Feather Touch Editing

After completing my bachelor's degree in electronics from REC Trichy (now NIT Trichy) in 1987, I heaved a sigh of relief. I could now boot electronics out of my life forever! After a few IT-related jobs that soon relegated electronics to a distant memory, in 2004 I found myself at the crossroads again. I felt I was ready for a new challenge, something off the beaten track. An intriguing opportunity presented itself in the form of an opening for an editor at a publishing services start-up. As a passionate nonfiction reader and book lover, I felt I would be at home working with academic books. I took the plunge. I trained under copyeditors who had decided to settled down in India after long editorial careers in the United States, and over the next several years, I learned the craft, working on hundreds of textbooks, mostly in the sciences but also in the humanities. I felt fulfilled: skills acquired thanks to a lifetime of obsessive reading were being productively exercised and honed, and I was also able to put my IT capabilities to good use, for example, developing a Perl script for consistency checking. In 2013, when my employers shut up shop, I was ready to hang out my shingle. Today, I work on academic books, but I've also diversified into new areas. I copyedit papers authored by a global research behemoth. I have copyedited course material and developed language-related content for a US e-learning company. And, yes, I also copyedit papers in electronics! My degree has armed me with the vocabulary and conventions of the field—if not dexterity in the lab. So I have not been able to boot electronics out of my life, after all. As Pema Chödrön has said, nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. My favorite compliment:"I have written more than 100 books, and you were one of the best copy editors that I ever worked with. You were intelligent, responsive, and understanding. A real pleasure." Steve Krantz, mathematician