When freelancer Nicola Jones’s middle schooler brought home an assignment to explain toothbrushing to an alien, she had to laugh. “That’s basically what I do all the time.”
In her work editing commentaries by academic researchers and other experts for outlets such as Nature, Jones helps specialists explain their worlds (and worldviews) to those from other realms. Op-eds, explainers, and similar articles let subject-matter experts share research, recommendations, and personal experiences directly with readers, providing perspectives that go beyond short quotes in a story reported by a journalist.
People who specialize in editing experts often come from journalism. After a stint as a reporter, I worked on Nature’s comment desk for more than a decade, commissioning and editing policy wonks, high-ranking scientists, and university administrators. Today, I do much the same for the science-policy magazine Issues in Science and Technology.
Editing experts draws on all the skills of editing professional journalists, but demands more diplomacy and upfront orientation to the norms and ethical practices of journalism. Preserving an expert’s voice while still upholding your outlet’s editorial standards is no small feat. You have to manage authors’ writing abilities, egos, and agendas to produce accurate, accessible articles that keep readers’ interest.
Often the most important work comes before the author starts their draft. It’s key to establish a human connection and to make clear the point of the assignment. Crucially, the editor serves as a “thinking partner,” collaborating with the author to find the right focus for their piece, says Candice Bailey, strategic initiative editor at The Conversation Africa. When successful, editor-author relationships can yield unique stories and lead to long-lasting, fruitful collaborations.
Setting the Stage
Editing someone about their life’s work and cherished ideas can be an intellectually intimate experience. It’s also a process many authors have never been through. That’s why “the absolute first thing you need to do is establish a relationship of trust,” Jones says. Pick up the phone and tell the expert about yourself and what you do, she advises. When authors have a sense of you as a conscientious, competent professional, they’ll be more open to stepping outside their comfort zone to use the personal anecdotes and informal language that make articles compelling.
It’s easier for a scientist to gear their writing for the intended audience when they see themselves as a human being working with a human editor and writing for other human beings, says Fenella Saunders, editor-in-chief at American Scientist. Framing assignments as a team effort might also prompt experts to take editors’ suggestions (and deadlines) more seriously. Though American Scientist provides potential writers with pages of guidelines and a video about the process, Saunders finds it best to start with an actual discussion about what it takes to make an article interesting and relevant.
Ask experts to home in on the one nugget they want their readers to take from their article.
Even the goal of writing in an accessible way may need to be spelled out. Experts are trained to include detailed caveats, nuances, and methods in their academic writing. “You’re really trying to include everything your peers would need to know to understand what you’ve done,” says Robin Mejia, who was an award-winning reporter before getting her PhD in biostatistics and joining the ranks of academia. “As a science journalist, my goal would be to make something as simple as possible without being wrong.” Trying to write that way can feel uncomfortable for researchers, she says.
Academics are also used to readers who know their field as well as they do and who have a professional obligation to stay current in it, says Michael Lemonick, former chief opinion editor at Scientific American. They may even assume that the text they submit will be published essentially verbatim. Lemonick makes a point of reminding authors that general readers can always turn to something else if they get bored or confused—no matter how prestigious the name on the byline. And if an editor feels intimidated by their authors’ achievements or subject knowledge, the editor should remember: “They’re the experts on science,” Lemonick says. “You are the expert on how to tell a story.”
That doesn’t mean you’re obligated to teach your writer every element of the craft. It’s okay if authors think a nut graf is a type of cereal or TK an odd typo, but they should understand that their writing isn’t done once they send off the first draft. Authors need to be told explicitly that revisions will take time, says Saunders. “You can’t rush this.”
Refining an Angle
I’ve found that before I can help expert authors explain their ideas to non-specialist audiences, I first have to explain the goals of such a piece to my author. Bailey finds it useful to tell authors to “undo everything you’ve learned” about how to write academically and not to approach op-eds as if they are writing a shorter, less jargon-filled paper. Instead, she sometimes advises them to see pieces as an expansive abstract—a high-level summary, albeit one with less technical language and more context.
Frame requests as part of your job. An editor’s role is to address gaps in the expert’s logic that might cause readers confusion.
The challenge is often more with the author’s mindset than the actual mechanics of writing, she says. “The one issue they struggle with the most is finding the angle, deciding what it is they want to communicate.” Bailey asks experts to home in on the one nugget they want their readers to take from their article. I often take a similar tack, asking my authors what they want readers to think or do differently after reading their article. The long pause that sometimes follows my question tells me they haven’t yet articulated these takeaways to themselves.
John Whitfield, opinion editor at Research Professional News, explained in an email to The Open Notebook that in his early days as an editor he would underexplain expectations and end up doing extensive editing on submitted drafts. Now he tries to have conversations with authors before they start writing and follows up with a list of bullet points proposing the structure and content of the article. “That made the writing and editing process smoother, and gave me a sort of mandate for imposing or asking for things if they weren’t in the first draft.”
