Academic Prose Editing

 
 
 

The relationship between a writer and an editor should be one of negotiation and trust. Clarity is what the editor owes the reader. The editorial process is one in which both the writer and the editor find solutions for every problem that best serves the writing.

 
 

Editorial Services for academic prose

I offer developmental editing for academic prose. Writing academic prose is a genre the way poetry, fiction, or nonfiction are genres. Writing a dissertation is one of the most challenging and all-consuming things a person can do; it dwarfs the stamina and patience required for doctoral coursework or exams. It’s the summation of all that you know on your subject and moves the writer from role of student to that of a peer or colleague of the people on the committee. In some ways, it agitates one’s sense of self; it demands more than scholarship. It’s about staking a piece of intellectual territory and producing an original and necessary body of work.

How I Can Help

I provide achievable deadlines and attentive support in these areas: psychological sturdiness (stamina, bravery), as well as rhetorical structure (making strong arguments, and bringing ideas together in the best way). The goal is for your work can enter an academic “conversation.” I charge standard rates set by the Editorial Freelancers Association.

I can help with academic prose and/or dissertations in any subject, but I have expertise in interdisciplinary work in urban studies, cultural histories of cities, jazz historiography, photography, literary studies, and film studies.

How WE CAN get started

Read more about the specific services I offer below. Then send me an email to book a free consultation to talk though your project and how we might proceed.

 

Some of the services I offer

  • Making every element contribute to argument and persuasion

  • Strategies for announcing voice, establishing questions, setting readers’ expectations, efficacy of claims

  • Literary fixes (driving the manuscript forward, infusing static or inert language with energy)

  • Placing the work within conversation in scholarship, describing intellectual territory, and conceptual paths

  • Empathic inquiry into the rhetorical structure, arguments, and transitions

  • Methods for organizing citations and other source material

  • Strategies to best improve conditions to produce writing: solitude, personal investment in material, process v. product

  • Skills of managing time and producing work on a rigorous schedule

  • Intensive discussion of the long, middle stage of revision wherein the writer needs to maintain thoughtfulness and purposefulness surround the topic

  • Support with process (increasing bravery, psychological sturdiness, making sure the practice sits in the parameters of your life)

  • Setting deadlines