About

I’m Daniel Fischer, the A La Carte Scholar. I founded this copy editing enterprise as a way to offer some of the skills and knowledge of an academic historian outside the university.

My interest in being a historical copy editor began in graduate school. Between 2013 and 2019, I persevered through all the fiery trials required to earn a Ph.D. in history. Unlike many graduate students, I worked as a copy editor for a stretch of my journey to the doctorate. For two years, I was assistant editor at the Arkansas Historical Quarterly. My duties included checking citations, ensuring that prose was clear and error-free, and strictly enforcing The Chicago Manual of Style and our house style (which included pluralizing Arkansas as Arkansas’s).

After finishing my Ph.D., I realized that I could contribute more as a freelance scholar who offered expertise in a few discrete areas than I could by juggling all the tasks a history professor must take on. That’s how I decided to go into freelance copy editing.

Other phases of my career have also prepared me to be a copy editor. Earning an M.S. in journalism and working for a newspaper out west improved my ability to write and to adhere to a style guide. I have more than a decade of experience teaching journalism and history, which means I have marked up a lot of student papers. Working with mature authors is quite different from working with students, but marking all those papers did give me extensive practice at helping writers see where they could improve and made me a pro at Microsoft Word’s “track changes” feature.

I also put a substantial chunk of my work time into considering words from the writer’s perspective. I am revising a book manuscript titled “The War on Winter: Settling the Northern West at the Dawn of Modernity” and post other writing at Substack.

I live in southwest Virginia with my wife, baby daughter, and Buford the dog. When I’m away from my desk, I enjoy hiking local trails and walking around the neighborhood with my family, running, gardening, and reading.

I’m a member of ACES: The Society for Editing and the Editorial Freelancers Association.

For the distilled version of my life story, go here for my CV.