If you are like most people, you were probably taught in your high school English classes that it is not okay to use the passive voice when writing.

The passive voice is that in which the subject of a sentence receives an action, while in the active voice, the subject performs the action.

An example of the difference between the active and passive voice:

Fred threw a snowball. (active voice)

A snowball was thrown by Fred. (passive voice)

The active voice is usually favored in writing because it is often more concise and requires fewer words. Consider the following example:

I want freedom. (active voice)

Freedom is wanted by me. (passive voice)

You probably wouldn’t shout “Freedom is wanted by me!” at a rally.

So why would anyone write in the passive voice?

In scientific articles, that is how it’s done.

When reporting scientific results, an author wants to distance the work from the people who performed the work. This is professionalism in the scientific world. The author emphasizes the reactants, products, results, and ideas, not their staff who mixed up reagents, cared for lab mice, created line and bar graphs, and typed up the results.

Consider the following paragraph, which is written in the active voice:

“Jamie centrifuged the suspension at 10,000 x g and aspirated the supernatant. Then she resuspended the pellet in phosphate-buffered saline, pH 7.4. Following this, she spread the suspension on an agar plate and put the plate in a 37°C incubator for 16 hours.”

Doesn’t this sound like I am telling a story or writing a novel? It seems like I am writing about Jamie’s life in the lab, not a scientific paper.

Now consider the same paragraph written in the passive voice:

“The suspension was centrifuged at 10,000 x g and the supernatant was aspirated. The pellet was resuspended in phosphate-buffered saline, pH 7.4 and the suspension was spread on an agar plate and incubated at 37°C for 16 hours.”

We don’t know who did this work…and scientists don’t care if it was Jamie or Jessie or Jenny who did. We do know the actions that were performed, and that’s what we are concerned with. Also, in this case, the paragraph written in the passive voice is more concise, which is important in scientific writing.

If you are a scientific editor, do you prefer the passive or active voice?

I specialize in research manuscripts, which I edit in MS Word. However, once a year, I perform a very different kind of editing.

I edit sales catalogs for a teak furniture company for which a friend of mine works.

You might think I edit all the text in the catalog in a Word document, but that is not the case at all. There are many things that are very different when editing one of this company’s catalogs.

The editing is done on PDFs using Adobe Acrobat. In order to do this, I peruse each page and place a comment icon wherever I see an error or other issue. When I do this, a comment list pops up in a narrow pane on the right side of the screen, and my comment appears there while I am writing it. When I have finished, I click the save icon. (I save the PDF after every comment I make, because I am very paranoid about losing my work.)

My editing these catalogs consist of editing the text, verifying the SKU number and dimensions of each furniture item, and verifying each item’s price. This means that I must have the PDF, the company’s website, and an Excel pricing spreadsheet open on my PC and constantly click back and forth between the three of them. This can get very confusing and can test my attention span, but I have become skilled at doing this. After all, I have been editing this company’s sales catalogs since its 2020 edition.

Distraction is my biggest challenge when editing the catalogs. The large photos of the products are absolutely gorgeous—chaises by a swimming pool of aqua-blue water, friendly-looking Adirondack chairs placed in a circle around a fire pit in a beautiful backyard—you can imagine. I sometimes find myself admiring the scenery and thinking, “If I win the lottery, that will be my swimming pool,” or “I would absolutely love for that to be my patio.” Then I quickly smack myself in the figurative face and think, “Okay, we have editing to do.”

Editors, do you do any work in Acrobat? If so, what do you edit?

I would be remiss if I did not brag on myself from time to time.

So, what have I accomplished in the last year?

One really exciting thing I did this year was gain a new client, an accountant whose business website I edited to make the writing perfect. I was referred to him by a good friend and expanded my vocabulary with accounting terms while I edited. The best part was when the client told me, “On a scale of one to ten, your editing was an eleven.”

I recently completed the editing of the 2026 trade catalog for an outdoor furniture company. This company manufactures and sells teak benches, tables, chairs, and such for outdoor use, and the trade catalog I just finished is geared toward designers and those who are in charge of planning the outdoor scenery for universities, hospitals, museums, and other public places. In editing the trade catalog, I verified its text as well as hundreds of SKU numbers, dimensional drawings, and prices, striving for 100 percent accuracy and perfection.

For this same company, I also edited many prelive web pages for its site. These pages covered everything from the company’s privacy and security policies to its shipping and delivery information to a list of questions frequently asked by customers. In my editing for this company, I had a chance to use my skills with Adobe Acrobat, as well as continue with my Word skillset.

I am about to begin working on the company’s 2026 retail catalog, which is geared toward individual consumers and homeowners (this is furniture for their patios or the area around their swimming pools). I will be doing the same thing as I did for the trade catalog, minus verifying the dimensional drawings, which are not found in the retail catalog.

I am also looking forward to more scientific manuscripts, grants, theses, resumés, and cover letters coming my way. If you have one that needs editing, please message me or contact me through my website. I will strive to make it perfect!

I made a list of goals for 2026 the day after New Year’s, but only one really has to do with my editing business. As for the other goals, several are too personal to share. Others are shareable. Here goes:

I want to gain at least one more client who sends me work at least once per month. I would preferably like to gain more than one. As it stands now, I have one client who sends me work every month (sometimes a lot, sometimes not much). I love this client to death, but having just one regular doesn’t put enough bread on the table. I also have another client who very occasionally sends me work, and I love the work that I do for them, but they have not been able to send me anything to edit in over a year, even though I am in regular touch with them and I like them a lot.

