Throughout his life, Johnson’s heroes were the humanist scholars – Erasmus, Roger Ascham, and above all Joseph Scaliger – who had pioneered the close textual analysis of classical texts. Unlike Swift and Pope, Johnson was not satirical about true scholarship, and he produced two major feats of scholarship in their own right: The Dictionary of the English Language and The Plays of William Shakespeare. The Dictionary’s innovation was that, following the example of the humanist lexicographers of Latin, it was compiled by reading books and recording their use of English words. The book’s most striking feature is its more than 100,000 quotations; its weakest is Johnson’s etymologies. Compiling it helped to Johnson to cement his close knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays, and so to edit them – sometimes proposing imaginative emendations, but with the caution his humanist exemplars recommended. Some of his comments, meanwhile, amount to moralistic mini-essays.

Concision is about more than writing like Hemingway or following Strunk & White’s edict to eliminate unnecessary words. Instead, concision relies on writers recognizing the myriad redundancies in English, a reflection of its evolution from the collision of Latin, French, and Old English in the decades following the Norman Conquest. Moreover, redundancies also litter English in the form of redundant modifiers, throat-clearing, and metadiscourse. By recognizing these words and phrases, writers can quickly pare sentences to their essentials, without fretting over the havoc deletions can wreak on the meaning of their sentences.

Clare’s declaration that he ‘found the poems in the fields, and only wrote them down’ is, to some extent, pretence; however quickly he might compose, he corrects and revises from very early on, before he gets any guidance from others. The more he writes, the more he confronts the inevitable problem of repetition: his solutions can be seen in the concentrated echoes and references back and forth between poems. The manuscripts in all their teeming detail demonstrate his determination to get things right. Once publication arrives he has to contend with the conflicting demands of editors, publishers, and supporters; there are vexed questions of taste and politics. As he moves towards The Shepherd’s Calendar, however keen his desire for independence, increasingly the process becomes collaborative. When his life is turned upside down with the move to Northborough in 1832, his deeply personal poems of loss are worked on with extraordinary intensity.

This chapter provides an overview of the process of conceiving, researching, editing, and publishing dictionaries, both synchronic (or commercial) and historical. Discussed methods and tools for making dictionaries range from traditional hand-copying of citations from print books and paper-and-pencil editing to sophisticated electronic technologies like databases, corpora, concordances, and networked editing software. The chapter shows how editorial conception of the needs and sophistication of the end user largely determines the dictionary’s length and headword list as well as the format, defining style, and level of detail in entries. The chapter goes on to examine how the pressures of commercial publishing, with its looming deadlines and pressing need to recoup investment by profits from sales, affect the scope of dictionaries and the amount of time editors can devote to a project, and how these pressures differ from those affecting longer-trajectory, typically grant-funded historical dictionaries. Assessing the consequent challenges for managing and motivating people working in these two very different situations, what may be the most important factor in a project’s success, concludes the survey of dictionary editing.

Advanced writing skills can make a piece of content truly excellent. Such tricks of the wordsmith’s trade include specialist structures, ensuring your content is inclusive and appealing to all, elegantly laid out, and efficiently edited.

This chapter’s focus is the nineteenth century, at the moment of ascendency of the popular magazine in capitalist print culture, when the essay achieved new prominence as well as a somewhat altered function as a marketable vehicle for literary criticism aimed at a popular audience. Edgar Allan Poe in particular harnessed the essay’s power to articulate a unique aesthetic philosophy and influenced generations of poet-essayists and poet-critics. While literary artists such as Lydia Maria Child, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass exemplified the many writers whose innovations appeared in what one might call the philosophical, political, or ruminative essay, Poe worked assiduously to found his literary reputation not only on his poetry but on an innovative form of the magazine essay as an exercise in expert aesthetic criticism. Poe’s work as a literary critic working in and editing commercial magazines helped reshape both the popular and the critical sense of the nature and potential of literary art, especially poetry, in the modern world in ways that remain vital, if controversial, to both poets and critics today.

