A Q&A with Heather E. Saunders, ACES Board president
By ACES Staff
After a decade volunteering for ACES, Heather E. Saunders is now president of the Board of Directors. She assumed the role in April at the close of ACES 2024 San Diego.
Saunders has built a successful career focused on technical editing. A voracious reader and a born editor — her first-grade classmates would give her their creative writing assignments to check their spelling — she intended to become a journalist, then pivoted to psychology, and finally, combined the two interests.
She founded her first company, Just the Write Type, in 2009 to provide proofreading, STEM and medical editing, and science communication services. In April 2022 she co-founded Nova Arc Content Co., which provides writing, editing, and design for technical and creative content. Saunders is chief executive officer and lead editor of the woman-owned small business.
She’s active in the online editing community and earned bragging rights for coining the name of the popular #StetWalk, an idea from another editor, Tanya Gold. Mignon Forgarty, aka Grammar Girl, described #StetWalk as “a hashtag that editors use to post pictures they took while they were out walking.”
Saunders likes reading science fiction — a particular favorite is the Murderbot Diaries. She lives outside of Boston with her husband, Mike, and their two dogs, where ACES recently spoke with her by Zoom.
Did it feel natural to combine these two fields, journalism and science?
I was raised around the sciences. My dad is an electrical engineer and among his many projects, he’s worked on pieces that have been installed in the International Space Station. I always thought that was the coolest thing. So while I was getting a degree in the social sciences, I was marinating in and continuing my education in some of the hard sciences.
When I came to the page as an editor, I realized that I had a lot more experience than I previously thought.
Now I focus on helping people working with technical, scientific, or complex material tell their stories to the rest of the world. Nova Arc focuses on developing content for these technical subjects and I love it. It’s exciting work and I’m always learning something.
You’ve been volunteering for ACES since you became a member. How did you first get involved?
My first ACES conference was in Las Vegas in 2014. As I sat in my first session, listening to Merriam-Webster’s Peter Sokolowski discuss dictionaries, I realized I had found my community. I had never felt so at home as I did with this group of people. There was such a sense of welcome and a feeling of camaraderie. It was so refreshing being around other people who also understood how important the written word can be and the impact you can have working with the written word.
It lit a fire in me and I became involved in volunteering with ACES immediately at the close of that conference. Mark Allen, who is now the Board president-elect, had mentioned an opportunity to volunteer. I was a new freelancer, I had just discovered ACES, and I wanted to be an active part of this community. We put together the first ACES freelancers directory, which grew into the Editors for Hire directory and has become a valuable resource for so many members.
I served as a Board member, Communications Committee chair, and conference planning support for ACES 2019 in Providence before being elected secretary. In that officer role, I was able to see how much the organization does, how it works, and how far-reaching some of our strategic goals can actually be. It impassioned me to keep going. I saw how much ACES was doing for editing and the industry as a whole, and I was really proud to be part of that.
As president of the ACES Board of Directors, what is your vision for the association?
One of the main practical goals is building a firm foundation for the organization’s structure. ACES has done so much throughout its history with the very generous gift of volunteer time.
Now we’re focused on the transition from an all-volunteer organization to a staff-supported organization. We’re working to make sure we’ve got the policies, documents, and procedures in place to be a well-oiled machine so it’s ready to be its new self long term.
Other goals are about thinking big picture: What can this organization do for community, for representation? How can editing as a whole help move communities and conversations forward? How can we support journalism, editing, and media transparency? What are the opportunities for ACES to step in and provide research or educational support? How best can we improve our education, our outreach, and our community, so that anyone who is interested has a place they can come and feel at home and ready to begin their journey?
We want to keep ACES a productive, supportive, welcoming community.
What do you get out of volunteering?
ACES has given me so much over my professional career that serving in this role feels like one small way to give back. It’s an opportunity to help share resources and knowledge and to encourage a growing sense of community for people who work with words and impact so many people every single day. There’s a lot of power in language and the written word, and in editing. Helping support that community means a lot to me. It meant a lot to me when I showed up to my first conference. I’m lucky to be here now and I’m grateful to be given the opportunity to do it for established working, new, and even thinking-about-becoming editors.
