Writing More Efficiently
Welcome to TEA Delivered, the newsletter of The Editorial Ally (TEA)!
As someone who loves efficiency, I’ve often found writing to be frustratingly inefficient. In some sense, I think we need to accept that inefficiency is part of the creative process. Most of us have stories about a research rabbit hole that led to an exciting discovery even as it ate up an entire afternoon. But just because some parts of the writing process are inefficient doesn’t mean that other parts can’t be streamlined.
When you start a manuscript or begin to revise a draft, I encourage you to standardize as much as possible from the first page. This habit will save you time even if you change the format down the road because all of the revisions will be A to B rather than C to B and F to B and R to B.
I encourage authors to standardize early in four areas:
Citation style. This decision involves choosing your style guide (most historians use Chicago). Bonus points if you review the difference between note and bibliography format.
Figure caption format. This decision involves setting an order for the information in the figure captions and establishing the punctuation. When I was writing my book, I put the format for figure captions on a post-it note and stuck it to the wall next to my computer screen. (The next TEA Delivered will be a deep dive into captions, so keep an eye out for it if you are new to or want a refresher on captions—or image credits.)
Foreign language quotations, words, and titles. This decision involves recognizing that different historical sub-fields and readerships have varied expectations and abilities when it comes to language proficiency. Do your best to understand your readers’ needs, and then consider whether you will translate titles and individual words in the text or notes. If you quote sentences or longer blocks of text originally in a foreign language, then you may want to put the English translation in the main text and the foreign-language original in the notes.
Grammatical basics. This category can involve many decisions, but common ones include date format (day/month/year or month/day/year) and the Oxford comma.
None of these decisions is necessarily complicated, but taking the time to make up your mind earlier in the writing process and being consistent will make revising your manuscript down the road much more efficient.
Keep writing (and revising!)—
Katherine
Do you find TEA Delivered useful? If so, subscribe to have it sent directly to your inbox and share it with a colleague, friend, or student.