A question for editors who work on “everything”

When I was asked to sum up what I do, I sputtered a bit. Did the person want to hear about my clients? My subject-matter-expert experience? The formats, genres or topics I’d worked on? Without a specific editing niche to cite, I found my range of experience hard to sum up.

I started as an editorial assistant at a national dog magazine, despite owning precisely zero dogs and being allergic to them to boot, and left as managing editor. This is where versatility started to become my forte. My editing as an outsider brought added clarity, concision and flow to the monthly articles – valuable aspects to the publisher and the magazine’s readers, and to any client.

The magazine provided a solid editorial foundation, from brainstorming story ideas and editing submissions to ensuring art meshed with content, helping production stay on track and checking page proofs.

I took this wear-all-the-editing-hats experience to my freelance career as founder of Think Communications. I could apply what I’d learned to formats including other magazines, books, newsletters, reports and theses. 

My early freelance days led me to work with several fiction and memoir writers. Fiction included humour, romance, speculative and fantasy works; memoir spanned personal journeys in adoption, self-development and historical perspectives. 

When I expanded my services, I focused on reviewing material from subject-matter experts even though, again, I had no specific experience in the subjects. The benefit to my clients? I’d see their work objectively, as a first-time reader. It seemed logical that if I, a somewhat intelligent reader, couldn’t understand something, other readers might not either.

I’m chuffed to help clients strengthen their work, catching inconsistencies, logic gaps and ambiguity, and even factual errors. My “I-know-nothing” topics have included law, medicine, earth science, social and financial policy, government resources, social welfare material and website optimization.

How does working on such wide-ranging subjects benefit me? I get to learn new things while helping others convey important ideas or information. Making a message easier to understand and relate to is rewarding, and I consider learning a huge perk of the job.

Back to the summing up: Now I usually say I’m an editorial generalist. “I work on everything, within reason” – that means barring topics I find offensive or troubling or in which the required level of knowledge is far beyond me (subject-matter material geared to an expert audience, for example) – applying skills developed over a lengthy career across a broad field of topics to achieve an optimal edit. 

So, does my versatility strengthen my editorial work? After thinking it all through here, I suspect it does.

Does this question strike a chord with you? If you have a career like mine, how would you sum it up?