Editing & Proofreading

I bring more than a decade of in-house and freelance editorial experience to projects that include serious nonfiction, superhero comics, pop-culture reviews, fantasy novels, breaking news, and more.

Can the overall pacing, organization, or impact of your work be improved? Is the language right for your audience? In nonfiction, are your facts or arguments well supported? In fiction, is the use of dialogue as effective as it can be? Is the plot well structured and engaging? Developmental editing suggests specific revisions related to these and other “big picture” elements.

If you’re mainly looking to improve your writing at the sentence level, you probably want a copyedit. If you’d like an overall analysis of your book rather than individual edits, you probably want a manuscript assessment. Read on to learn about both of those services.

Basic copyediting will check your grammar, punctuation, spelling, and word usage in addition to making sure there aren’t any consistency or continuity errors. Heavy copyediting, sometimes called line editing, includes all of the above plus sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph improvements to language and flow. In both kinds of work, I will keep an eye out for language that may be unclear, awkward, or inadvertently alienating to readers in your intended audience.

Light versus heavy editing is a spectrum rather than a set of firmly defined categories, and I can help you identify the level and nature of work you’re looking for. Copyediting may also include citation formatting and/or a degree of basic fact-checking.

The last step before publication, proofreading checks for mechanical errors such as typos, incorrect punctuation, inconsistencies, and word confusion. When applicable, I’ll also check for layout errors such as word stacks, rivers, widows and orphans, bad word breaks, broken links, and incorrect directionals or cross-references. Proofreading may be done “cold,” reading only the final product, or may involve checking a proof against previously marked corrections. I have extensive experience with both text-only and image-heavy books, articles, reports, marketing material, and more.

Proofreading for comics and graphic novels combines many of the same elements as proofreading for prose with elements unique to the medium. In addition to grammar, spelling, styling consistency, and other mechanics, I can check your crossbar I’s, balloon stems, emphasis, grawlixes (#@$!), caption formatting, and much more.

Due to the nature of the comics publishing workflow, proofreading can (but does not always) involve some types of editorial review that are usually limited to the copyediting stage in prose publishing, such as word choice or conscious language. However, I also offer copyediting at the script stage—find information on that service above.

Authors: Do you feel your manuscript isn’t ready for full editing but need help shaping it? Do you want feedback on your plot, structure, pacing, character development, worldbuilding, and/or marketability? A manuscript critique may be right for you! Although it looks at many of the same things as a developmental edit, the end result of a manuscript critique is an overall analysis of your work—not an edited manuscript with specific revisions and suggestions. I can take a general approach or restrict my review to a narrow set of concerns.

Publishers: If you don’t have time for everything in your submission queue, I can prepare reader’s reports, research comps, and more.