Copying the Craft • Volume I • Issue I • October 2026
Adapted from an interview with Sharon Brinkman
Sharon Brinkman, JD, is the managing editor of the American Journal of Sociology and a freelance copy editor. Trained through the University of Chicago Press’s old apprenticeship-style instructional model, she now trains the next generation of editors as an instructor for the University of Chicago’s editing certificate program.
This article is an edited oral history portrait, adapted from a conversation between Brinkman and Copying the Craft’s editorial director, J. Maxwell Barid. What began as a raw conversational transcript passed through substantive cleanup and developmental restructuring, ultimately emerging as a shaped narrative of Brinkman’s professional life and development as an editor and trainer.
— Ed.
I think most people eventually reach a point where they look around themselves and ask, “All right, what can I do for a career? What will I be good at, that I can live with, that will take me to retirement without too much mental anguish?”
If you’re someone like me — who is a big reader, longtime graduate student, and all that kind of stuff — you do find yourself saying, “I could probably be an editor. You go with your strengths, right?
I started out in a PhD program researching Proto-Indo-European linguistics. It was very esoteric. There were only five universities that even had it at the time, I think. And in my program, there were only two people in the whole thing.
The University of Chicago Press used to, every once in a while, put out the word that they were giving out tests for copy editors. And they certainly have a captive audience here in Hyde Park. A friend of mine who was working at the Press said to me, “The Press is giving out tests. I think you should take one.” She probably saw that my graduate career wasn’t going anywhere.
I said, “Okay, I want to do that. What do I do?” She gave me the Chicago Manual of Style, which was in the fourteenth edition at the time, and she said, “Well, you have to read this.”
And I said, “What parts of it?”
“All of it.”
So, I did. I went and took the test, and they said to me, “Okay, here’s the test, here’s the Manual, and here’s the dictionary. Take all the time in the world, but most people finish it within three hours.”
I took six hours, but I passed the test and got hired at the Astrophysical Journal, then published by the University of Chicago Press. I still freelance for them to this day. There was a woman there who was one of the people who worked on the Manual. She was in her eighties at the time. Whenever they would publish a Manual, she was always on the masthead. Her name was Beth Garrison.
I went to her cubicle every day and sat next to her, and we’d call up the document that I was working on. I would edit, and she would critique almost every keystroke that I made. It was exhausting. And I did that for six months. It was so tiring to not have any downtime all day long except for my lunch break. I honestly don’t think I could do it now that I’m older. I was in my twenties at the time, so I had a little more energy.
But she was very nice. Beth was a very nice person. She was never critical in a mean way. She was just a really good trainer. And they treated her well because they wanted her to train, so I think it worked out for everybody. I think that’s why she worked so long into her eighties. She was a really sweet, sweet woman.
After sitting hip-to-hip with her for six months, the Press let me go and do a little bit on my own. Then she checked it. Then the ties were cut a little bit, and I was more on my own. It may have been that I had a more trial-by-fire experience because I had no experience. I was a complete newbie. Maybe somebody who had more experience — if they’d been an editor somewhere else — would have been let go from the training a little earlier. I also studied at the University of Chicago’s editing certificate program; we’d all go downtown once a week and sit in the classroom.
I remember working at my editing job at the Press, still in graduate school working on my PhD, and I got a job newsletter from the Modern Language Association. That year, there was only one job available in the whole world in Proto-Indo-European linguistics.
So, I had to say to myself, “Self, are you the person who’s going to get that job if there’s only one?”
I had to admit that would not be the case; the man who was in my cohort, who’s still my good friend, was much smarter than me, and he would definitely get the job, if there was indeed only one available.
I had to rethink, like, my whole thing. My now ex-husband was studying at Loyola Law at that time, and law looked to me like a pretty easy way to make a decent amount of money. So, I quit my PhD and went to law school, starting the year after he graduated. I was pregnant with my first child.
