What kind of work can you help with?
You can visit the Writing, Editing, and Research pages for a brief overview of how I can help you, and please feel free to contact me with any questions about those services or others that may not be listed there.
There are ethical guidelines about thesis editing (see below), which govern the work an editor is allowed to do and we must work within those limits.
What kind of guidelines do you follow for thesis editing?
There are professional standards that all editors should follow for thesis editing, and these specify limits within which editors must work to ensure the final thesis remains the student’s own work and is assessed accordingly.
What this means is that editors can provide copyediting and proofreading services but cannot correct content, substance, or structure, although they may note problems for the student to follow up. Editors are also not responsible for any errors of fact or citations, or plagiarism, but they can advise the student to seek advice from the supervisor and to check the university guidelines.
For more details on these editing standards, you can read more in the Australian Guidelines for editing research theses, the Canadian Guidelines for editing theses, or the relevant guidelines for your location.
How long will it take?
The time required to complete each project will depend on three main factors: your deadline, my availability, and the scale of work required (e.g., intensive, light, or somewhere in between).
We can discuss the expected duration of your project before agreeing to work together, and revisit deadlines along the way should things change, if feasible.
How much does it cost?
Feel free to contact me to discuss your budget to see what I can offer within those limits.
When I provide a cost for an editing project, I first ask for a sample (a few pages) of the work that is representative of the piece as a whole, assess the time required to edit that sample, and use that to then give you a cost. There’s no obligation or fee for that and you can decide at that point if you want to go ahead or not.
To get an idea of hourly rates for editors across a range of experience levels, you can read some guidance on the Australian context and other factors affecting costs here.
What’s the difference between structural editing, copyediting, and proofreading?
Think of them like three steps that take place one after the other.
*Structural editing (also known as content editing, or substantive editing) is big-picture thinking about your text – is it structured logically, does it flow, do the pieces all fit together and make sense as a whole. It might also involve major rewriting and other advice on improving the work. Read more here.
*Copyediting comes next, and this step focuses on consistency, grammar, and spelling, to ensure clarity and accuracy. Examples might include consistent use of US or UK spelling, treating numbering the same way throughout, and formatting footnotes similarly across the text. Read more here.
*Proofreading is at the very end, which originally meant checking the ‘proofs’ from the publisher against the original to ensure no errors have been introduced to text or visuals in the final layout, but nowadays more usually means checking for mistakes as a final step. Read more here.
The Writing Desk 