What I really would like to have is several clients who keep me so busy that I am booked months in advance, or at least weeks in advance. Thanks to the current government administration, many of my potential clients aren’t looking for editors because they have no money to pay them. Or they have turned to AI to edit their work. It is a shame that these researchers have to waste their time prompting and verifying whether an AI platform “hallucinated” when they could be having me edit for them.

Things have to get better…

On a personal level, I want to do more of the cooking at home. In 2025, my husband did almost all the cooking while I cleaned up after the meal. I’ve never been much of a cook and never really took an interest in cooking or baking. Starting in 2026, this is changing. I cooked dinner tonight for my husband and myself and found a sense of accomplishment in doing so. I plan to continue to share more of the food preparation responsibilities. It’s also nice not having to wash the dishes.

Do you have any goals for the new year that you would like to share?

If you are trying to get work, you are waiting. Waiting for responses to your applications and follow-up emails. Waiting for responses to your interviews. Waiting for good news.

You are locked in a season of waiting.

Everybody hates to wait.

But this season of waiting might be preparing you for something better.

“Really? How so?” you ask.

You can use this waiting period to sharpen or improve your skills. For example, during much of this past summer I tried to get more editing clients and gigs…and I waited for them to come. While I waited, I took a course in AI for editors and finally learned to understand AI as it applies to my work. In 2015 and 2016, while applying to laboratory science jobs and waiting for responses, I refreshed my lab skills and learned new ones by taking courses in cell culture and biomanufacturing at a community college. I obtained more interviews after completing them.

If you are a copyeditor, you can find editing exercises in a book or online to keep you on top of your game. The Copyeditor’s Workbook, by Büky, Schwartz, and Einsohn, is a good example of a resource for this.

The “something better” for which waiting is preparing you might not even have to do with work. If you need a new car, you have more time to go car shopping, and so you might end up making a better decision on a car. Or you might have more time to spend with your spouse and end up making your marriage even better. (I would imagine that you might similarly make your relationship with your children better by having more time to spend with them, but I hesitate to say this outright, because I am not a parent myself.)

What do you think might be the “something better” for which waiting is getting you ready?

With Thanksgiving coming up this week, I want to give thanks for the good that has happened both this year and in the past regarding Fiedler Editorial.

I gained a new client in the form of a gentleman who asked me to edit the website for his business. He told me, “On a scale of one to ten, your editing was an eleven.” (Thanks are due to a good friend of mine, who put us in touch with each other.)

I continued to receive steady work from a longtime client (courtesy of another good friend), especially at the end of last year, making me busy enough that I could not take on any additional editing until January of this year. It felt so good to be that busy and needed.

I took Erin Servais’ course, “AI for Editors,” which made me finally understand AI. If you don’t understand it, I would highly recommend the course. Ms. Servais is an excellent instructor.

I’m also thankful for things that occurred before this year. I am thankful for my HP laptop and being able to buy it in 2020. Yes, it is now five years old, and it does have its quirks, for which I often yell at it. But I love it.

Also in 2020, a former grad school professor introduced me to the facilitators of an editing pool at my alma mater; we edit research manuscripts written by the school’s scientific researchers. I absolutely love doing that kind of editing.

In 2019, I was given the opportunity to edit the master’s thesis of a student at a well-known research institution, and my editing was called “wonderful” by the student and “5-star” by their advisor.

And I am thankful for my husband, who gave me the seed money to open a business bank account, and a good friend, who gave me great business advice.

What are you thankful for regarding your profession?

This past Friday, I turned 52.

As I put the past year behind me (that is, most of 2025), I am reflecting on what I accomplished at 51.

My editing business, Fiedler Editorial LLC, turned seven years old.

I gained another client in the spring by word of mouth (thanks to one of my best friends) and the client was very pleased with my edits and revisions to his website.

I edited a scientific literature review, and the author was pleased.

I helped get out the 2025 trade and retail catalogs of another good friend’s furniture  company, and from what I heard, the company enjoyed good sales. I also worked on its website and marketing emails.

I edited a new booklet that my church put out for a new Bible study. This booklet contained many links and QR codes, all of which I checked as part of my editing. A few of them were wrong. I saved the participants a few headaches.

I fastidiously educated myself on AI by taking a wonderful course taught by Erin Servais. I finally learned how to understand AI and how to use AI in editing, although I have only used it in the homework for the class. I learned that I don’t like AI, and so I do not use it in my editing.

Of course, not everything about the past year was good. My father passed away in March, and I was forced to temporarily shut down my editing business for about three weeks while my mother and I dealt with first the hospital, then the hospice, then the funeral arrangements. I was very blessed that my most consistent client (the furniture company) was so understanding during this time.

My biggest aim now is to get more clients. I want to be booked weeks in advance. I am posting on this blog and on LinkedIn, keeping my website and professional profiles up to date, and reaching out on LinkedIn. I just started reading The Chicago Guide for Freelance Editors by Erin Brenner, and I trust that I will gain valuable ideas from it.

Here’s to an even better year!