You wouldn’t bring a prototype straight to market. Your first draft probably isn’t ready for prime time, either. Professional editing helps you identify things you’ve overlooked, tightens your focus, and clarifies your distinctive voice.

By the time you’re ready for an editor, you’ve already worked hard on your draft. Your effort deserves respect, and your draft deserves an editor who’ll meet you on your terms. That’s why the first step of the process is all about you: what you like about your piece, what you don’t, and what you’d like me to accomplish.

You also deserve my candid opinion. If I think you’re overlooking an important consideration or phrasing things in a way that invites undue risk, I'll let you know…but only after I’ve gotten a clear, complete idea of your vision for the piece. That’s the only way for us to move forward as partners.

After we’ve discussed the piece, I get down to work, typically editing each document twice. I do most of my work in MS Word, though I also accept documents in Pages and LaTeX formats. If you need help with another type of document, I’m open to a discussion (some PDFs, for instance, convert nicely to simpler formats; some can take a surprising amount of prep work before they’re ready to edit).

You’d think that a profession devoted to precision and clarity would agree on how to describe the services it offers. But editing’s not that cut and dried: one editor’s idea of copyediting might resemble another’s approach to line editing.

We come by that ambiguity honestly: editing meets various needs in different settings, and the terms used to describe it can vary, too. When I worked as a book publisher, developmental editing meant lots of reading, a surprising amount of research, and pages of notes designed to give authors the right blend of structure and encouragement. My wife worked for years as a journalist; a newspaper’s idea of developmental editing is far more terse and demanding than anything I ever wrote to a manuscript author.

Line editing is an important phase of the book-editing process, but doesn’t figure into a newspaper column at all. My clients get a chance to approve my copyediting work, a luxury I never had when writing my own column. Proofreading can mean something different to me, a guy who’s actually read galley proofs before books went to press, than to someone without a book-publishing background. And so on.

Before you hire an editor, you should learn a bit about how they approach various levels of their work. Here are my thoughts on the services I provide.

When I edit for issues of grammar and punctuation—what some might call proofreading—I also look to establish consistency throughout the piece. That can mean that I go a bit farther than other editors might. Even the most basic types of editing require a good deal of judgment, and each decision your editor makes should support a consistent voice and tone.

Light copyediting corrects your draft; line editing or heavy copyediting seeks to improve it. As I define them, these terms are largely interchangeable.

Your first draft is truly complete when your ideas are all set out, however awkwardly you needed to wrestle them into your text. We’ve all been there. The next step is to have someone gauge how successfully you’ve told your story or presented your case. That’s line editing as I see it. I’ll correct what needs correcting, but I’ll also rephrase passages to let your voice speak more clearly and directly, and I’ll look for ways to improve your draft’s flow and improve its structure. This all happens on a sentence-by-sentence level: you won’t get any notes from me about topics you might want to address or new research you might want to perform, though I’ll note any inconsistencies that I can’t resolve on my own.

Line editing is still a term of art in book publishing. Newspapers and magazines run on much tighter deadlines, and line-editing functions tend to get folded into the copyediting phase (after which, unless you’re a superstar writer, you don’t see your piece again until it’s in print). From my point of view, it’s the same work: a freer editorial hand than light copyediting allows, with more responsibility to make the final product really sing.

Roughly 40% of my clients write natively in languages other than English. They know their stories and their material perfectly well, but their thoughts just don’t come through in English with the same power and clarity that they do in their own languages. Others are English speakers whose expertise doesn’t include finding the right words to convey their best ideas. That’s where substantive editing—all right, let’s call it rewriting—can help.

My approach to rewriting builds on my line editing service to include every word of your document. Exceptions to that rule include product specifications, mathematical formulas, and quoted material. Beyond those, I treat your draft as a sort of enhanced outline, focusing on recasting your material rather than correcting or building upon it.

Aside from diary entries (please don’t ask me to edit your diary), we never meet our audience while we write. Developmental editing gives you the next-best thing: an expert audience of one who gives you the insights, encouragement, and respect you need to produce a compelling first draft.

We can start before you’ve started to write your first draft, after you’ve completed it, or when you’re stuck midway through. Whatever the state of your draft, you’ll get a letter from me telling you what I liked about your piece and what you can do to make it even better, along with extensive notes throughout your draft that ask important questions and put my recommendations in context.

I’ve been a professional editor since 2006, and I’ve worked on everything from full manuscripts and research articles to blog posts and marketing copy.

I got my start in editing at a professional publisher in New York City, where I was an acquiring editor and developmental editor. While I am an avid reader of fiction, I specialize in developmental editing and line editing of non-fiction manuscripts. Within that scope, I have edited manuscripts on topics ranging from metadata to history to theology.

My first career was in academic librarianship, where I developed a healthy combination of research savvy, dogged precision, and constructive skepticism. I also found time to co-author two peer-reviewed articles while at Yale Law School. History and law are special topics to me, but I’ve edited articles on everything from cryobiology to the metaphysics of yoga.

It’s never been easier or cheaper to produce long-form marketing content. That’s the problem. Your competitors have access to the same cheap copy written by the same AI tools, and they can splurge just as often as you can on an inexpensive, inexperienced human writer.

Even if your SEO strategy calls for a certain amount of crank-it-out content, your flagship material deserves better. I deliver quick, expert editing and rewriting that sets your long-form content apart and gives potential customers a reason to keep coming back.