ACADEMIC EDITING

I am especially pleased to offer editorial services for scholars at all levels—grad students, postdocs, researchers, and faculty—for a wide range of academic projects:

• books

• dissertations and dissertation-to-book projects

• theses

• journal articles

• essays

• research proposals

Academic writing and editing, especially for journal publication, can be a specialty all its own. I edit in all the major style guidelines required by journals and academic institutions (including APA and MLA) and have helped many academic authors produce professional-level articles, proposals, and writing samples for submission.

Academic editing includes all the services of a thorough copyedit: correcting spelling, punctuation, grammar, and style; assuring that in-text citations and references are formatted in accordance with specific style requirements; checking that each in-text citation has a correct and corresponding reference; clarifying and consolidating wordy and overlong sentences; and assuring that the technical language (jargon) is appropriate for the target audience. Often, a bit of substantive or developmental editing helps organize the flow of ideas and arguments and allows robust scholarship to tell a good story.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of having one’s writing carefully reviewed by another set—or several sets—of eyes, especially in the wild world of academe. Scholars who open their work to careful, honest, interactive review, whether by trusted peers or mentors or by a professional editor, tend to become better writers as a result.