Tuesday, December 27, 2005
A lot of writers work in educational publishing. Young ones? Mike Topp, Cort Day, Jonathan Blum, Paul McCormick. Older ones? Well, John Ashbery and Toni Morrison used to. (Ashbery at Mighty McGraw-Hill, Toni Morrison at Holt, I believe.)
The reasons for this could be numerous. One obvious reason would be that educational publishing can promote literacy when it's at its best. Textbooks, mass-published as they are, find their way into students' minds, or are more likely to, than literary magazines. I would say it was "grassroots," but that term has always eluded me, somewhat like the term "metroplex" used to elude me when I lived in Dallas.
Another reason could be that the process of working on textbooks is unpredictable. One day you might find yourself researching Sitka, Alaska, the next you might find yourself reading about Alexander Hamilton's personal quirks (or lack thereof).
I've enjoyed educational writing and editing because it represents a striving towards clarity, which is important to me in my own work... I'm currently an editor at the leading publisher of assessment textbooks. What interests me about the job is the discreet nature of the books I do--they are halfway between test prep and regular texts--passage-based, question-and-answer-based. At a certain level, producing these books require that you be tremendously analytical and process-oriented. Without a pre-established set of steps for working on a given manuscript, the book's complexity, with its question styles, its regulated passage lengths, its foil requirements, its adherence (or not) to a bookmap, might just swallow you up.
Educational publishing itself is a rather tempestuous field. I've worked at my current job for 15 months, and since I began, two of the people who interviewed me have been let go and replaced, five people have quit, and an entire Production department has been added. Changes in protocol happen steadily and without much notice, causing a lot of teeth-gnashing, so much so, in fact, that sometimes it seems as if there's an orchestra of teeth, gnashing privately in the cubicles ... But everyone is smart, and everyone is ambitious, and, for the most part, the people have good values. We have a lot of meetings; I'm still perfecting my meeting posture. Do I slouch today, or do I sit up straight and look respectful? No one ever knows entirely what will come next, or even what is happening at any moment. Which is great. It keeps you spontaneous...
The reasons for this could be numerous. One obvious reason would be that educational publishing can promote literacy when it's at its best. Textbooks, mass-published as they are, find their way into students' minds, or are more likely to, than literary magazines. I would say it was "grassroots," but that term has always eluded me, somewhat like the term "metroplex" used to elude me when I lived in Dallas.
Another reason could be that the process of working on textbooks is unpredictable. One day you might find yourself researching Sitka, Alaska, the next you might find yourself reading about Alexander Hamilton's personal quirks (or lack thereof).
I've enjoyed educational writing and editing because it represents a striving towards clarity, which is important to me in my own work... I'm currently an editor at the leading publisher of assessment textbooks. What interests me about the job is the discreet nature of the books I do--they are halfway between test prep and regular texts--passage-based, question-and-answer-based. At a certain level, producing these books require that you be tremendously analytical and process-oriented. Without a pre-established set of steps for working on a given manuscript, the book's complexity, with its question styles, its regulated passage lengths, its foil requirements, its adherence (or not) to a bookmap, might just swallow you up.
Educational publishing itself is a rather tempestuous field. I've worked at my current job for 15 months, and since I began, two of the people who interviewed me have been let go and replaced, five people have quit, and an entire Production department has been added. Changes in protocol happen steadily and without much notice, causing a lot of teeth-gnashing, so much so, in fact, that sometimes it seems as if there's an orchestra of teeth, gnashing privately in the cubicles ... But everyone is smart, and everyone is ambitious, and, for the most part, the people have good values. We have a lot of meetings; I'm still perfecting my meeting posture. Do I slouch today, or do I sit up straight and look respectful? No one ever knows entirely what will come next, or even what is happening at any moment. Which is great. It keeps you spontaneous...
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