I realized halfway through law school that it wasn’t for me at all, but my ex-husband said, “Well, now if you quit, you’ve totally wasted a bunch of money. If you’re more than halfway through, at least get the degree.”
So, I did, but I never practiced. I just went right back to editing after that. That isn’t to say that the degree doesn’t help me get freelance jobs. On my resume, you can see that I have all this education and stuff. So maybe people who are looking for freelancers are like, “Oh, we’re going to go with her, because she’s got a law degree.”
But I struggle with that a little bit, because I don’t think it really matters. My experience teaching editing is that none of those degrees have anything to do with anything; people just have the natural aptitude or they don’t. They’re willing to work at it or they’re not. I’ve taught some people with very advanced degrees and lots of industry experience alongside others who were literally dipping their toe into it for the first time — sometimes the beginners are better.
In 2016, I had been working under my former supervisor at the American Journal of Sociology for two years. She was also my teacher when I did the University of Chicago’s editing program in the nineties. She was still teaching in the program, and she knew they needed teachers. I guess I made an okay impression, because she said that she would recommend me to teach.
I was a little nervous, because I didn’t know if I could teach, and maybe I was a little right. I think, when I started teaching basic manuscript editing, I wasn’t as good as I could have been, because I only knew my journals’ styles. The students were pointing out a lot of stuff to me that I just didn’t know, because I hadn’t delved into those parts of the Manual. I never had to before.
If you want to learn a subject, teach it, because the students will come to you with a million different questions, different viewpoints, different perspectives, and different experiences. You’re expected to answer their questions.
Then I started to up my game a little bit and realized that I needed to do more. I went from teaching basic to intermediate manuscript editing. Now I’m teaching advanced, and I learn all the time. I always tell my students I learn so much from them. I really do. I try to impart to them absolutely everything that I know, but there’s always so much more to know.
I think in editing, as with any career, there’s a big, long learning arc and a lot of different, distinct tasks. Some of these articles that I’m editing freelance, the editors just want the basic style applied, and they want it done lickety-split. They’re not looking for anything else. And that’s what that is.
That’s a whole different thing versus an academic journal article. Or even a book, where an editor is expected to be more thoughtful, sit with it for a while, read the whole thing once, take a break from it, read it again, go back and forth with the author, get deep into it, and make sure the ideas are expressed as well as they can be.
Then there is looking everything up. The most important thing for students to learn is that they have to look everything up. It’s so tedious and it isn’t optional. They have to have their style manual and their dictionary open, and they have to be looking everything up. And I know sometimes they complain, and they’re right to complain, that they didn’t even know they were supposed to look something up.
One hundred percent confidence about what to look up comes with experience. Sometimes an editor doesn’t know to look up whether or not something should be capped, because it never occurred to them that some obscure term would even be capitalized. That’s fine. That kind of one-off is only a twenty percent problem.
The eighty percent problem is everything else: looking up every compound word, every punctuation rule, and all proper nouns. Having the manual open when working with any non-English terms or when editing tables is essential. By looking everything up, an editor can get to at least an eighty percent solution. Eventually, with feedback and experience, they will know the other things that they didn’t even know they had to look up.
I’ve noticed that when an editor first starts out, they’re so discombobulated and bamboozled by how much there is to know that they feel like they’re just barely getting the basic mechanical stuff done, sending it in, crossing their fingers, and hoping for the best. I think it’s a normal reaction to have as someone starting out.
But then, as that stuff becomes second nature, I think they start looking for more high-level things having to do with organization, tone, fact-checking, and making sure the really embarrassing things don’t get by. Things that are not quite obvious but are deeper and more embarrassing. You know them when you miss them.
But that takes a long time. I mean, it really takes a long time. It might take ten years, but it does become second nature. My students always complain about bibliographies and reference lists, and I always tell them, “You’re going to do enough of them that one day you will literally just glance at the screen and see all the mistakes.” It almost becomes just like looking at the palm of your hand.
An editor won’t understand everything they read anyway; they just have to be a good reader who is able to look at the whole structure, follow the argument to a certain point, and then do all the copyediting stuff too.
