If you are interested in working with me to improve or polish a document of any sort, please get in touch!

My services include (but are not limited to) substantive editing, copyediting, style formatting, language correction for ESL writers, proofreading, and indexing. If you are seeking a kind of editorial or writing work not listed here, please ask.

Rates are determined on a per project basis, but they are consistent with the average established by the Editors Association of Canada. Depending on the type of work required, I will charge either a flat fee or an hourly rate. (See here for more information on how to predict the hours needed for different types of editing.) Normally I will ask to see a portion of the text in order to determine an estimate. If you have a longer manuscript and would like to get a sense of the kind of work I would do, I will edit an excerpt for a small fee, which I would then deduct from the total should you decide to proceed with me.

I also work with the bilingual Montreal-based editing collective red line-ligne rouge. If I can’t provide the type of work you need—such as translation between French and English—one of my colleagues probably can. Check out our website!

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My greatest strengths as an editor are my attention to detail and my expertise as both a writer and a reader. I have almost certainly read some version of the text you are working on, and perhaps I have written about it or taught it, and very possibly I have written in that very genre myself. These genres include fiction, memoir, scholarship across all fields, business writing, and job or grant applications. I understand grammatical and stylistic conventions. I have experience communicating with publishers and image copyright holders, and I have also acted as a liaison between editors of essay collections and individual authors.

Above all, I know how to ask the right questions. For example:

• What is the main purpose of your document? Do you seek to inform, persuade, entertain?
• Who is your audience? Are they members of the general public, friends, scholars, a hiring committee?
• In what context will they encounter your text, and what knowledge and assumptions will they bring to it?
• Does your prose flow smoothly?
• Is your language grammatically correct, as well as idiomatic in English and appropriate for your audience?
• If your text is to be published, what are the publisher’s style guidelines? Do they conform to a particular style, such as MLA, Chicago, or APA, or do they have their own regulations?
• If you are including citations and references, do these contain all the necessary details, and are they formatted properly?

I meet you where you are and help you to take your text to the next level.

Riding to “the next level” on the Ironman Canada bike course, 2007