Graeme Brown spent his career in Australian education — first as a high-school mathematics teacher, then as an assistant principal — before moving into editing. In 2014 he co-founded Global English Editing with his son Brendan, and he shares oversight of editorial standards at The Expert Editor. He writes about the parts of writing that reward patience: the slow work of revision, how to actually finish a piece, and what reading widely over a lifetime teaches you about clear language. He brings a teacher's instinct for making ideas land with readers.
A book I taught for the better part of two decades reads like a different novel to me now than it did in my thirties. Same paperback, same underlined passages from years of lesson planning, same chapters in the same order. What changed wasn't the text. It was ...Read More
My wife can finish a novel in an afternoon and tell you exactly how it made her feel. I have never been able to read that way, and after a career spent first teaching and then editing, I have stopped apologising for it. I read slowly, and I ...Read More
When a writer sends a finished manuscript for assessment, they usually expect one of two verdicts: it's ready, or it isn't. What they get back is neither. A manuscript assessment is not a mark out of ten and not a line edit. It is a reader's report — ...Read More
I marked mathematics papers for the better part of four decades — first as a teacher, later as an assistant principal who still couldn’t leave a red pen alone. When I moved into editing other people’s writing, colleagues assumed I was starting over. I wasn’t. Marking a proof ...Read More
The email that accompanies a first thesis draft is a genre of its own. It apologises for the draft’s existence before describing it. It explains that the writing is "probably not at the level you usually work with." It asks, somewhere near the end, a question the sender ...Read More
Editor's note: this article was substantially revised in July 2026. The reading list now focuses on books about writing and editing, which is what we do. See our corrections policy. Ask ten editors for the books that actually changed how they work and you will hear the same handful ...Read More