At the beginning of intermediate manuscript editing, we ask the students what a copy editor’s job is. They say all kinds of things that are correct: spelling, punctuation, grammar, usage, tone, having a good relationship with the author, all that stuff. Sure, that’s all true enough.
But I always say the most important thing is making the text conform to style. That’s the first thing you do. The most difficult thing for my students to grasp is that the text has to conform to the style. Whatever style is being used — APA, MLA, CMOS, house style, whatever — the text must first and foremost conform to the style.
If you take a paragraph that an author wrote that was convoluted, wordy, and problematic, and you rewrite it to make it a hundred times better than they did, but you miss a single CMOS error, you have not done the job — even if the words sound so much better.
But style isn’t infallible. I edit all of the American Journal of Sociology’s major articles. It’s only five or six articles per issue, thirty to thirty-six per year, so I can do that. I get reasonable editorial discretion as managing editor. I definitely do my level best to make articles conform to our style, which is basically Manual style with a few weirdnesses having to do with sociology. I let my authors get away with some things, though. I do my first edit totally for Manual style. Then when it comes back, if the writer says, “I don’t want such and such,” for some really good reason, I defer to them, since they know the field. That’s my discretion; I can do that because I’m the managing editor. They understand their audience better than I do.
An editor can’t always understand a manuscript’s subject matter, and that isn’t their fault. But there are some things the editor can spot. For example, in the Astrophysical Journal, if someone is saying these ten galaxies are all this number of years old, and then I look at the next sentence and it refers to ostensibly the same galaxies but now there are only eight with a completely different time scale, then there’s a discrepancy.
I’d tell the author, “Hey, in the sentence before you said ten, and now you’re saying eight. You also said they were this many million years old, and here you’re saying this.” I’m not questioning their whole theory or anything. But if they say a fact in sentence A that doesn’t line up with sentence B, that’s something I’d ask about.
And sometimes you’re just wrong as an editor. I once edited this really good book about translating English-language novels into Russian. I hope the author had success with it. I was asking the author to go a little further with some of the claims, especially having to do with the whole political system in Russia at the time, where everything was so repressed. They kept pushing back against me. Finally, they just came out and said, “I can’t do any of what you’re saying, because I still live in Russia.”
I didn’t realize that. I assumed they lived in the United States.
Immediately, I stepped back. Obviously, I wouldn’t be saying they should criticize Russia’s government if I knew they lived there. There was a lot of back-and-forth with them, trying to get the tone of it right without jeopardizing them.
I’ve been at it a while and I’m good at it, but I still don’t really feel like I’m the best editor. Especially with fiction. I’m not that good with fiction. I always joke that I like everything I read, so I’m not the best person to do anything critical, because I am pretty much interested in everything. My students point out things to me in our texts, and I’m often thinking, “Huh, thank you for pointing that out. I never noticed that.”
And I am still, to this day, a very slow editor. Not fast at all. If you need something done fast, don’t give it to me. On my first editing test, I did look up every word. Literally every word. That’s why it took six hours. And at the time we didn’t have the Manual online, so I was definitely thumbing.
But at the end of the day, I’m still the managing editor of a journal and an editing instructor to boot. If I had to recommend best practices for people who want to be editors, I would say read widely. Take the classes and always be willing to learn. Always be willing to look stuff up. Don’t be embarrassed that you’re in Webster’s dictionary looking fifteen words up per page. And, yeah, editing can be taught. It’s more natural in some people, sure, but it can be taught, especially if someone is willing to put in the work.
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Copying the Craft
An independent narrative nonfiction journal exploring the art and practice of editing.
Copying the Craft publishes oral history and narrative portraits documenting the professional lives, practices, and experiences of editors, focusing on editorial education and training.
New portraits are published on the fifteenth of every month.
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Copying the Craft is independently edited and published by Broughton House LLC. All narrative portraits are developed from interviews with featured editors.