About the Editor

Anne Rebull, Ph.D.

Anne Rebull is an academic editor supporting all career stages on both the research and teaching tracks. With a background in both music and Chinese literature, Rebull specializes in refining language and style with both graduate applicants and tenured professors to enhance clarity and dialogue around the many issues discussed in China Studies and in US-China relations.

She is a published author with CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature (2017) and in Rethinking Socialist Theaters of Reform (University of Michigan Press, 2021), as well as with the translation of Kunqu Masters on Chinese Theatrical Performance (2022).

Get in Touch
A portrait of a person in a blue blazer with a necklace showing an accurate rendition of the dark side of the moon.
I am a self-proclaimed “fire-keeper”—a night owl by nature, I am descended from those ancestors who collected lore, observed the night sky, and fixed the broken pieces for the next day’s use.

Humanist
Academic Editor
Content Strategist
Solutions Architect
Arts Enthusiast

Why this?

Ink Wash Edits was founded after years spent marinating in the intellectual foment created by the students in Art History, Theatre, Cinema and Media Studies, and East Asian Languages and Civilizations1 at the University of Chicago and the postdoctoral and other visiting scholars at International Institute of the University of Michigan. Rebull found that life, art, and persuasion were inseparable and that most writing achieves the best effects with collaboration on not just substance but also rhetorical style.

Skills specifically useful for the social sciences were trained with two years spent doing in-house work for Research Square Company, during its years as a component of Springer Nature. Rebull trained in statistics, learned to edit in LaTeX, and edited many economics papers across multiple subspecialties. She ensured that her foundational skills were rock solid by independently achieving a Certificate in Copyediting from the University of California San Diego Extension Studies.2 I prefer to use my walls for other decorations, so if you’d like the goods, they’re here.

Coat of Arms of the University of Chicago

My Position on AI

We all benefit from full transparency and accuracy in communication, and that includes in the production of written, edited materials. The use of a human editor is entirely compatible with AI tools, defined as large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. I do not use AI during my professional editing process. This does not mean that authors themselves cannot use AI.

Tl;dr

If AI has been used at some point during writing, whether before or after a human editor, this information must be disclosed to your publisher. Please talk to your representative for best practices used with their house.

Wait. Why should you trust me?

I have worked extensively with black-box language models trained on large data sets. These models make for interesting co-editors. My first exposure to an LLM was before the public debut of ChatGPT. I was professionally editing with a team of “power users” who beta tested new editing technology regardless of academic specialty. We named our LLMs after robots from old sci-fi films. The future caught up to us faster than we expected.

Here’s what hasn’t changed.

LLMs often usefully standardize language throughout a paper or introduce small changes to consistently enforce usage. Sometimes, these little changes are the formal bread and butter that professional editors love: Shakespeare finds a summer’s day cannot compare to thee, but that is only after he has compared thee with one to make this determination. Other changes are more subjective: Words like “cheap” can be replaced with “inexpensive” to enhance a professional tone. But this choice is highly context dependent. Authors might deliberately choose “cheap” to convey the derogatory perspective of their subject; an editorial replacement is obviously inappropriate. AI is getting better all the time at intuiting how tone works in text and anticipating the correct next word to use. But it is still fundamentally an algorithm making statistical guesses based on prior inputs.

Here’s what’s new since the widespread rollout of AI.

AI is helping us reveal again how subtle biases form our expectations of the world. A recent article in Fortune Magazine (paywalled) shared the work of Zehra Chatoo, who presented research participants with two résumés that differed only in the perceived gender of the first name. Both had used AI, but when this detail was noted, reviewers were more likely to doubt the competence of the female candidate. Chatoo sensitively frames this finding as an “AI judgment penalty”; I believe we can be more direct and call this institutional sexism. The process on display here is how implicit biases get reproduced in the world around us, without anyone wishing direct harm on anyone else.

What does this mean?

It means that our choices in editing matter whether we use AI or not. It means that our words to describe our choices matter. And it means that, as they ever have, our words matter.

At the most recent ACES3 conference in Atlanta, GA, the keynote speaker, Hollis Towns, delivered the following message:

“The machine doesn’t care; you do.”

Hollis R. Towns, Chief Operating Officer for the Deep South Today

Towns was speaking to editors, and he’s right—editors DO care. But authors do, too. Authors and editors are served by the patterns and consistency brought by AI, but readers are served when the line is memorable, the story hits home, and the ideas nibble at your brain after you’ve closed the cover or the app. Writing is fundamentally a form of communication. We need your words to stick around in the mind of your reader.

We need each other more than we need AI.
  1. EALC? What is that? Area studies departments have a long and storied history that extends before the Cold War, even though that’s when they became famous. Their raison d’etre as university departments is to create cultural experts who can help inform foreign policy goals and diplomacy and researchers who extend regional histories from alternate perspectives. The naming of these departments (and their existence) is highly contentious. At a minimum, know that “EALC” degrees confer expertise only in constrained areas, usually divided by cultural region and by historical time period, e.g., “early modern China” (Ming and Qing dynasties) or “modern China” (which may or may not include “contemporary China,” i.e., the most recent period of history). ↩︎
  2. Did you just wonder how style guides handle university names with specific locations? I did, too! There’s such variation across institutions (e.g., commas, dashes, colons, etc.) that the general principle is to defer to the university on their preferences. When it comes to businesses or people, we honor their chosen names. I think that’s pretty cool. ↩︎
  3. What is that? ACES is a professional society for editors. I’ve been a member since 2022. ↩︎