Writing and editing form an important part of the work of many professors. In this interview, Neil R. Coulter talks with Dorian Coover-Cox (DCC), editor of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, and Glenn Kreider (GK), editor of Bibliotheca Sacra, about the writing life and their current responsibilities as academic journal editors.

Talk about your development as a writer.

DCC: I studied at Wheaton College and then at DTS, but as a doctoral student at DTS, I took the scenic route. I didn’t really want to write a dissertation. Who wants to write a dissertation? I didn’t—I wanted to help people learn Hebrew. As an adjunct, I was teaching more and more, and for a time, it wasn’t a problem.

GK: Until it became a problem.

DCC: Until it became a problem. Some pressures in higher education began to put the heat on PhD students to finish their degrees if they wanted to keep teaching. I realized that if I wanted to keep doing what I was doing as an instructor for more years, then I would have to finish the degree. At one point, my husband said to me, “You know, Dorian, if the Lord comes back before you finish your PhD, there’s going to be a little room in heaven for you to work on it. And every thousand years or so, Prof. [Don] Glenn will come by to see how you’re doing.” So I said, Okay, I’m going to have to do this. I was looking at a blank screen, and I called a friend. I remember her exact words. She said, “Dysfunctional behavior is usually connected to some area of pain in your life.” I thought, “What?” Then I realized—I’d had some bad experiences connected with writing. And every paper I’d ever written had been done at the last minute, and in the middle of the night, and late, for as long as I could remember. In fact, I’d picked all my classes in college based on whether the professor required papers or gave exams. If anyone required a paper, I didn’t take the class. That continued until I had to take a writing class at Wheaton. I took Magazine Writing with Paul Fromer. He knew how to help people learn to write, and now I use what he said to help other people who are having trouble writing. It didn’t cure me, but I learned how to write. So for a year, when nobody in the department was on sabbatical and I didn’t need to teach for those two semesters, I figured out a way to complete my dissertation. And once it was done, I said, “Oh, I’m really glad I did this.”

GK: Our stories are so similar. I nailed the verbal section on the ACT—I think I got a perfect score. In college, they waived my composition requirement. But I knew I couldn’t write. So I took a writing course, and I got a C. I never got C’s, but I got a C in that course. I, too, avoided courses, when I could, that had writing in them. I’d much rather take a test, because I can take tests.

DCC: But now you’re good at writing! When I read something by you in Bibliotheca Sacra, it’s solid.

GK: If I miss something, like a word left out of a quote, the BibSac editorial team will find it.

DCC: Everybody who’s writing needs somebody else to read it.

GK: Everyone needs an editor.

DCC: Because you cannot see everything.

Can you teach someone to become a better writer?

DCC: Yes! I think you can help. See, I’m the optimistic teacher.

GK: That’s where you and I are not the same.

DCC: I didn’t know I had “teacher genes” until I started tutoring at DTS. Then, all of a sudden, being an editor made sense, because it’s a version of teaching. It’s not about commas—it’s about helping people learn. That’s why I like editing: I like helping people learn. Everything made sense and fit together when I realized that. So I have this optimism. But the student has to have an internal “yes.” The student has to let go of any rebelliousness toward learning.

GK: I think you can give somebody the opportunity to learn how to write. But I don’t think you can teach writing to people who don’t want to learn.

DCC: It can be modeled. I see in people sometimes that in the process of doing this difficult thing, they learn something about themselves that ends up being beneficial. Even the things that you think don’t matter about learning to write may be things that God can use in your life.

Along with teaching, you also both work on academic journal editing. You both contribute to Bibliotheca Sacra, published by DTS, and Dorian, you work on the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (JETS). What is a peer-reviewed journal?

GK: We publish academic works, written to make a contribution to the academy—advancing an idea, defending a claim, plowing new ground, critiquing something that has been done. And it’s heavily documented through research. To be peer-reviewed means that our articles are reviewed by peers in the discipline. By “peer review,” we mean that the editorial committee has experts from each of the journal’s primary areas—biblical, theological, historical. When an article comes in to BibSac, I send it out to people who have some expertise in the field. They get the manuscript “blind”; they have no idea who wrote it. I think that preserves the integrity of the process and avoids bias.

We also have an editorial team who do the nuts-and-bolts work of editing, both copy editing and checking resources, making sure the footnotes are correct. They do a really good job of catching stuff. And then, when it’s all put together in an issue, it goes to Dorian, and she is the final voice in the process.

When an article has already received so much review, what is left to say when you see it at the end, Dorian?