This essay proposes that the English literary anthology is a genre that triangulates the canon, the curriculum, and the classroom. Its colonial legacy is undeniable, and the core processes of anthology editing – selection, excerption, arrangement, and framing – do closely replicate the decontextualizing and objectifying practices of imperial epistemologies. Nonetheless, the anthology remains an affordable textbook and is most popular in nonelite universities and college classrooms where survey and general literature courses are taught as important parts of the English literary curriculum. Rather than dismiss the anthology as a pedagogical tool, the author presents editorial strategies for decolonizing it and for presenting literary tradition in the English language in more equitable ways. Drawing upon her experience editing the eleventh edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (NAEL), the author offers a reappraisal of critical theories of anthologizing alongside strategies for reframing the global diffusion of English literature through the power dynamics of territorial, educational, and cultural imperialism.

This chapter considers the complex task of editing Puccini’s works, informed by the production of the Ricordi critical edition (launched in 2008 and ongoing). An abundance of materials exist upon which the editor can draw, including autographs, sketches, printed editions, and correspondence, thanks to Puccini’s close and long relationship with the Ricordi firm. However, some gaps exist in the surviving sources, and some sources disagree with others. The author explains that the editor must choose a text on which to base the edition, drawing on further sources as necessary to make informed interventions, striving to get as close as possible to the composer’s intentions, but mindful of the fact that his intentions and preferences changed over time. In Puccini’s case, second editions usually reflect the works as performed at their premieres, the first edition already becoming obsolete in rehearsal. The chapter discusses the various decisions and interventions that an editor must make in order to make an edition both faithful and usable. Puccini’s working method and process of revising his operas are discussed in detail. The chapter ends by asking whether early recordings, as well as printed and written documents, should inform an edition.

The everyday work of a manuscript editor who works independently is variously styled as:

• intellectual labour

• highly skilled work

• technical or craft work

• support for creators or publishers

• piecemeal, gig or cottage industry work

• contracting or labour hire, consulting or supply of communication services.

The mere mention of the term “plagiarism” can strike fear into the heart of an academic editor; likewise “attribution” and “citation”. Editors of fiction and poetry can take no great comfort, either: our Nemesis might be found in the subgenre fan fiction and the saying that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”.

So, what exactly is literary appropriation, and what is its relationship to plagiarism?

In this section we explore the legal, ideological, philosophical and theoretical contexts of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. The aim is to provide an overview of some of the important considerations in undertaking an editing assignment in these settings. It is not meant as a substitute for legal advice, nor as a treatise on any preferred political or social ideology, philosophy or theory. My own perspectives and bias will no doubt be evident, so you are advised to take it all with a large grain of salt! In other words, to be a critical reader.

Use the discussions presented here as a sounding board and a starting point for development of your own approach to editing and editorial practice, and to underpin a sound rationale for the editorial decisions you make.

There are many definitions of what might constitute literary appropriation. On the side of generosity and openness is the idea of using a well-known literary work as inspiration for a reworking, or re-imagining, so as to offer a new or extended perspective or meaning. An intellectual or scholarly approach might be to explore intertextuality or commentary, whereby elements of one work are explicitly or implicitly referenced in another. A more critical interpretation might be that of a hostile takeover of minoritised languages and cultures in post-colonial societies. This section explores some interpretations of literary appropriation.

If there is to be a singular conclusion to this book, it is that we live in increasingly uncertain times and thus, as editors, it behoves us to embrace uncertainty in all aspects of our work – or, at least, to learn to live with it. Embracing uncertainty in the professional context can be empowering: it enables us to be flexible and open to new ideas, to new ways of thinking and doing things, to be innovative. Learning to live with uncertainty can also help to build our personal resilience. If the concept of resilience appears to be an overused cliché, that is understandable because it is increasing in importance to life as we know it in the 21st century.

This chapter covers the appraisal of published and unpublished works in fiction and non-fiction, prose and poetry, in single volumes, monographs, series and collections. These works are intended, for the most part, to be published in book formats or in formal journal publications, in print, electronically and online.