I Develop
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Content for Humans
Editorial Services
I specialize in nonfiction books (with a love for prescriptive nonfiction), and excel at making your complex content easy to understand and pleasurable to read.
Manuscript Review
High-level review that tells you the strengths and weaknesses of your book.
Line and Copy Editing
Line editing at the paragraph and sentence level makes your prose sing, and copy editing finds errors and ensures your manuscript conforms to industry style guides.
Developmental Editing
High-level review, but with inline comments and suggested fixes. More of a relationship with the author!
Book Doctoring
When you know your book has issues, but you want someone else to fix them and finish the book!
What Hosting and Domain Companies Don’t Tell You
Did you know you can get a domain for only $1? I'm continually surprised at how some simple facts about domain and hosting practices are unknown to many people and small businesses. I'm going to share some of them here.
Writing Stronger Taglines
A concise tagline with strong verbs grabs your attention and gives you a good first impression of the company (or person) it’s associated with. Conversely, a rambling tagline with weak verbs and clunky construction might leave you with a “meh” impression.
The One Thing Your Instructions Are Missing
There's one piece of information your instructions might be missing that will really help your users.
Quick Fix UI: Rite Aid Prescription Inserts
When you pick up medications at the pharmacy, wouldn't it be nice if you could choose how often to receive those papers that come with them? Here's my quick UI fix to a Rite Aid screen.
One Thing Leads to Another: How I Give My Freelance Clients More Bang for Their Buck
When I come in on a freelance contract, I usually find at least one other project that needs doing (in addition to what I was hired for).
A Great Quote About Editing
“In my years teaching writing, and as a writer, and as an editor, I feel safe in passing on something I’ve learned: that the solution to almost any ‘problem’ that a manuscript has is already contained in the work, that is, it is usually found in an unexplored sentence, some implication that has not been played out, a structure that is barely visible that must be solidified. Good writers often plant these solutions in the ‘unconscious’ of their work—it’s a matter of analysis and identifying the solutions in the unconscious of the manuscript.”
– James Reich
Copy Edit Only
I have copy editing listed as a separate service because occasionally people do ask for a copy edit that doesn’t want me to look at writing mechanics, language issues, or content at a sentence or paragraph level. They only want me to ensure that their manuscript has no grammatical errors or typos and adheres to whichever style guide is relevant (for most publishing, it’s the Chicago Manual of Style).
(NOTE: This isn’t proofreading. Proofreading is the last step before printing, where someone checks the galleys for errors and/or formatting issues. I don’t do proofreading but I can refer you to a colleague who does.)
Price: $.042/wd, pending review of manuscript. If it needs more work than just a light copy edit, price will go up to line editing prices
- Fix:
- Typos
- Misspellings
- Incorrect grammar (e.g., these things is incorrect)
- Incorrect punctuation (e.g., a colon where a semicolon should be)
- Incorrect capitalization (e.g., capitalizing “president” when not a title)
- Ensure:
- Verb tenses match
- Parallel structure in bulleted lists
- Proper capitalization in bulleted lists
- The document has proper formatting
- Remove extra spaces between paragraphs
- Remove extra spaces after periods (should only be one)
- Ensure Em and En dashes are correctly used, and there are no spaces around them (per CMOS)
- Ensure the document conforms to the Chicago Manual of Style. This includes things like:
- Ensure numbers and money are formatted correctly (numbers up until 101 spelled out, money amounts kept in numerals, etc)
- Check hyphenation (compound adjectives before the noun are usually hyphenated, when used after a noun, they are usually not)
- Ensure serial commas are used
- Ensure books, movies and TV show names are formatted correctly