DCC: I haven’t seen it before, so I’m a fresh set of eyes. I can make changes to little details, and those changes might reduce the overall length and make space for one more book review later in the issue.

When does the writer hear from you during this process?

GK. The faculty committee weighs in first, and then I make the decision about whether we’re going to publish the article. I send the writer a letter that says we’re moving to the next step, so they’ll know it’s being edited. If the article requires significant correction or modification, or if the reviewers request revisions, then we’ll ask the writer to do that. When Roy Zuck was the editor of BibSac, he would do much more of that work—and not take credit for it!—but we now ask the author to take care of those revisions.

Like most academic journals, we’re on an eighteen-month to two-year lag from the initial submission of an article to its final publication. That’s a lot of time, but it’s still shorter than the process of publishing a book.

What level are BibSac articles written at? Are they so academic that they would be hard for a layperson to understand?

DCC: No, a high school or college-educated person could read most of the articles and say, “Okay, I get that.” As with any sort of specialized industry, there might be some things that they don’t understand—but that’s one of the reasons you want to read a journal. You learn things! One of the things I like about BibSac and JETS is that we publish different kinds of articles. You might get Old Testament, New Testament, historical theology, systematic theology.

GK: We know that not every article in every issue is going to connect to everyone. But I think the book reviews are where we’re particularly intentional about writing at a level that the educated person can understand.

What are the elements of editing?

DCC: In my first job in publishing, the man who ran the press famously defined editing to all of us in the office: “Editing is finding the misspelled words.” [laughs] What that showed me was that if I made a change that went beyond “finding the misspelled words,” I should be able to defend it—and “It sounds better this way” was the last reason I wanted to give, especially when my boss didn’t have an ear for it.

GK: Editing is also finding grammatical and formatting errors. This sounds really negative, but it’s finding the stuff that needs to be fixed.

DCC: And it’s finding places where things need to be moved a bit—a sentence that needs to be up here or over there so that the flow is better, or finding a sentence or a paragraph that needs to be taken out entirely. You have to hear what the author is trying to say and be able to change the writing so that the author says what they intend.

GK: Doing that in a way that preserves the voice of the author is a really important skill. Dorian is amazing at that. When she’s finished editing something I’ve written, it retains my voice.

People might think of editors as the people who enforce the rules. But what you’re saying is that editors want to make an author’s writing clearer.

DCC: The rules of punctuation aren’t just rules for rules’ sake. They’re rules that aid readers who are used to the system. We want to remove impediments. If, for example, you get the wrong preposition with a word, some readers will get stuck on that, and they’ll say, “This is ridiculous. I’m not reading this anymore.”

GK: As we said, every writer needs editors. Somebody told me one time that the clearest sign of someone who hasn’t published much is a person who argues with the editor. As an author, I’ll accept the editor’s suggestions unless there’s a compelling reason not to.

DCC: Sometimes when I’m talking with an author, I’ll explain that if I made a change that they don’t like or that seems wrong, it’s because I didn’t understand it well enough to fix a problem I thought I saw. As we talk about it, what often happens is that we come up with a third way that neither of us had thought about. And I’ll say, “Oh yeah, let’s do that. That’s it.”

Why do academic research and publishing matter?

DCC: They matter because you’re listening to voices of people from other places or decades or centuries who looked at something and thought about it and have something to offer. And for a Christian, scholarship is even more; it’s part of benefiting from the gifts that God has given to people over centuries and bringing it forward. We’re trying to benefit from God’s gifts to humanity from more than just the last ten minutes. That’s one of the reasons why research and publishing are important: to look back at what people have said in history and in places we have never been. That’s why we want people to read journal articles and take theology classes. Editors and professors who curate those resources are saying, “Read this, because other people are thinking about important things that you haven’t had time to think about yet.” We want to help. So—editing is finding the misspelled words. And some other things.

GK: And some other things.

About the Contributors

Neil R. Coulter

Neil R. Coulter

Neil R. Coulter completed degrees in music performance and ethnomusicology from Wheaton College and Kent State University. He and his family lived in Papua New Guinea for twelve years, where Neil served as an ethnomusicology and arts consultant for Wycliffe Bible Translators. In 2015, he helped design and launch the PhD in World Arts at Dallas International University. He teaches doctoral courses in theory and ethnography at DIU’s Center for Excellence in World Arts. At DTS, he teaches about art, literature, film, and theology, and he is senior writer and editor of DTS Magazine. Neil is married to Joyce, and they have three sons.