When you chose your career as an editor, you were probably thinking about applying your wordcraft and composition skills or using your eagle eye to ensure documents are correct and compliant. You may not have anticipated how much of your job would involve emotional labour instead of literary, grammatical, or plain language effort. So many minutes spent smoothing the ruffled feelings of subject matter experts! So many hours spent managing resistant authors!

Join me on Wednesday, February 19, 2025 for a conversation about whether plain language is a type of emotional labour … and whether it should be. We’ll talk about the types of emotional work we do as editors, how this emotional work costs us and rewards us, and whether we’re being called upon to do more emotional work than is fair, reasonable or respectful.