Ryan C. Niman

Me

Hello, my name is Ryan. I’m a copyeditor, which you probably knew already since you are here. I homeschool my son, work as a copyeditor, and I publish Lexification.

In a previous career I was a high school English and social studies teacher. That started in Washington State, then continued when we moved to Korea. When my son was born, Gangnam style, I got to be the stay-at-home parent while my wife, a middle school teacher, went back to work. That continues to this day, more than ten years later.

During that time, we moved to Israel. There, I worked as a copyeditor, author, graphic designer, and video editor for a Palestinian organization focused on nonviolence and international law. When we moved back to the United States in 2021, I turned my attention to educational copyediting, working as a copyeditor, quality assurance specialist, and accessibility specialist for The Learning Network.

At the end of 2024 I launched my own copyediting service, Classic & Conscious Copyediting, and the publication Lexification, dedicated to everything about words.

The Mascot

This is Chicky, also known as Chickpea. She showed up in our yard as a kitten when we lived in Israel. When we moved back to the United States, she came with us, meowing beneath my seat the entire way.

She gets jealous of the Macbook and will make it very clear when I’m paying too much attention to it.

The Inspiration

As a high school teacher and lifelong writer, most of my focus in the past has been on the author: What was I trying to accomplish? What did my student want to say? The audience was often a potential audience, something I or my student hoped to reach, but it wasn’t the primary focus.

This began to change when I started to work in advocacy. The focus was now on the audience: getting them to care about the situation in Palestine and Israel, helping them understand nonviolent action, and convincing them to attend webinars and meetings when there were other things they could do with their time.

This continued in educational design. Every word has to serve the learner. Does it help them understand? Does it connect with who they are and their goals? Is there a more effective way to help them learn?

During this time, I adopted two books as the foundation of my thinking about editing: Stephen Pinker’s The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (in which he discusses “classic” style) and Karen Yin’s The Conscious Style Guide: A Flexible Approach to Language that Includes, Respects, and Empowers. I used these two concepts, classic style and conscious style, in the naming of my copyediting business.