Brendan Brown founded The Expert Editor in Melbourne in 2012, after completing a Bachelor of Laws at Deakin University and working as a writer. He built it into a professional editing service used by academics, authors, and businesses across Australia and beyond, and later founded its international sister company, Global English Editing. Brendan is a co-founder of Brown Brothers Media, the company behind The Expert Editor, where he oversees both editing brands. He sets the editorial standards that apply to the company's client work and this blog, and reviews articles before they are published.
I ask writers to do one thing before they send me a manuscript they think is finished: read it aloud, start to finish, in a room where they can hear their own voice. Most haven't done it. Some resist the idea outright — it feels theatrical, or slow, or beside ...Read More
Writers tell me some version of the same thing often enough that I've stopped being surprised by it: they do their best work with a deadline bearing down, and their worst work when a project has no fixed end date at all. It sounds like a confession of bad ...Read More
The first draft of a chapter comes out of a writer in a rush some mornings — messy, but moving. Then the second pass arrives, and the same writer sits in front of the same document for an hour and produces four changed sentences. Ask them what happened ...Read More
Most writers who submit manuscripts for editing understand their argument. They know what they want to say. The chapters hold together, the reasoning is sound, the research is there. And yet the prose doesn't work. It resists the reader at every turn — not because the ideas are ...Read More
The manuscript arrives three weeks late, and the covering email always says the same thing: "Sorry — I’ve been so busy." But editors see the file’s revision history, the timestamps, the chapter written in one desperate weekend after two months of silence. The author wasn’t busy. The author ...Read More
Every editor knows the manuscript. It arrives with an apology attached: the author has been working on it for four years, has rewritten the opening chapter eleven times, and wants "one more pass" before anyone else sees it. The prose in that opening chapter is polished to a ...Read More