishing industry to be proficient at this.

Most writers are familiar with many of these points. What often gets overlooked about professional editing is that it should transform both the manuscript and the writer. Any writer who has their work edited professionally will naturally improve. This happens as the writer sees how a professional tackles the same challenges and obstacles that they’ve been struggling with for days, months, or years. Good writers absorb the edits that a professional has made and incorporate them into their subsequent work. This happens naturally, mostly because good writers become slaves to elements of style over time. They’re naturally pulled to the elements of the language that work for them; things like direct sentences, coherent paragraphs, and realistic dialogue. The act of seeing their writing transformed in this way usually changes the way writers think about the challenges they’re facing on the blank page. This leads to more confidence and more time to spend on the nuts and bolts of creating great characters, developing a unique voice, and building rising conflict.

Professional editing is not for every writer and not for every project. But every writer who takes the craft seriously should have their work edited professionally at some point. The writers we work with have typically reached that point. They’ve been working long enough on a project or on writing in general that they know it’s time to have their work edited by a professional. This is a major step in the development of a writer, and it necessarily changes the way writers think about writing; usually for the rest of their lives.

Writing from Within

In fiction writing, there’s nothing more important than creating an honest story. An honest story isn’t merely something that truly happened, and it doesn’t refer to non-fiction. An honest story is told by an author who was there, who experienced the narrative in real life, and is writing with the authenticity that can only come from personal experience. Fiction writers are often tempted to use the medium to concoct an elaborate story, or to explore the boundaries of some event that happened to someone else. But the best fiction writing is a product of writing from within, not writing from without. Great narrative movement is not in recounting an epic tale full of conflict and resolution. It’s in the vibrant details of a scene and the specific movements of a character. These elements, added together, create the great tapestry of fiction that puts the reader in the story.

The great stories of American fiction were all told by writers who genuinely experienced them. Readers of The Sun Also Rises are left with no doubt that Hemingway witnessed violent bullfighting, just as readers of Fitzgerald can be sure that he was well-versed on the culture of the swanky Hamptons in the 1920s. The great novels of the last hundred years – and thousands of more modest ones – are tales of personal experience. They’re populated by places an author has been, or people an author has known. At its essence, fiction is as real as any other genre. A great writer crafts a scene and a lens, and puts the reader in the picture. It’s easier to do this when he has already been there.

For a graduate English class many years ago, I was required to read a well-known book called The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. The “nonfiction novel” follows Wolfe himself as he becomes immersed in the psychedelic, late-‘60s culture of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. At some point, each character experiments with LSD, a gamble at best given the unknown risks of the drug at the time. After completing the book, the professor of the class asked each student the pivotal question of the novel – did Wolfe really take acid (as he claims to have done)? The question gets at the heart of Wolfe’s credibility, and the reader’s faith in the claims of the book.

It’s the quintessential question of fiction writing, and one thousands of M.F.A. students around the country have encountered. Do you believe the writer? Consciously or not, readers of fiction ask themselves this question each time they read a writer’s work. It’s more than a B.S.-meter; it’s a measure of the author’s ability to write from within. A writer who’s been there can craft a great story with vivid details, and the reader will know it’s written from within.

So, did Wolfe take acid? I didn’t believe so at the time, but most students in the class did. Why would he take acid, I thought? Just for a story? Seems pretty dangerous, just for the sake of being authentic. I realize many years later that the answer was yes. Wolfe would have taken acid for the benefit of the story – to be sure that he was writing from within.

Writing Like an Editor

My first job out of college was working as a videotape editor in the tiny newsroom of a local network affiliate. My job was to take endless piles of raw video and turn them into a coherent 30-second piece of news tape for voice-over or live read by the anchor. It was a thankless job spent punching buttons in a closet-sized edit bay. The only time I got noticed was when I screwed up. I would emerge after a couple of hours, squinty-eyed and jumpy, to watch my video on the newscast monitor. Then I would grab some more scripts and skulk back into the edit bay.

I left the world of local news as quickly as possible, but the lessons I learned have stayed with me ever since – always smile for a mugshot and write like an editor. Hopefully, you’ll never need the first lesson, but the second one is crucial for writers. Imagine the piece of crime scene video that appears on every local newscast. It starts with a wide scene-setter and might cut to a close-up of a front door. Then there’s a medium shot of the scene (perhaps a chalk outline on some pavement), followed by flashing police lights, a close-up of yellow crime tape, another wide shot, and a medium shot. There’s never five close-ups in a row, or five wide shots in a row. The videotaped editor is taught to mix up the length of shots to weave a complete picture.

Writers describing a scene would do well to follow this technique, and I always have in my writing. A giant building could be developed by its 1) hulking, monolithic structure, 2) the cornice molding over the doorway entrance, and 3) the businessman walk through it. A male character could be described as 1) a large figure in a pea coat, 2) the gray stubble on his face, and 3) his hands tucked in his coat pockets. It’s the art of the cut-away – from faraway to close-up, and back, that works here. It’s quick stabs of description peppered with light action. Readers need story, but they also need specific details that add without getting in the way.

I’ve often wondered how many great writers worked in local news, or were simply avid watchers of the news. Many seem to follow this descriptive template, and it’s a great tool for first-time authors looking to harness the power of description. Next time you’re struggling with how to describe action, it might be a good idea to turn on the local news and see how they do it.