The pandemic has led to many changes at the University. The Academic Success Centre’s Academic Copy Editing service (more dashingly known as ACE) was well-positioned to respond to these changes. Editing, after all, is editing, whether it occurs during a pandemic or not.
Still, there’s no question that the pandemic affected the service. Although editors work alone, editing doesn’t happen in isolation. Editing’s effects are not limited to the work on the page. Editing is a human-centred, transparent and responsive process that helps to improve the communication skills and facilitate the goals of writers regardless of their place in the academic environment. As those goals change, and as the educational environment shifts, ACE continues to adapt.
We’ve been editors at ACE for a combined 15 years and have worked with a wide range of clients—academic staff, faculty, administrators, graduate students, postdocs and alumni—operating within a diversity of disciplines. Like all student services, ACE adheres to the principles of academic integrity; while we identify errors and give guidance, the client is ultimately responsible for the corrections and their work.
The return to in-person work won’t change the nature of our editing—editors work alone and can work from anywhere. However, throughout our time with ACE, and in particular during the pandemic, we have seen shifting trends in more practical aspects of the service, including who uses it, how they use it and their goals and expectations for their writing. We expect those trends to continue now that the campus and the world are slowly reopening.
Competition for publications
Early career academics and graduate students have always faced pressure to publish their research in academic journals or in book form. This pressure has intensified in today’s competitive career market and climate of economic uncertainty, resulting in more scholars—at all career stages—using ACE to submit more polished manuscripts to academic journals and publishers.
Internationalization
While ACE’s clientele is varied, the U of A’s network of international collaboration means that the service is used by an increasing number of faculty and graduate students for whom English is their second or third (or fourth or fifth) language. ACE helps these clients to understand their writing strengths and weaknesses and improve their skills for future academic writing.
Supervisor requests
Supervisors of theses and dissertations are busy people, often juggling teaching and their own research with the supervision of graduate students. Given their time constraints, it is not surprising that some now ask their students to have their documents edited before submission. Editors at ACE help make these final-stage documents submission-ready by correcting sentence structure, grammar, spelling, and punctuation and providing clear direction to help the students make those changes on their own in the future. This frees supervisors to focus on content without the distractions of poor grammatical choices or unclear writing.
Career documents
In recent years, more faculty and graduate students have come to ACE seeking editing for career-related documents such as personal statements, résumés, job application letters, and statements of teaching philosophy. This shift responds to client interest in presenting polished documents for increasingly competitive positions, grants and scholarship applications. As the copy-editing service focuses on grammar and clarity, it complements the Career Centre’s critiques of career documents that address content, format and presentation.
Follow up
ACE’s 45-minute post-edit sessions shifted from in-person to online meetings during the pandemic. These informal sessions offer clients a chance to ask their editor specific questions, receive additional writing advice, or be referred to a Writing Advisor for more in-depth sessions to help them develop ideas, enhance organization, deepen analysis, and improve clarity. While there are currently in-person options for services at the Academic Success Centre, post-editing consults are still being conducted remotely. The remote format provides flexibility for clients who don’t have time to come into the office for a meeting.
Client needs
Increasingly, the editing service has taken on jobs with tight deadlines, adapted to clients’ shifting timelines and responded to clients wherever they are in their manuscript editing. Like the Academic Success Centre more generally, the Academic Copy Editing service strives to respond with flexibility and compassion to changing client needs.
Learn more about Academic Copy Editing services on the Academic Success Centre website.
About Alison
Alison Hughes has been an editor with the Academic Copy Editing service for three years. She holds a BA in English (U of A), an LLB (McGill) and an LLM (Cambridge). She is also a writer and has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards and the CBC Nonfiction Prize.
About Debby
Debby Waldman is a Writing Advisor and Editor with the ASC. Her articles, essays, and reviews have been published in The New York Times, Wired, NBC-Think, People, Parents, the Washington Post, and numerous other outlets. She has also written six books for children. She lives close to campus with her husband, a professor in Biological Sciences, and their delightful chocolate labradoodle, Chip.
About Garrett
Garrett Faulkner is a Writing Advisor and Editor with the ASC, and also teaches in the Department of English and Film Studies. He lives close to campus with his wife Maggie and their fluffy cat Herschel.