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.
English runs on borrowed words most speakers never think twice about. Kindergarten came from German. Karaoke came from Japanese. Déjà vu and zeitgeist and schadenfreude arrived, kept their original spelling, and simply moved in. Meanwhile, for every word that survives the crossing intact, thousands of others get quietly swapped ...Read More
"The inability to 'see' revision as a process: the inability to 're-view' their work again, as it were, with different eyes." That is composition scholar Nancy Sommers, writing in 1980, long before anyone edited a manuscript inside a colored overlay of insertions and deletions. She was describing student writers ...Read More
There are two ways to get from one end of a book to the other. One is a highway: fast, direct, and built to get you to the last page with the least friction possible. The other is the old road that runs beside it, the one that takes ...Read More
I have spent close to two decades reading other people's drafts, first as a writer trying to figure out how sentences work, then as an editor whose whole job is noticing what a writer almost said. One thing shows up across thousands of manuscripts, academic and creative and corporate ...Read More
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