Despite doing a lot of writing over the past few years, I’m definitely not a well-seasoned editor. If I’m being honest with myself, I’m not critical enough: I’m too willing to say “yes, this is fine.” But with some texts, strong criticism is definitely needed. I also sometimes feel that my edits are too superficial, and sometimes don’t adequately address the structural problems of a text.

But I do like editing. On the editorial board for Code4Lib Journal, I really appreciate reading the papers and watching them come together through rounds of revisions and input from editors. Editing technical topics poses unique challenges, because we are all sometimes confronted with the limits of our own technical knowledge. But it is valuable work, because we’re helping to produce something that hopefully benefits the Code4Lib community and beyond.

I also feel that editing is very much a learnable skill. Even in the brief time I’ve been on the editorial board, I think my editing abilities have come a long way. Granted I was starting from a low base. Nonetheless, watching the other editors has been very instructive. I hope to stick at this until I get much better at it. It’s probably a good skill to work on.

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