A little aside on the joys of editing

I suppose most of us have considerable first-hand experience of the two situations I’m about to describe – pruning our academic work and leaving possessions behind us as we travel the world whether for study or work.

These days as I’m busy trimming the early chapters of my thesis, I’m reminded of the latter experience when I was teaching overseas and moving between countries. Along the way I’d have to make choices as to what I should keep and what I should leave behind, mainly in terms of clothing and books. In most circumstances when you leave these behind you never see them again. Yet in 2006 when I was teaching in Korea I reached a point where I decided to go back to Higher Education in the UK and thus packed my bags for what was possibly the last time at the end of the Christmas semester. In doing so, I made choices about which clothes to carry home and which to leave behind. Then, satisfied I’d made the right decisions, I caught the plane home and awaited several interviews which might well decide the course of my future career.

Unfortunately I didn’t get any of the permanent positions I applied for and so I told my bosses in Korea I was available for another term, and headed back to Seoul to my old apartment which had lain empty over the Christmas holidays. When I got there carrying a lighter suitcase than when I had left, I took a look in the wardrobe and realized how the clothes I left behind suddenly seemed so much better than those I had chosen to keep!

When I am editing my work I often think of this story as a good example of how it’s crucial to move back and forwards between that which has been chosen and that which has been abandoned, and to reflect on this over time, because when it comes to the finished thesis the last thing any of us want is to have all the best stuff left behind and stored at the bottom of the wardrobe.