Silvy Sharon Nag

My job is to find what it is trying to say, and then make sure a reviewer can see it too. Those are two different problems, and most drafts fail at the second one.

I came to publishing through literature — a master's in English, and a thesis on how folklore turns women into witches. What that training gave me was not a style guide. It was the habit of reading closely enough to notice what an author means but has not yet written down.

Now I do that for researchers in health sciences, life sciences and technology. Many are writing in their second or third language, for journals whose standards do not bend. I handle the manuscript, the peer-review response, the journal selection and the covering letter.