Editors café


At METM21, we want to build on the success of last year’s how far should we go? conversation group. But this year, we don’t just want to hear what editors do – we want to see what they do.

Helping us get under the bonnet (or hood) of the editing process will be two highly skilled authors’ editors, Alan Lounds and Theresa Truax-Gischler, who’ll join expert host Wendy Baldwin in a salon-style chat. They’ll talk about what they'd do if an author approached them to edit a paper for submission to an international journal.

The text in question is a short paper written by a non-native speaker of English in partial fulfilment of a thesis. For our editors café, we’ve asked Alan and Theresa to show us how they'd bring the abstract and introduction up to scratch, based on the material in the paper as a whole.

Besides undertaking linguistic, substantive and didactic editing, Alan and Theresa will comment on how they’d query unclear content, how they’d teach the author about good writing through their interventions, and how they’d elicit revisions by encouraging the author to reconsider areas that need work.

Where will our editors find common ground? How will their approaches differ? Join us to find out. Audience participation is strongly encouraged – come prepared with your mic and camera!

Our editors

MET founder member Alan Lounds is an editor and translator with over 30 years’ experience. Besides his editing and translation work, Alan has taught academic writing and was the head of the Language Advisory Unit at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya until 2019. He also created and facilitated the MET workshop on abstracts and introductions

Theresa Truax-Gischler is a freelance substantive and developmental authors’ editor of article- and book-length manuscripts. Working in the narrative social sciences and humanities, she specializes in writing support for multilanguage authors working in English. Earlier this year, she co-facilitated our popular workshop on editing humanities and social sciences texts, which sold out twice over. Theresa is also a co-founder of the MET-HSS Hub.

Our host

Wendy Baldwin is an authors' editor and Spanish-to-English translator, specializing in disciplines related to the brain, language, learning and cognition and working primarily with multi-language scholars. She also operates as an independent academic writing facilitator and trainer, running structured writing retreats, online writing groups and other #acwri training for academics from her home in Donostia/San Sebastián, Spain. Like Theresa, she is a co-founder of the MET-HSS Hub.