Digging into a Draft
When the first draft arrives, I scan it for assumptions that need to be spelled out and try to ignore the simpler stylistic issues that often crop up in expert-written pieces. I read a draft at least twice to see if it has the necessary structural components, plus a clear argument and enough context to show why readers should care.
Lemonick hunts for ways that authors can make their work more personal. He recalls, for example, getting a draft from a young researcher that started with a dull, technical definition of a neurological condition. Following a hunch, he wrote back and asked whether she had it. She did, and he advised her not to start with an “encyclopedia entry,” but with her own personal experience. She came back with “a beautiful lede,” he recalls, “and the rest of the piece was great.”
Model what you want authors to do in revisions. For instance, flag a long, complicated sentence with a query asking “Do you mean …?”
Sometimes when experts shed the constraints of academic writing, they forget it’s still necessary to break down their logic or back up their arguments. When I see a draft with overgeneralizations, missing evidence, or logical disconnects, I rarely go straight to revisions. Instead, I reply with a numbered list of questions and ask for citations, such as white papers, official data, and academic articles. This is essential to producing an article readers can trust, but it can make the editing process fraught. When asked to justify their arguments or verify evidence, authors can feel that their authority is being questioned. The key is being both tactful and tough, says Saunders. One way to soothe egos is to frame requests as part of your job. An editor’s role is to address gaps in the expert’s logic that might cause readers confusion. “You’re trying to help them make the strongest argument possible,” says Corinna Wu, senior editor for opinions at Undark.
Scheduling another meeting with an expert can help with sorting out more complicated issues. If the logic is convoluted, the content complex, or the author seems to be underplaying counterarguments, I tend to request another conversation. Consider recording conversations (with permission), just as you would when working as a reporter. This can help you fill in missing components using the author’s own words, even when an article needs to be largely rewritten. When people speak, they often do so in a “much more fluent and understandable way than they do when their fingers hit a keyboard,” Jones says.
Explaining Edits
Delivering edits to experts takes a little more care than delivering them to journalists, who are used to their pieces being reworked. When Jones ends up doing extensive rewriting, she doesn’t chide the author or invoke rules of rhetoric. Nor does she use track changes if she thinks authors would be alarmed by a sea of red. Instead, she asks authors to read carefully, make changes as they see fit, and push back on inaccuracies. She tells them, “I haven’t changed your words because your words are bad. I’ve changed your words because they weren’t well-suited to our particular audience.”
When authors balk at suggested changes, Saunders uses a similar tactic they call “invoking the reader,” framing changes not as fixing flawed writing but as helping readers understand the material. Sometimes humor can help. When I was editing an article about how economic metrics were insufficient to gauge a country’s prosperity, my author resisted my suggestion of inserting micro-explanations of technical terms. The second time he asserted that my readers at Nature would already know these words, I replied that plenty of Nature readers would see GDP (gross domestic product) and think guanosine diphosphate (a nucleoside that regulates intracellular signaling). He laughed—and started accepting the edits.
Amanda Mascarelli, senior health and medicine editor at The Conversation U.S., models what she wants her authors to do in revisions. For instance, she’ll flag a long, complicated sentence with a query asking “Do you mean …?” followed by shorter sentences showing the cadence of how technical material could be broken down. Then, she invites the author to adjust the material to suit their voice. Even when they simply accept her suggestion, they retain agency over the prose. Either way, the magazine gets readable material.
She also uses the concept of zooming in and zooming out to help authors understand how to strike a balance between detailed explanations of some concepts and broad strokes for others. When an author introduces a premise or particularly important study, it can make sense to take a paragraph or more to zoom in on experimental techniques or the history of a research question. In other areas of the piece, the author can zoom out, making broader statements to cover a lot of ground quickly. By explaining the rationale behind edits, editors provide concepts that authors can apply in future writing assignments. “As an editor,” Mascarelli says, “that’s one of the most important things I can do: empower them to be able to do it, rather than to just do it for them.”
When the article is published, there’s often a mutual sense of pride. Many authors thank their editors for what they’ve learned about conveying ideas to a more general audience. They may even send follow-up notes about grants they’ve won, speaking invitations they’ve received, or other ways the article is drawing welcome attention to their ideas and work. I’ve found the benefits go both ways: former authors become valuable sounding boards for vetting potential articles, and those who write well and work collaboratively are the first I turn to in a pinch.
Sometimes, the most gratifying aspect is helping someone discover how to tell their story. Mascarelli says she feels as much or more satisfaction with the expert-written stories she edits as the stories she reports. “It’s a very powerful collaboration,” she says. “At the end of the process, there’s this really neat energy and synergy that happens because you have this end product that neither of us could have come up with on our own.”
Monya Baker worked as a reporter and editor at Nature from 2007 to 2022, where she commissioned and edited the World View column and longer commentaries. She is currently a senior editor at Issues in Science and Technology. Her work has appeared in those magazines, as well as Science, Wired, the Economist, and elsewhere. Follow Monya on LinkedIn.