WHAT I DO 

COPYEDITING . . .

is the work of amending a manuscript by catching errors and improving clarity, logic, and flow, while respecting the author’s intent and voice. In my experience, copyediting sorts itself into three levels:  light, medium, and heavy. We'll agree on which level your project needs before I begin. I will do whatever is needed, from a quick, sharp pass with Track Changes to a full makeover.

The Light Edit

At this level, my concerns are correctness and consistency--the close, sentence-by-sentence work that even the best AI editing tools still get wrong often enough to matter. And it's a lot more than proofreading: See the note at the bottom of this page for this distinction.

Correctness starts with mechanics: grammar, spelling, punctuation, parallelism, misused idioms, wrong word choice, dangling modifiers, and permission for copyrighted material. Correctness also includes factual accuracy. If your facts are shaky, your credibility as an author can go way down. I'll flag anything tht needs flagging, or do a deeper fact-check on request. 

Consistency means standardizing your text to a particular style. The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th ed., Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 12th ed., and Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th ed., are the ones I use most often. I am also current with MLA. I build a custom style sheet for every project so that Aunt Millie doesn’t morph into Aunt Milly in the last chapter.

*A note for dissertation authors:  I address technical problems; issues of clarity, flow, and language; and verify references. I also ensure compliance with the style guide of your institution (most often, APA). I do not make fundamental content alterations in response to recommendations from your faculty mentor—that's your job.

If you are confident a light edit is all you need, I'll query rather than rewrite whenever I spot something beyond that scope. Very often, however, the work naturally opens into . . .

The Medium and Heavy Edit 

A medium edit includes attention to everything in a light edit, but also to how you say things, in what is sometimes called substantive or content editing. If English isn't your first language, this level often matters a great deal.

Logic and Clarity.  Your point may be perfectly clear to you, but your words can still throw a reader off the track. l find these gaps and either fix them or query you, if needed.

Language.  I hunt down wordiness, repetition, cliché, mixed metaphor, offensive language, jargon, awkward dialogue, overused phrases or devices, missing transitions, adverb overuse, and words that appear correct but are just not quite right. I also look at pacing and structure at the sentence level.

The "Judgment Calls.” This is where an experienced human editor earns their keep, and where AI tools—trained to smooth prose toward a statistical average—can do real damage. I do such things as pointing out places to "show rather than tell," and I follow the old rule of cutting anything that doesn't serve your goal. You may find some cuts harsh at first, but your readers will thank you. 

Occasionally, we can go further still. A heavy edit is all of the above along with significant intervention—rewriting in places, sometimes ghostwriting seamlessly alongside your own voice or restructuring at the paragraph level.  

That's copyediting.  

Unless Your Big Picture Needs More Focus . . .

Sometimes, after reviewing a manuscript, I recommend a developmental pass before any copyediting begins, when pacing, plot, or structure need work first. You're welcome to take those initial notes and return to your draft on your own. Or, you could have me put on my developmental editor's hat: evaluating your work as a whole for structure, theme, and narrative arc and giving you honest feedback on tone and overall effectiveness.  We could then work together until the manuscript is ready to publish. The particulars of how I am compensated for this work are negotiated on a case-by-case basis.  

* * *

It’s all an interactive process—
and the final call on how involved I get is always yours. 

   I can't promise that my work will make your manuscript sell, 
but I can promise that it will be in far better shape to try.

So . . . let's make the magic happen!!!


 

PROOFREADING?

Yes, I do that too. Proofreading happens only at the mechanical level and, by definition, is for print-ready text—a manuscript that has already been thoroughly edited, perhaps even typeset, and needs only a final check against a standard prior to publication. This is why I rarely even use the word proofreading in a discussion of editing. I'll be honest—this is the level where AI tools are genuinely decent, because spell-check and grammar-check are exactly the kinds of narrow, mechanical tasks they're built for. But even the best of them miss things a careful human eye won't—a correctly spelled word used incorrectly, an inconsistent hyphenation choice, a formatting slip that shows up only on the printed page. If that final pass is where your project stands, I'd be glad to help. It would be a shame to let your carefully crafted content be discounted just because of some minor slip-up.