Supplemental Resources for Designing E-Learning: Responding to Editorial Comments

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You are here: Ideas and Issues in E-Learning --> Supplemental Resources for the Book Designing E-Learning --> Chapter 10 --> Supplemental Resources for Conducting Editorial Reviews --> Responding to Editorial Comments

Responding to Editorial Comments

You respond to editorial comments in much the same way that you respond to technical review comments: go through the commented drafts and indicate on the page whether or not you intend to incorporate the comment. If you do plan to incorporate the comment, briefly explain why.

As a unique aspect of the process for providing feedback, editors often meet with course developers to discuss the comments. This meeting is called an author-editor conference.

This meeting substantially differs from a review meeting in its informality and its collaborative tone. Some editors prefer to give back their comments to authors at this meeting, so that editors have a chance to explain the comments before authors consider them. Other editors prefer to give the comments back first, then give authors a chance to meet later so that authors can discuss those comments that they have questions about.

Author-editor conferences are generally informal; although you schedule them in advance, you do not have a formal agenda for them. Some authors approach these meetings with trepidation and defensiveness; their primary concern being defending their original choices.

Such an attitude defeats the purpose of an author-editor conference. At its best, the author-editor relationship is a collaboration in which the author drafts and editor reflects back, helping the author to significantly improve the learning program. Typically, a good editor can raise the quality of a learning program by one level at each edit. By opening up to an editor’s comments, then, you can ideally improve the quality of your work three levels during the course of a project.