Express Editing Writing and Research

Most academics’ careers rest on their published output. This article from The Conversation (25th September 2013) shows that if you’re a woman, if English is not your first language or if you’re still a student, publishing sooner than later is particularly important.

I charge clients by the hour, so I record my time on an Excel spreadsheet. It’s extraordinary how often I return to my desk, enter a new start time and realise that I’ve just spent 20 minutes making a cup of tea, 25 hanging out the washing while listening to the radio or a podcast, or 40 collecting daughter #2 from school (only a five-minute bike ride away, so what happens to the remaining time?).

I enjoy my work, and I frequently find that I’ve been working hard for an hour or more without realising it, but when I get up for a break the time spent concentrating becomes apparent. My back is a bit stiff, my eyes take a while to refocus, my fingers hurt … Yet somehow an hour digging in the garden zooms past virtually unnoticed, as does an hour riding around Brunswick doing the shopping and returning library books. Despite not earning me a cracker, and giving me blistered hands or a rain-soaking or a near-miss with a delivery van, they’re fun and that makes all the difference.

Mark Twain summed up the paid-unpaid work distinction in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer:

 … Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and … Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. … constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.

I’m not sure I’d do a great deal of editing if I wasn’t paid for it, but I certainly don’t want to be paid for my unpaid work. Would I want to be a professional cyclist, a landscape gardener or an au pair? Give me a break.

Only twice in five years of freelancing have I been sent a document so poorly written that I simply couldn’t edit it. The first time this happened was a year or more ago; the client’s first language was Sinhalese, which is some excuse (but how he managed to hold down a job in university administration is hard to work out). The second time was last week.

The client was a third-year university student so must have submitted many successful essays, yet the text he sent me was outrageously bad; it was twisted, circular, impenetrable gobbledegook. His essay had no title, no headings and no obvious conclusion; the document’s central idea couldn’t be discerned; not a single sentence made perfect sense, and no paragraph was coherent. Many words seemed to be inserted at random.

I’ve edited material for Chinese computer scientists, Romanian architects, Saudi Arabian radiographers, Emirati surveyors, Fijian policemen, Sudanese sociologists, German immunologists, Russian nanotechnologists, Iranian physiologists, and Australian postmodernists and post-structuralists; I was always able to grasp their intended meaning sufficiently to be able to improve their work. But not with this client. I asked if his first language was English (thinking it was probably Arabic, or possibly Russian – he seemed to have a slight accent); it was, so that didn’t go down well. Had he randomly cut and pasted it from online text? – he hadn’t, and neither had he translated it into Cantonese and back, which seemed the only other explanation for his tortured prose.

The client clearly wanted to believe that his subject was technically beyond me, and wasn’t at all happy to hear that his writing was woeful (not that I actually told him that, but that was the unavoidable message). If he hadn’t hung up in a huff, I would have given him the following tips:

• Give your document a title that conveys the topic.
• Even if you don’t include it in your final document, write a sentence under the title that begins something like ‘This essay is about … ’. This will help to remind you of your subject and what you want the reader to take from your argument.
• Use subheadings (even if you remove them later) that summarise the text beneath them. Examine your subheadings on their own and ensure they follow a logical sequence.
• Read over your document carefully, and if possible get a colleague to read it too. If it doesn’t make sense to you or someone who knows your work, it’s unlikely to make sense to anyone else.
• Look at your concluding paragraph – does it match your introduction? Your document should end by wrapping up the argument you outlined at the start.

Yesterday morning Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, was detained at Heathrow airport under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act of 2000. Official UK documents state that only 0.06% of all people detained are kept for more than six hours; David was held for nine.

The stated purpose of the UK’s Terrorism Act is to question people about terrorism. But the authorities spent their time interrogating him about Glenn’s work (he’s been writing about Edward Snowden and the USA’s National Security Agency) and the content of the electronic products he was carrying. When they finally released him, they kept his laptop, mobile phone, video game consoles, DVDs, USB sticks and other materials; they did not say if or when they would return them.

This was a new attack on journalism and an abuse of the UK’s own terrorism law, and illustrates how we should pause before granting governments new powers to monitor, interrogate or hold their own citizens. Read the full story here.

*This is an edited summary of Glenn Greenwald’s original article in The Guardian, Monday 19th August 2013.

From http://blogs.law.harvard.edu

The word ‘significant’ is often used to mean ‘important’ or ‘substantial’ or ‘meaningful’, or ‘signifying’ something notable, and all these definitions are fine in most contexts. However, when a document involves quantitative data and even the minimum of statistical analysis, authors should be very careful about their use of ‘significant’, even if the only goal is to avoid annoying reviewers.

In statistics, describing a difference between two groups as ‘significant’ means that it is likely to be real rather than a random outcome. For example, the mean heights of 100 students grouped by gender (male and female) might be significantly different at a 95% confidence level (p < 0.05). This difference’s significance is a mathematical attribute; it is not the same as stating that it signifies something meaningful or important, which is a subjective human interpretation.

Earlier this year I passed a significant milestone: five years as a freelance editor. Happy birthday Express Editing Writing and Research! I wish I could report that the business and I celebrated in some way, maybe sharing an expensive bottle of champers or streaking around the block … although, I was on holiday in Cyprus on the 1st of April, so I suppose that’s an implicit celebration of the business thriving.

