Not the fundamental reason for EDITH, but still…

If you’re a small business owner in the U.S., from time to time you’ll receive surveys from various government agencies, like the Department of Labor, that ask you to declare certain things about your business—how many employees, what sector you work in, and so on. Sometimes they just want to know how things are going. (Seriously.) Because I have a not particularly productive sense of civic duty, I answer these surveys!

Luckily, they can be answered online. Unhappily, they consistently convey that the powers that be don’t know that developmental editing is a thing. To wit:

Now, Document Preparation Services doesn’t really bother me. I’m old enough—and a history major— so don’t even cringe much at “secretarial services,” as administrative work is honorable, difficult, and historically speaking, not gendered in the way we might think of it today.

But the presumption that editing is primarily concerned with manipulating documents, as opposed to developing ideas and nurturing growth in creators—that does stick in the craw a bit! So EDITH will help change this, we hope.

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