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Editing Services

I provide line editing, copyediting and proofreading services.  Indie authors and clients from any country are welcome.   A written work should go through four types of editing before publication: It needs content editing to help you organize your material in the most interesting and coherent way and catch any passages or plot elements that are confusing, redundant or boring. It needs line editing to make sure the work is clear, consistent and easy to understand. Then it needs copyediting to polish the spelling, punctuation, etc.  And just when it seems like the piece must be perfect, it needs proofreading to catch the errors that somehow stayed in there anyway. A good professional standard for proofreading is to keep checking until you have read through the whole piece once without finding a single error. Services Line editing and copyediting: The final draft must be completed and the content editing done. Attempts at copyediting of earlier drafts will only waste yo...
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My Editing Portfolio

Fiction books. Common issues here are point of view, verb tense, spatial continuity and characterization. Nonfiction books. In true stories, spatial continuity and characterization tend to take care of themselves, but point of view and verb tense still need attention. Clarity can be a special challenge as authors attempt to describe complex real-world events and situations. Children’s books. These require a careful balance of keeping the language appropriate to grade level without talking down to or boring the reader. Screenplays. Formatting is key to a successful script, along with remembering that every word must describe a sight or sound that can be captured in the final film.  Academic papers. My favorite project of this type was a Master’s thesis in a technical field. The text frequently reverted to the student’s native Turkish, which I did not speak. Since online translators were not yet available at the time, I used a dictionary and learned some Turkish grammar. Website ...
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The Summer That Turned Me into a Language Fanatic

“I want to go to Indiana and learn the language there.” At four or five, that's what I was going to do when I grew up. I thought Indiana was where the Indians lived, and I was going to move there and do some important work or other to make life better for them. Whether I was thinking of Native Americans or people from India, I can’t say, but most likely I just thought they were all the same people.  Most of what I knew about "Indians," I had learned from authors like Richard Scarry and  Rudyard Kipling , so you can imagine what kind of culture I thought I would find when I got to Indiana.  Detail of a Richard Scarry children's book illustration But I had a reason to be so focused on the language. A summer or two before, my parents were getting ready to be Christian missionaries and had enrolled in Wycliffe Bible Translators' Summer Institute of Linguistics. This is a program of accelerated graduate-level courses designed to prepare missionary candidates to be Bibl...
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