Five years as a sole trader, a small businessman – something I never thought I’d call myself. Five years ago I was simultaneously excited and apprehensive at the thought of having to find my own projects and generate my own salary, but I soon found being my own boss and being responsible for my own time suits me. It’s at least partially about self-worth. People value my expertise, they tell others, they become repeat clients, and there’s a correlation between effort and reward that isn’t so apparent in my research job. A dozen or so years in the highly competitive Australian medical research sector, publishing in quality journals and getting grants but consistently failing to reach the first rung of the fellowship ladder, gave my self-esteem a bit of a battering. I found the constant rejection corrosive; I was always worrying about my career.

Now I love working for myself, and particularly from home. I like being able to see the sky and our garden and the neighbour’s huge palm tree when I look away from the screen. The flexibility is priceless. If I want to go for a ride or run at 11am, I do; I can help a friend renovate or get a mid-morning haircut; if we need a tradie or a parcel is being delivered, I’m here; I can take girl #2 to school and I’m home when both of them get back. I even enjoy doing the washing or emptying the dishwasher as a break from the keyboard.

The work itself can be very stimulating. Occasionally I get something that’s a joy to read. I learn a lot from the documents I edit, particularly the PhD theses, and have racked up quite a few new words (e.g., ‘gibbous’, ‘apotropaic’). Many clients are extremely grateful for my suggestions, so I get some direct affirmation of worth as well as the cash.

Of course, working for yourself has its minuses. Sometimes I have to work late at night or on weekends to meet a deadline. Some of the documents I edit are eye-glazingly dull; others are written so astoundingly, unbelievably badly they offer no reading pleasure at all. The money side of it can be a trial. I had never realised how difficult it is to compensate for all the benefits of being an employee. Sick leave, long service leave, holidays, superannuation, insurance – I have to cover it all myself. I had only three jobs in my first year of freelancing; thankfully they’ve been arriving increasingly steadily since, and now it’s rare that I have less than a few weeks of work lined up. Nevertheless, lean periods do occur, and they’re frustrating for someone who likes to be busy and to see his labours bear fruit. I just have to remind myself that lumpy workflow is in the nature of freelancing, and resolve to work harder next time I’m awash with projects.

In summary, freelancing may not be as financially rewarding as being a salaried employee, but the freedom is worth it.

My PhD research was all about residential water consumption, and I completed it surrounded by engineers working on all sorts of practical water-related projects, so I have a longstanding interest in urban infrastructure. But I’ve never heard of anything like this.

John Vidal’s story on London’s fatberg, published in The Guardian, Wednesday 7 August 2013, describes a bizarre consequence of the combination of high-density urban living with dodgy waste disposal. Used oil and fat poured down sinks and drains over many years generated a 15-tonne ball of congealed fat that blocked 95% of a sewerage main in the borough of Kingston upon Thames. Workers needed three weeks to clear it with high-powered water jets. According to a Thames Water spokesman, “it’s a heaving, sick-smelling, rotting mass of filth and faeces. It’s steaming and it unleashes an unimaginable stink.”

Fatbergs aren’t just disgusting, they represent a missed opportunity. Fat is very energy-dense, and is easily converted into biodiesel to run vehicles or generate electricity. Boris Johnson is reportedly pressing for waste fat to power a fifth of London’s bus fleet (which is appropriate as the fatberg was the size of a bus …)

The world’s first meat grown from stem cells was recently eaten in a hamburger – and it wasn’t very juicy, apparently. Nevertheless, this development offers much more than a slightly disappointing culinary innovation.

Nearly one-third of the world’s ice-free land is already used to raise livestock, and the human appetite for meat is forecast to grow by 70% by 2050; that demand could be met through large-scale production of artificial meat, which could eventually release land for growing more efficient food crops. Artificial meat has ethical advantages; a single sample of stem cells could produce 20,000 tonnes of “cultured beef”,avoiding the slaughter of 440,000 cattle. Environmental benefits exist too – animal husbandry is responsible for 18% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (notably methane), so the introduction of artificial meat could help reduce the coming impacts of climate change.

It’s not instantly appealing, but artificial meat seems quite likely to become part of our diets before too long.

**This is an edited version of an article in The Economist on the 5th of August 2013.

Men of almost all nationalities can expect to die earlier than their female counterparts; in Japan the average difference is seven years.

Of course, it’s largely our own fault; men die from lung cancer (which essentially means tobacco smoking) at more than twice the rate of women, and experience much higher rates of death due to motor vehicle accidents and alcohol-related causes. But does our higher propensity for risk-taking and ability to ignore common sense mean the gender difference in health outcomes shouldn’t be addressed?

Click here to read more about this topic in Sarah Hawkes’ article Death by Masculinity.

According to Nafeez Ahmed’s article in The Guardian, 10th July 2013, this is the conclusion of a paper by James Hansen’s paper soon to be published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A:

Most remaining fossil fuel carbon is in coal and unconventional oil and gas. Thus, it seems, humanity stands at a fork in the road. As conventional oil and gas are depleted, will we move to carbon-free energy and efficiency – or to unconventional fossil fuels and coal?

… It seems implausible that humanity will not alter its energy course as consequences of burning all fossil fuels become clearer. Yet strong evidence about the dangers of human-made climate change have so far had little effect. Whether governments continue to be so foolhardy as to allow or encourage development of all fossil fuels may determine the fate of humanity.

I’m an optimist by nature, but not when it comes to politicians. Look no further than Tony Abbott’s recent statement on emission trading (as reported in The Age, 15th July 2013) :

Just ask yourself what an emissions trading scheme is all about. It’s a market, a so-called market, in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no one.

Politicians distrust data because they so often distort it for their own purposes, and they assume everyone else takes the same approach. Only unarguably, unambiguously nasty climate consequences will force most politicians to seriously address human-induced climate change.