The Seamless Transition: On Exiting the JMHC Editorship

Being editor of the Journal of Mental Health Counseling (JMHC) has been an honor, a privilege, a learning experience, and a pleasure. I developed many new relationships, through e-mails, particularly with authors and reviewers. Although I met a few of these individuals at professional conferences, for the most part, these relationships have remained delightful dialogues that occurred in virtual space and struck me as somewhat strange because of being devoid of images or vocal tones attached to names and felt connections. These conversations, which illustrate the technologically based changes in the world, were an unexpected perk of the job; and I will miss them. I will also miss being so completely immersed in the breadth of topics and scholarship that fit within JMHC's mission. As editor, I developed a fuller understanding and appreciation of the several purposes and constituencies associated with both mental health services and AMHCA's commitment to the intersection of research and theory as contributing to the continuing development of practice. Serendipitously, I have come to feel that I know a little about a lot, because, while engaged in my own professional conversations (e.g., with students), I have discovered a newly developed fund of knowledge. As with other worthwhile professional endeavors, I experienced some frustrations in being editor of JMHC. Although my students and I benefit from my increased expertise with APA style (APA, 2001), I was sometimes exasperated with the amount of effort required to develop accuracy in articles' reference lists, and in the match of citations and references. To phrase it in the vernacular, I am here to tell you that it is just plain hard to get the references correct. In my tenure as editor, I rarely saw a reference list that was accurate and required no, or even only a few, revisions. Matching citations and references appears to be almost as difficult. On the other hand, my own references are more accurate than they used to be. While editor, I remembered that earlier in my career I would get irritated when "journal editors made me" correct cites and references. In one of those funny quirks of life, it dawned on me: Whose job did I think it was to get the details of the references and citations correct! Of course, it is the author's. My tenure as editor also reinforced for me that the dialogue between the scholars publishing in the journal and the professional readership is facilitated by high-quality writing. Early into my editorial responsibilities, I became aware of how much my own professional writing had changed and how much I had learned about writing by receiving feedback from the editorial review process. Thus, the style and conventions of writing for publication seem to me to constitute development that accrues more often on-the-job, based on experiences in a training program. Now, I believe even more strongly that writing matters. For scholarly work to reach its audience, researchers and theorists need to lead readers through an organized and focused text. Take research articles as an example. The study is conducted according to scientific procedures and standards. However, in evaluating submitted manuscripts, reviewers frequently ask for changes that facilitate comprehension and usability of the research that is written in a way that engages the readers and makes comprehension a "no-brainer" rather than cognitive work. Although it may seem counterintuitive, non-concise wording, lengthy explanation, summaries, and repetition require more work from the reader, who has to sift through the language and text to discern the point. Therefore, it is usually more effective to usher the reader through the study, while reporting sufficient information to allow professionals to draw their own conclusions about the strength of the methodology, design, and analyses. For example, reviewers asked again and again for hypotheses. It is much easier to track an article that says: (a) This paragraph is the context that is relevant to my topic and the journal's mission (Kazdin, 1995), (b) These are the hypotheses, (c) I did this statistical procedure to analyze this hypothesis, and (d) Here is the meaning of the results in plain language. …